When harm looks “unthinkable”: cognitive bias, impunity, and what accountability demands of us

For many people, the most disorienting part of the Jeffrey Epstein story is not the fact of abuse alone, but its apparent durability: the sense that harm could be so extensive—and remain survivable for those enabling it—for so long.

That reaction is not naïve. It is diagnostic.

It points to a basic feature of impunity: impunity does not only sit in courts and institutions. It also sits in perception—in the cognitive shortcuts through which people decide what is plausible, who is credible, and what does not “fit” the story they already carry.

Impunity is a barrier system, not a single failure

Impunity is often described as “getting away with it”. A more accurate description is that impunity is the set of conditions that make accountability difficult to initiate in the first place.

Accountability, in this sense, is not a single moment of punishment. It is an ongoing practice—relational, shaped by power and affect, and oriented towards recognition, responsibility, and change (not isolated incident-management).

Impunity blocks that practice upstream: it interferes with recognition, delays response, fragments responsibility, and makes repair feel optional.

Why cognition matters: power shapes what people can perceive

Power is dynamic and multidimensional. It operates through social status, economic position, political-legal privilege, relationships, and control over knowledge and language—not only formal titles.

That matters because power does not only shape what someone can do. It shapes what others can imagine them doing—and how quickly warning signs are explained away.

This is where cognitive bias becomes politically significant.

Human beings use shortcuts to reduce complexity. In unequal contexts, those shortcuts tend to align with existing hierarchies. The result is a cognitive environment in which some people are granted credibility by default, while others must “prove” themselves into being believed.

The cognitive biases that routinely manufacture impunity

The point here is not to pathologise the public. It is to name predictable distortions—especially when status cues are present:

• Authority bias: treating perceived authority as evidence of correctness or innocence. Authority may come from a role, but also from charisma, institutional proximity, expertise-signalling, or language fluency.
• Halo effect: allowing polish, prestige, attractiveness, or “respectability” to spill into assumptions about moral character.
• Implicit bias: acting on stereotypes without intending to—shaping whose accounts feel believable, whose discomfort is dismissed, and whose behaviour is normalised.
• Framing effects: allowing euphemisms (“complicated”, “private”, “unproven”, “messy”) to govern response rather than the ethical stakes of harm.
• Motivated reasoning / defensive attribution: bending interpretation to protect a preferred reality—especially when acknowledging harm would threaten identity, community standing, or institutional reputation.
• Silence dynamics (pluralistic ignorance): misreading the absence of open challenge as proof that there is “nothing there”. In many settings, silence is not neutrality; it is an incentive structure.

These mechanisms are not trivial. They are how impunity becomes ordinary: not always through overt conspiracy, but through socially patterned cognition that protects status.

Accountability requires emotional responsibility—not because feelings are the issue, but because avoidance is

A recurring reason accountability fails is not lack of information. It is that people cannot stay with what the information implies.

That is an emotional problem as much as a cognitive one.

Emotional responsibility, in this framing, means bearing the consequences of our feelings and interpretations without outsourcing them onto others—refusing to treat discomfort as a justification for minimisation, dismissal, or spectacle.

This does not reduce harm or excuse abuse. It makes us less governable—by our own shortcuts, and by the social pressure to “move on”.

From “who did it?” to “what conditions made it survivable?”

Public discussion often collapses into either sensationalism or denial. Both can serve impunity.

Accountability asks harder questions:

• What forms of power were in play—economic, relational, political-legal, symbolic, linguistic—and how did they interact?
• Which biases turned those power signals into credibility signals?
• Where did institutions and communities treat harm as an isolated incident rather than a structural pattern?
• What social costs made speaking up feel impossible—or futile?
• What would it take to make harm harder to conceal, easier to report, and riskier to enable?

This is not abstract. It is the difference between accountability as performance and accountability as practice.

A more useful response to shock

If you feel surprised, the question is not “how could I not have known?” The more important question is: what made this feel implausible in the first place?

A few prompts that link cognition to structure:

• Which status cues make me lower my guard: wealth, polish, institutional proximity, charisma, “good reputation”?
• When do I demand a higher standard of proof before I allow concern—and who pays that cost?
• Where do I confuse silence with safety?
• What emotion is governing my interpretation right now—disbelief, fear, disgust, defensiveness—and what am I tempted to do with it?

These are not prompts for self-blame. They are prompts for precision.

Closing

Impunity is not only produced by “bad people”. It is produced by the alignment of power and perception: by the ways social structures train us to trust certain signals, doubt certain voices, and avoid certain realities.

Accountability begins when we refuse that alignment—when we become more emotionally responsible, more attentive to cognitive bias, and more willing to interrogate the arrangements that shape what we find believable.

That is where impunity tends to start. That is also where it can be disrupted.

So what?

If impunity is a system of conditions, then accountability is a system of counter-conditions. The point is not only to condemn harm after the fact, but to make harm harder to conceal, easier to interrupt, and more costly to enable.

For institutions (policy, governance, organisations)

• Design for disclosure, not reputation-management: build reporting pathways that do not depend on personal courage alone (multiple entry points, anonymous options, independent safeguarding).
• Shift incentives, not slogans: treat retaliation, silence, and “informal warnings” as organisational risk events with consequences, not interpersonal drama.
• Audit credibility allocation: notice whose accounts are doubted, delayed, or proceduralised into exhaustion—and change the rules that produce that pattern.

For communities and networks (professional, social, cultural)

• Interrupt status protection: refuse the reflex that wealth, charisma, institutional proximity, or “good reputation” counts as evidence of innocence.
• Practise collective noticing: name patterns early—especially boundary-testing, isolation, and “everyone knows but no one says” dynamics—before they harden into normality.
• Reduce the cost of speaking: create norms and supports that make raising concern survivable (shared responsibility, accompaniment, and follow-through).

For individuals (perception, responsibility, practice)

• Track your own credibility shortcuts: ask what signals make you minimise, delay, or demand impossible proof—and who bears the cost of your uncertainty.
• Stay with implication: when discomfort shows up, treat it as data to examine, not a cue to dismiss, sensationalise, or “move on”.
• Choose actions that redistribute risk: document concerns, support those targeted, and escalate responsibly—so the burden does not fall on the most vulnerable person in the room.

Bottom line: accountability is not a mood or a verdict. It is a practice of changing the conditions under which harm becomes ordinary—and under which impunity becomes thinkable.

If you’d like to explore how accountability, cognitive bias, and emotional responsibility operate in your organisation or community—and what to do about them—contact CTDC to request our services or register your interest in our Academy.