There’s little debate about the fact that there’s no place for harassment at conventions like Comic-Con. People go to conventions to have fun, and just about everyone realizes that being verbally or physically abused is the complete opposite of fun. The real convention harassment debate–the one that’s once again igniting communities of fans, professionals, and convention organizers–is what we should do about it, and whether we need explicit policies to define harassment and how to respond when it inevitably occurs.

There’s been consistent pushback against developing and implementing convention anti-harassment policies, but it’s not that anyone thinks harassment at conventions is okay. In fact, it’s just the opposite: The most vociferous of opponents to anti-harassment policies are often people who assume that “don’t harass people” is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be articulated.

They’re not exactly wrong. Harassment should be an obvious taboo, and in an ideal world, human decency, common sense, and basic social etiquette would render the issue moot. But if that were enough, con harassment wouldn’t be the epidemic that it is. The fact is that people do harass and assault each other at conventions; that that the problem is pervasive among both fans and professionals; and that the community and official response to it is often vastly insufficient.

John Scalzi, the author and former president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, forced the issue when he announced last week that he will no longer attend any convention that lacks an explicit, well-publicized , and enforced anti-harassment policy. Since then, nearly a thousand other fans and professionals have signed the pledge.

Nor is Scalzi the first person to suggest that conventions need official harassment policies. Five years ago, in response to a series of incidents at San Diego Comic-Con–which had no official harassment policy at the time–the Con Anti-Harassment Project launched a campaign encouraging conventions to establish, articulate, and enforce anti-harassment policies. Personal appeals and awareness campaigns are terrific tools for publicizing the issue of convention harassment, but there’s only so much they can do without strict policies and staff training to enforce them.

Conventions need anti-harassment policies. Not because convention attendees are disproportionately boorish or creepy–they’re really not–or because of social obliviousness. Rather, the difficulty lies in the very thing that makes conventions conventions: the social phenomena that come into play whenever humans gather in large groups.

Diffusion of Responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility refers to the tendency of people in large groups to avoid decisive action. It’s linked to two specific circumstances: a large enough group of people, and a scenario in which responsibility isn’t explicitly assigned–say, a convention with no clear guidelines for what constitutes harassment, or for reporting and intervention. It’s because of diffusion of responsibility that companies over a certain size need to have protocols for emergencies and people explicitly responsible for implementing them. It’s a Somebody Else’s Problem Field that grows in direct proportion to the number of Somebody Elses in the room. And there are a lot of Somebody Else’s at a convention.

The bystander effect, or, bystander apathy, refers specifically to the way diffusion of responsibility deters people from intervening in crises. Bystander apathy is also called the Genovese effect, after a young woman named Kitty Genovese who was stabbed to death over the course of about half an hour while dozens of people allegedly witnessed the attack but failed to intervene or alert authorities. It wasn’t that they didn’t care: It was that everyone assumed that someone else must already have taken action.

The Genovese case is extreme–and there’s strong evidence that the numbers involved were inflated in the reporting–but it led psychologists to investigate bystander behavior in crises. Again and again, they found that an individual’s tendency to intervene in or act on a crisis, regardless its scale, consistently dropped as the number of bystanders rose.

For the most part, bystander apathy isn’t a conscious choice. It’s hardwired into our brains and behavior on a level that requires conscious effort to recognize and resist. There are two primary means of overcoming bystander apathy: bystander intervention training, in which participants learn and practice techniques for intervention; and explicit assignment of responsibility, in which members of a group are explicitly assigned individual or collective responsibility for action in crises and provided with the tools and protocols to act on it.

Let’s look at how these apply to conventions. We’ll assume that, say, 99 out of 100 convention attendees are basically decent folks there to have a good time, who will adhere to basic social etiquette. Number 100 is a different story. This person is offering free hugs to every passer-by–and when someone declines, hugging them anyway, even if it means chasing and heckling them halfway across the con floor. Everyone else knows there’s something off, but, unless (and sometimes even if) they’re involved, they probably won’t be able to pinpoint it. After all, if that person really was behaving inappropriately, someone else would already have intervened, right?

Diffusion of responsibility makes it a lot harder for us to intervene and respond when harassment occurs. But social phenomena don’t just affect how we respond to harassment—they contribute directly to its prevalence.

Social Proof

Our behavioral norms—the rules, conscious or not, that determine both how we act and how we judge others’ actions—are largely situational. We behave differently and expect different behaviors from others at home and at school, at work and at bars, at sporting events and at the grocery store. But all of those are routine settings, parts of day-to-day life. How do we work out the rules when we’re dropped into an atypical situation, like a convention?

Humans are extremely social animals, and in social settings, we look–consciously or unconsciously–to the people around us for the proper way to behave. It’s irrelevant whether those people know any more than we do; we’ll still look to them for cues and use their behavior to extrapolate the rules for any given situation. Social Proof, or informational social influence, is amplified by out-of-the-ordinary circumstances like a convention and by an individual’s similarity to the people around them–say, a large group of individuals who have congregated based on their shared interests.

Let’s go back to those 100 hypothetical con attendees. We’ll postulate that one person is definitely going to harass people. The other 99, left to their own devices, wouldn’t. But there are enough of them in the room that bystander apathy is going to come into play: They may not engage in direct harassment, but they probably won’t intervene if they witness it. At the same time, they’re all looking to each other–to everyone in the room–for a sense of what constitutes correct behavior in this context.

Say someone observes an incident of harassment, but none of the people around them–people they recognize and sympathize with as peers–intervene. The observer may still realize that the behavior would be considered inappropriate in most circumstances. However, a convention is an irregular circumstance, removed from the majority of their lives, and so normal rules may not apply. Inappropriate behavior is behavior that inspires intervention, and this behavior did not.

And the people walking past aren’t the only ones those 99 attendees may recognize and sympathize with: odds are that they recognize the harasser as a fellow fan. From there, it’s a short step to another conclusion: maybe their behavior is appropriate in this context. Thus, they might infer, it is not necessary in this situation to intervene. The odds of arriving at that conclusion skyrocket when the harasser is a professional or individual in a position of explicit or implicit authority, like a security guard or speaker.

The scenario above won’t simply influence the way people act at a convention: it’ll affect their personal rubric for what behavior is and isn’t objectively okay. And so it is harassment can go from an absolute taboo, to a behavior we tolerate from within a crowd, to an accepted norm.

Social reinforcement doesn’t deter harassment at conventions. It also reinforces it. Even if we put aside other cultural contributors to harassment, as long as there’s even a single person who refuses to abide by social compact (and there will always be one), large crowds united by common interests make conventions the perfect habitats for toleration, normalization, and propagation of harassment.

That’s where anti-harassment policies come in, and why they’re indispensible. They’re not babysitting or tyranny, nor do they assume malevolence or incompetence. Rather, they’re a means of counterbalancing the power of social phenomena like bystander apathy and social proof.

An Effective Anti-Harassment Policy Does Three Things:

First of all, it establishes clear, external guidelines for situation-appropriate behavior, bypassing social proof and prompting attendees to regulate their own behavior rather than relying on communal cues. That awareness—and clear delineation of inappropriate behavior—also combats they bystander effect, empowering attendees to recognize and act in response to inappropriate behavior.

Second, an effective anti-harassment policy provides attendees with a concrete means of responding to harassment they experience or witness. It’s not enough to merely have a policy: it needs to be publicized, publicly visible, and easily accessible. And it should detail not only unacceptable behavior, but course of action for attendees to follow when an incident occurs. Social proof and bystander apathy are both relative to how people perceive their individual power and responsibility, and giving convention attendees concrete tools for responding to harassment not only empowers them to act, but increases the likelihood that they’ll see it as their responsibility to do so.

Finally, an anti-harassment policy must be procedurally reinforced. No matter how clear your rules or how alert and engaged your attendees, there will be incidents of harassment. Convention staff and volunteers need to be able to recognize inappropriate behavior and intervene as necessary, and understand how and where to respond to and escalate complaints.

It’s important, too, to remember that staff and volunteers are parts of the same community as attendees–and, to some extent, vulnerable to the same phenomena, as both victims and potential perpetrators of harassment. You can’t instinctually assume that they’ll do the right thing. They not only need to be familiar with the anti-harassment policy, but understand their specific responsibilities under it.

While San Diego Comic-Con now has an official harassment policy, you won’t find it at their website, or, indeed, anywhere but the program handed out at the convention. The most a Google search will yield is a version of the policy transcribed from a photo of last year’s program at an unaffiliated blog. Worse, there’s no evidence that Comic-Con staff and volunteers are trained directly in either the content or the enforcement of the policy.

Last year, a volunteer wrote about her experience being assigned to and left in an isolated position, without staff support, for an extended period. She had, months before, received a document that listed the harassment policy for Comic-Con, but told Wired it was never subsequently reviewed or addressed, leaving her unsure how to deal with harassment she endured during the convention.

Wired asked a Comic-Con representative to outline the training provided to volunteers and staff members but received no response. In a previous conversation with Wired, marketing director David Glanzer said the convention has “no tolerance for harassment” and “encourage[s] anyone who feels they’re being harassed to contact a member of security or staff.”

Although the addition of an explicit anti-harassment policy to the official convention program is a good start, and speaks to the organizers’ willingness to take at least some concrete action, it isn’t enough. If Comic-Con and other conventions want their guests to take anti-harassment policies seriously and feel comfortable reporting incidents to staff, they need to actively publicize those policies, and provide staff and volunteers with the training to enforce them and take decisive action when they’re violated.

Social phenomena like diffusion of responsibility and social proof aren’t the only factors that contributes to convention harassment, but they’re among the few that convention organizers have the power to directly and effectively address, with immediate impact. And they must.

Additional reporting by Laura Hudson.