Norm Violations.
Social norms guide our expectations about how people should behave toward each other. Because social norms foster social coordination and communication, their violation can be viewed as disruptive and dangerous, and therefore warranting punishment. Norm violations can also set in motion a vicious cycle that attributes malevolent motives and antagonistic interests to a person designated as an adversary, resulting in hostile reactions and conflict escalation that can ultimately lead to violence. Norm violations are less likely to trigger these negative responses when they are perceived as transient rather than stable, as unintentional rather than intentional, and when parties to a conflict at all levels of analysis (friends, community groups, or nations) have developed norms of redress. Norms of redress are procedures for bringing about retributive or reparative justice. They are more likely to be effective and prevent conflict escalation if they are in place and well established before norm violations occur (De Ridder and Tripathi, 1992).
Moral Reasoning and Judgment.
Sociomoral reasoning examines how people judge their own and others’ behavior (Rule and Nesdale, 1976). Aggression can be normative or norm violating, depending on prevailing norms in families, communities, and cultures. Such sociomoral judgments consider an actor’s intentions; the appropriateness, intensity, and nature of the aggression; and the harm done. These judgments, which can be accurate or faulty, are influenced by such factors as the perceiver’s age, ideology, and feelings of affinity for the victim or aggressor. Sociomoral development tends to increase with age and maturity (Killen and Hart, 1995), but it is also reactive to context. Danger and threat, for example, can cause people capable of sophisticated sociomoral reasoning to revert to simpler, more egocentric thinking.
Domain theory, a sociocognitive approach to moral reasoning, posits that interpretations of behavior can be construed in various ways: (1) in the moral domain, in which fairness, responsibility, and deserving are salient; (2) in the conventional domain, in which social conventions and structures are salient; or (3) in the personal domain, in which personal discretion and privacy are salient. Interpreting behavior—one’s own or that of others—depends on whether that behavior is construed in moral or nonmoral terms (Smetana, 2006). For example, people can view drug use as a moral issue (right or wrong), socially conventional behavior (hanging out with friends), or a personal issue (their own preferences) (Berkowitz, Guerra, and Nucci, 1991). Similarly, abortion can be viewed as a moral issue or a matter of personal discretion (Smetana, 1982).
When applied to aggression and violence, domain theory can have chilling implications, such as when domestic violence is dismissed as a nonmoral issue by aggressors claiming that their behavior is in the personal domain: “This is a family matter. Why do you want to make a big deal of it?” (Quindlen, 1994, p. A21). People who commit hate crimes, too, can invoke prevailing homophobic, misogynistic, or racist norms that justify violence as conventional rather than acknowledge that it violates widely shared morals about respect and human rights (Opotow, 2005; Opotow and McClelland, 2007).
Moral Exclusion.
Morton Deutsch (1985) has defined scope of justice as the psychological boundary of one’s moral community and the extent to which one’s concepts of justice apply: “The narrower one’s conception of one’s community, the narrower will be the scope of situations in which one’s actions will be governed by considerations of justice” (Deutsch, 1985, p. 37). To empirically investigate and further theorize the scope of justice, Opotow (1990, 1993, 1995, 2001a) has conducted research to investigate the sociopolitical factors associated with changes in the scope of justice over time (Opotow 2008, 2012).
The scope of justice influences how people think about and behave toward others. It also can position some people as inferior, irrelevant, undeserving, or expendable. It therefore has important implications for aggression and violence: a shrinking scope of justice that narrows the applicability of justice can support destructive conflict and violence. Aggression and violence justified by moral exclusion can seem normal, acceptable, and unproblematic, rendering moral exclusion invisible. Yet symptoms of moral exclusion can indicate its presence. These symptoms include minimizing harm through euphemism, disclaiming, or concealing moral exclusion’s harmful effects; excluding others through biased evaluation of groups, condescension, derogation, or dehumanization; and self-exoneration through victim blaming, deindividuation, diffusing and displacing responsibility, and comparisons that glorify one’s own group at the expense of others (Opotow, 1990; Opotow and Weiss, 2000). Consistent with Deutsch’s Crude Law of Social Relations (1993), these symptoms can be an outcome of moral exclusion or can actively promote it.
Cultural Theories of Aggression and Violence
Culture is relevant to moral exclusion because it shapes human behaviors through norms, beliefs, values, and traditions. While traditional social science treats culture as a natural, essential property of a group (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan, 2001), a critical approach to culture conceptualizes it as a political as well as a social construct, emphasizing that structures of power regulate representations of culture (Gjerde, 2004). From this perspective, culture shapes how we represent, communicate, and respond to violent events. Thus, cultural violence is also a critical construct in its attention to forms of violence including those that are forbidden or unacceptable and those that are ignored, justified, or normalized. Recent scholarship on aggression and violence that analyzes the relationship of violence and culture largely focuses on three contexts: sexualization, honor ideologies, and non-Western practices.
Sexualization.
Violence against women and girls has gained international attention over the past decade as the sexualization of women and girls is increasingly understood as a symptom of social inequality on multiple axes of oppression (American Psychological Association, 2007; Gill, 2012). As feminist scholars observe, this form of gendered violence is often foregrounded and sensationalized in the popular media, but such media accounts do not discuss key themes that feminist scholars have identified as important: the agency, participation, and pleasure women and girls experience in their sexuality. To dispute the predominant image of feminine victimhood in the media, academic scholarship focuses on women’s lived experience, the social location of women in society, and it positions women as agents within a complex web of power relations (Coy and Garner, 2012). This offers a broader analytical and critical framework because it considers the multiple spheres that contribute to the sexualization of women and focuses attention on systems of gender inequality, evident in frequency data on violence directed at women. Academic feminist literature argues that these data reveal how female bodies are appropriated in the cultural production of masculinity that naturalizes hierarchical and gendered power relationship (Garner, 2012).
Honor Ideologies.
While feminized and sexualized violence is generally considered unacceptable (but not in all contexts), masculinized forms of violence can be widely supported by norms, beliefs, values, and traditions. Honor killings are an extreme example, but gendered beliefs, such as “boys will be boys” (Miedzian, 1991), excuse violent expression of masculinity.
Masculinized justifications for violence have been studied in war (Barnes, Brown, and Osterman, 2012), rural southern culture (Lee and Ousey, 2011; Nisbett, 1993), and as a social mechanism to develop subculture identities such as street gangs (Brookman, Bennett, Hochstetler, and Copes, 2011). When masculine honor ideologies condoning aggressive attitudes and behavior are described as biologically determined, they are presumed to be hardwired, unchangeable, and situated within a fixed cultural context in which all individuals—men, women, and children—are subjected to this cultural influence (Nisbett, 1993).
Studies on gay male youth athletes dispute the assumption of fixed cultural precepts and cultural uniformity. A study of masculinity found a decrease in homophobia, a more positive environment for gay male athletes, and an increasingly in
clusive sense of masculinity for young men who came out from 2008 to 2010 compared with young men who came out from 2000 to 2002 (Anderson, 2011). Another study examined the construction of masculinity on a university rugby team (Anderson and McGuire, 2010). Players’ and coaches’ gendered belief systems differed sharply. Players saw their coaches as adhering to an orthodox, out-of-date version of masculinity. These players, who all identify as heterosexual, had an inclusive approach to masculinity that contested homophobia, misogyny, and excessive risk taking. They did not support the degradation of women or gay men, and they expressed emotional support for each other, particularly when a team member was ill or injured. Because this research indicates that masculinist ideologies are changeable within some contexts—rather than global and immutable—the studies offer evidence that neither masculinity nor culture is a fixed construct.
Non-Western Practices.
When culture is represented as the practices of a geographical, national, or ethnic group (Nisbett, 2003), it foregrounds and essentializes particular customs, traditions, or systems while it slights within-group or within-nation variation. When researchers then identify non-Western practices as having a seemingly self-evident influence on social relations in these contexts, it implies that the non-Western culture being studied is static and, by implication, inferior.
Chinese culture, for example, is framed problematically in discussions of student victimization by teachers (Chen and Wei, 2011; Chen and Astor, 2010) or interpersonal violence that results in loss of face or dignity (Liao and Bond, 2011). This perspective positions culture as an analytical construct that differentiates the normative West from the problematic East. The East is positioned as culturally exotic and lacking in a contemporary and sophisticated grasp of human nature or human rights. Problematizing the culture of the East in this way obscures complex power relations and practices, and it depicts the culture of the East as homogeneous and morally underdeveloped. Critical scholars, in contrast, who have, for example, focused on one aspect of Chinese culture, parenting practices, situate it within the ongoing transformations of China’s political and economic context rather than as a predetermined behavioral pattern (Chang, Chen, and Ji, 2011). They do so to argue that drastic social change brings about new forms of cultural adaptations, including parenting practices. Thus, an understanding of the dynamics of change, including cultural adaptation strategies and political-economic structures, disputes the stereotypical image of the authoritarian Chinese parent as fixed and universal.
In sum, without deconstructing the hegemonic ideologies and systems at work in a given context, the deployment of culture as a sole explanation of aggression and violence is problematic as both an analytical approach and for developing culturally sensitive policy. Instead of making broad assumptions about the norms, beliefs, values, traditions, or behaviors of a particular group, a nuanced perspective of the culture of aggression and violence would attend to structural mechanisms that justify and perpetuate violence. Deeply rooted systematic factors must be understood to effectively address violent practices.
Structural Violence
Both cultural and structural analyses of aggression and violence focus on the macrolevel, but they are not identical constructs. Cultural theories focus on forms of violence that have been normalized and taken for granted within a particular subgroup, community, region, or nation (Galtung, 1990), whereas structural theories focus on the systematic disadvantages conferred on marginalized groups in society. Such disadvantages include a lack of access to basic resources that lead to chronic, negative outcomes. Theories of structural injustice and violence are critical in that they interrogate how social arrangements and power can privilege one group and marginalize others.
Structural violence not only influences societal institutions and social groups; it also can penetrate psychologically at the personal level. Derek Hook (2004) articulates how Frantz Fanon’s (2008) theories of racism and identity contribute to a critical redefinition of violence by describing “the systematic undermining of an individual’s physical or psychological resources” (p. 103). For example, under apartheid in South Africa, segregation policies forced black workers into distant townships requiring up to ten hours a day of travel to reach their jobs. In addition to the negative physical effect of prolonged travel and lack of sleep (Goldblatt, 1989), the accumulated psychological stress should be understood as a form of structural violence that continually reinscribed the inferior, excluded status on black South Africans.
Structural violence is not distinct from direct violence. Indeed, structural violence can occur in tandem with direct forms of violence, such as when patriarchal, misogynistic mores support both discrimination and violence against women and children (European Commission, 2010; Hart and Schwab, 1997). As another example, the gunning down of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 highlighted the interactive effects of structural violence and direct violence. Laws and norms within the United States vary by state and can be more protective of gun ownership than public safety. While aggressive dispositions and pathological portrayals of mental illness often become the cultural trope blaming a single perpetrator as the sole cause of the incident (Langman, 2009), the structural elements that contribute to such shootings, which are influential and complex, often evade scrutiny.
The challenges of addressing direct violence through structural change are currently being debated in response to recent incidents of gun violence in the United States. Psychologists for Social Responsibility (2013) have argued that the long-term solution comes from structural changes that include stricter gun control laws, universal access to mental health services, removing the stigma of mental illness, and the right of children worldwide to protection from harm (also see United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, 2005). Structural change toward equality and resource sharing is consistent with an expanding scope of justice that widens our sense of moral obligation, responsibility, and duty toward others and supports mutual respect, constructive approaches to conflict, and cooperative, peaceful intergroup relations (Opotow, 2012).
ADDRESSING AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE: IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
This chapter has described the many ways that aggression and violence can occur within individuals and social relationships, as well as in communities, organizations, societies, and nations. As the Seville Statement argues, violence emerges in human relations and human systems; therefore, the activities, behaviors, processes, norms, or systems that created violence are amenable to change. Indeed, strategies for deescalating direct and structural violence are urgently needed for social relations at smaller and larger levels of analysis. This section turns to the conditions that can allow conflict to take a constructive course that has emerged from theory and work in the field (see Deutsch, 2011, for an extended discussion). Because both nonviolence and violence have been used by social movements to foster equality and constructive societal change, this section concludes by discussing both.
Conflict Resolution: Examining Attitudes and Developing Skills
Morton Deutsch (1993) has identified thirteen elements that are common components of conflict resolution programs designed to enable individuals or groups to resolve conflict cooperatively and constructively (also see Deutsch and Coleman, 2012). We discuss three key elements that focus on attitudes, knowledge, and skills: self-reflection, perspective taking, and deescalation.
Self-Reflection.
Effective conflict resolution intervention helps individuals reflect on their own conflict resolution style, distinguish between healthy and unhealthy ways of expressing anger, and be more aware of the long-term consequences of violent behavior. Individuals who understand their own conflict resolution style can be vigilant about situations that are likely to provoke their anger. They can also learn to critically examine their justifications for anger and aggression and realistically assess the gains and losses that can result from violence. Individuals are more likely to use hea
lthy ways of expressing anger if they can differentiate between assertive and aggressive responses and can communicate assertive responses effectively.
Perspective Taking.
Conflict resolution programs can help individuals learn perspective taking to understand and avoid behaviors that provoke others. Individuals who can take others’ perspectives are more likely to see the issues with more complexity, acknowledge rather than deny problems, and approach conflict constructively, with the flexibility and creativity that can more fully use available resources to resolve their conflict. Perspective taking is difficult during the intense arousal of escalated, violent conflict, and it can be threatening, and therefore avoided, when it can reveal unpleasant truths about oneself, one’s group, or one’s position.
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