Intimate Violence in Community Context

Christopher R. Browning, Psychology, University of Chicago

Research Grant, 1999

---

This research applies the social disorganization perspective on the neighborhood-level determinants of crime to partner violence. The social disorganization approach focuses on the role of neighborhood characteristics such as poverty, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity in limiting the social resources available to achieve shared community goals. Specifically, I hypothesize that trust, attachment to community, and the associated willingness of residents to intervene on behalf of one another—the combination of which has been described as collective efficacy—may help limit the prevalence of violence between intimate partners. The analysis brings data from the 1990 Decennial Census together with the 1994–95 Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Community Survey, the 1994–95 Chicago Homicide Data, and the 1995–97 Chicago Health and Social Life Survey to study the impact of neighborhood characteristics on partner violence, above and beyond the effects of individual characteristics. Findings indicate that collective efficacy is negatively associated with both neighborhood-level intimate homicide rates and self-reports of nonlethal partner violence at the individual level. However, collective efficacy exerts a more powerful regulatory effect on nonlethal violence in neighborhoods where the tolerance of intimate violence is low. Finally, collective efficacy also increases the likelihood that women will disclose conflict in their relationships to various potential sources of support. This research points to the importance of neighborhood environment for regulating violence between intimate partners.

Findings indicate that collective efficacy is negatively associated with both neighborhood-level intimate homicide rates and self-reports of nonlethal partner violence at the individual level.

The Relationship Between Theory of Mind, Social Information Processing, and Aggression in Preschool Children

Kimberly Wright Cassidy, Psychology, Bryn Mawr College

Research Grant, 1997

---

Much recent research suggests that preschoolers undergo a fundamental change in their ability to understand the internal states (desires, beliefs, emotions) of others (termed theory of mind). Little research has been done to determine the extent to which theory of mind development relates to social adaptation. A second line of research indicates that other social cognitive variables, namely social information processing, are consistently related to maladaptive behavior in middle childhood. This study investigated the links between social cognitive variables and social adaptation in preschool children by investigating the relationship between theory of mind development, social information processing, and social behavior (both prosocial and aggressive behavior). More broadly, this research provided a descriptive study of aggressive behavior in preschoolers as rated by teachers and research observers.

Seventy preschool children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds performed a battery of theory of mind measures (measuring understanding of others’ beliefs and understanding of others’ emotions), a measure of social information processing (measuring children’s ability to complete the stages of Dodge’s social information processing model: assessing intentions, generating strategies, evaluating potential strategies and choosing a competent strategy), and several measures of social behavior (with a particular emphasis on physical and relational aggression).

Children with better understanding of others' thoughts and feelings were also more likely to be popular with their peers and to be the recipient of prosocial acts by their peers.

Overall, preschoolers seemed to have an aggressive “style.” That is, some engaged in no aggression, some engaged in physical aggression only, some engaged in relational aggression only and some engaged in both types of aggression. These percentages were different for boys and girls, with boys being more likely to engage in primarily physical or both kinds of aggression and girls being more likely to engage in relational aggression. Boys who aggressed were seen as possessing fewer social skills, but were also not seen as having more problem behaviors in general (beyond aggression). Girls who aggressed were not rated as deficient in positive social skills, but were rated as engaging in higher levels of other types of problem behaviors. Interestingly, higher levels of aggression were not related to popularity among peers (as rated by peers).

In addition, results showed that for boys with less developed language skills, there was a strong negative relationship between social cognitive understanding and physical aggression. That is, boys with below-average language skills relative to their peers who were better able to predict the thoughts of others and who were better able to social problem solve were less likely to engage in physical aggression such as hitting and pushing. Girls’ social-cognitive skills were not related to their level of physical aggression. Children with better understanding of others’ thoughts and feelings were also more likely to be popular with their peers and to be the recipient of prosocial acts by their peers.

Bibliography

1. Cassidy, K. W., Werner, R. S., Rourke, M., Zubernis, L. S. & Balaraman, G. (2003). "The relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior." Social Development 12: 198-221.

2. Werner, R. S. & Cassidy, K. W. (under review). "The role of social-cognitive abilities in pre-schoolers' aggressive behavior." British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

3. Werner, R. S. & Cassidy, K. W. (under review) "The early correlates of preschool aggressive behavior according to type of aggression and measurement." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

The Peaceful Century: War in Twentieth-Century Latin America

Miguel A. Centeno, Sociology, Princeton University

Research Grant, 1997, 1998

---

Blood and Debt analyzed a double empirical puzzle. Why did the Latin American state fail to develop beyond its limited organizational capacity, and why did international war occur so infrequently on the continent? I demonstrate how the absence of both institutional authority and politically organized violence were bound in a circular, causal relationship. The origins of this unique pattern of development are found in the conditions under which the countries achieved independence. We also need to consider other factors, however, such as Latin America’s actual military experience, the divisions within the societies and within the dominant elites, and the particular sequence of these developments, all of which helped to make the colonial legacy harder to escape.

We can begin with perhaps the most interesting empirical puzzle discussed in the book: the relative scarcity of wars (but especially international ones) in Latin America. The continent has not lacked bloodshed and cruelty in its history, but it has, somehow, skipped the organized exercise of violence that so defines other modern nations. It is the difference in political organization that helps account for both Latin American ‘exceptionalism” and differences within the continent.

The absence of a strong centralizing state authority best explains the particular distribution and forms of political violence observed on the continent. Because the state developed so late (generally only in the late-nineteenth century and then only intermittently), social, political, racial, regional, and economic conflicts were rarely controlled from above. The Hobbesian function of the state was underdeveloped and what ensued was often the violence of all against all. There were simply too many conflicts occurring within each Latin American state for these countries to have much energy to fight each other. These internal struggles and the never-resolved social and economic divisions produced a military that saw its major responsibility as the protection of an always ill-defined sense of nation from internal enemies. Whether these were Indians, class antagonists, or the supposed communist representatives mattered less than the fact the military gaze was oriented inward.

There were simply too many conflicts occurring within each Latin American state for these countries to have much energy to fight each other.

How do wars make states? Wars provide both the means and the incentive to centralize power. Given external threats, states seek to protect their internal situation by imposing their control over as much of their own territory as possible. Wars also help build nations. They do so by both providing the dramaturgical materials for nationalist liturgies and by providing avenues and opportunities for the subject population to establish possibly more cooperative relations with the state. Through the massification of armies, wars also help define citizenship.

In general, the standard bellicist model assumes a relatively smoothly operating feedback loop. External threats generate military needs. These include fiscal and manpower resources. The first are satisfied though some already-existing administrative capacity (which in turns grows and makes fiscal extraction easier). The newly augmented organizational capacity and new funds further encourage and support the establishment of centralized authority. The manpower needs lead to conscription and to citizenship claims in exchange for granting the state such power. Meanwhile, the external threat gives rise to both elite unity and a broader sense of collective identity. The latter (along with the heroic deeds of the actual conflict) help develop an official nationalist ethos (which in turn helps consolidate elite unity). Both of these contribute the legitimacy of centralized authority. The combination of institutionalized authority, citizenship claims, and nationalism are the essential components of a modern nation-state.

In Latin America, the process was generally quite different. The fiscal response to military needs could not be met through an expanded administrative capacity as one barely existed. The kinds of wars fought and the same limited state organizational capability precluded massive mobilization. Instead, the professionalization following the 1890s produced socially isolated, small, and relatively privileged armed forces. External threats did not automatically translate into support or self-identification, but were precluded from doing so by social divisions. Given the absence of any core sense of nation, external threats often aggravated domestic divisions. These produced divided and isolated elites and a generally excluded majority without a sense of citizenship. The results of war on the continent were generally negative, in that it mostly brought about debt, economic breakdown and political chaos. When it had a positive economic effect, it was too often in the form of providing a state with new “rents,” but not forcing it to do more with what it already had undertaken. Positive political results (as in greater centralization) were usually accompanied by authoritarian rule and rarely with any parallel rise in popular participation.

The Mind of the Segregationist

David Chappell, History, University of Arkansas

Research Grant, 1999

---

The biggest result so far of my project, “The Mind of the Segregationist,” is one-third of my book, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (2004, University of North Carolina Press). An advance review in the Atlantic Monthly (November 2003) assessed the book as “one of the three or four most important books on the civil rights movement.” My summary of the book appears as the lead article in the Journal of the Historical Society (Spring 2003).

Still in the works is the larger project the grant supported, an entire book devoted to segregationist propaganda and strategy, tentatively titled The Mind of the Segregationist. I have drafted about half of that manuscript—most of the three most important chapters: on constitutional arguments, on religious arguments, and on the “classics” of segregationist thought (Herman Talmadge’s You and Segregation, Judge Tom Brady’s Black Monday, James J. Kilpatrick’s series of “Interposition” editorials, former Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Byrnes’s article in U.S. News and World Report, etc.).

My HFG grant covered travel expenses to the archives of prominent segregationists, and of southern leaders who wrestled with segregationism but decided not to support it. The most interesting in the latter category was the popular evangelist Billy Graham. Graham and his father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell (a prominent conservative southern Presbyterian editor and former missionary, who answered much of Graham’s mail and guided him on practical and spiritual questions), both declared publicly, in Life magazine in 1956, that segregation could not be biblically or constitutionally justified. Ebony magazine made much of Graham’s stance, praising him lavishly in September 1957, but historians have ignored it—along with Graham’s refusal to practice segregation in his southern “crusades” after 1954 or so and his public endorsement of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957. Segregationists attacked Graham for deviating from what they understood as the conservative course on race. Graham was often soft-spoken about his integrationist stance after 1956, but he stuck to it.

Graham’s position on race would have been career suicide had he run for public office. Elected southern leaders went the opposite way, achieving near unanimity in their “Southern Manifesto” of opposition to the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions of 1954 and 1955 (Lyndon Johnson, Estes Kefauver, and Al Gore Sr. were the only southern senators who declined to sign). Graham, however, remained one of the most popular figures in the South, and on most issues one of the most conservative.

The archival record suggests that segregationism, though it was the leading issue in southern election campaigns from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, did not go as deep in southern white culture and psychology as historians have hitherto thought.

Other religious leaders of the white South were closer to Graham than to the elected politicians. Both the Southern Baptist Convention and the (southern) Presbyterian Church in the U.S. voted by strong majorities to support public school desegregation in 1954. The vote in the SBC, the more democratic of the two all-southern denominations, was roughly nine thousand to fifty. Segregationists attacked their own churches in order to promote segregationism, though surprisingly few congregations achieved enough unity or militance on the question to withhold funds from the denomination or to withdraw from it, or even to threaten to do so.

Integrationists ridiculed the absurd attempts of a few lay and clerical leaders on the fringe of the segregation movement to use the Bible to justify segregation. But the integrationist reaction seems to have exaggerated the extent and the influence of biblical arguments among segregationists. Far more common than segregationist “proof-texting” in the records of both religious and secular segregationists are statements of an increasingly heated anticlericalism. The southern white churches ended up conflicted, passive, and relatively silent on race questions. As frustrating as that silence was to Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, it was also frustrating to the segregationists who felt abandoned and betrayed by their own churches. The segregationists recognized that their cause was greatly weakened by their inability to match what the Black leader Fred Shuttlesworth called his “weapons of spiritual warfare.”

The archival record suggests that segregationism, though it was the leading issue in southern election campaigns from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, did not go as deep in southern white culture and psychology as historians have hitherto thought. The further one went below the surface of opinion polls and demagogic single-issue campaigns, the less solidarity and confidence one found among white southerners on segregation. Their segregationism did not have nearly the cultural and spiritual resonance that the defense of slavery had had one hundred years earlier. In the slavery struggle, the South’s leading ministers and theologians confidently and resourcefully claimed slavery was a “positive” good, sanctioned by the Bible as well as the Constitution and classical philosophy. There is nothing like that confidence and commitment to segregation a hundred years later: though the opinion polls show overwhelming numbers “favor” segregation, they do not show how much white southerners were willing to sacrifice to defend segregation. The polls do not reveal the deep conflict among white southerners over how best to defend segregation.

If we seek to understand how an impoverished, disfranchised, and unarmed minority succeeded in overthrowing the system of segregation, we must learn how they found and exploited the fissures and pressure points in southern white society. The conflict between the white South’s political and religious institutions helps us begin to understand that although white southerners overwhelmingly supported segregation, they were not about to make significant sacrifices to defend it, and the were incapable of unifying behind any particular strategy of defense.

Had American liberals grasped that basic truth about the white South, they might have found the nerve to challenge segregation a lot earlier and more effectively than they did. As things turned out, American liberals were instead dragged with little preparation into the wake of an indigenous Black southern movement. That movement’s greatest gift, my research suggests, was that its leaders understood the white South better than the liberals—or the racist politicians who represented the white South—did.

Conspiracy Beliefs and Violence in American Culture: A Comparative Study of Black and White Separatism

Michael Barkun, Political Science, Syracuse University

Research Grant, 1998, 1999

---

One of the most volatile forms of contemporary identity politics is that associated with race, and more especially with organized groups for which race is the characteristic of overriding significance. In North America and Europe, race-oriented political and social movements display two salient characteristics: ideologies that are mirror images of one another, and a treatment of race as the functional equivalent of nation. These characteristics imply a potential for violence.

While outwardly dissimilar, White and Black racial separatisms possess belief systems that are structurally similar. Each possesses a myth of origin which confers a transcendent significance on the group, and each identifies racial villains and inferiors against whom the group must struggle to realize its destiny. White racists and Afrocentrists may therefore differ less in the structure of their beliefs than in the groups to which they ascribe virtue and vice. Each also gravitates towards a Manichean worldview, in which the virtuous must battle an evil cabal.

While outwardly dissimilar, White and Black racial separatisms possess belief systems that are structurally similar. 

Like national groups, racialists adopt what Anthony D. Smith has called “myths of ethnic descent” to validate their claims to power. However, the boundaries of race and nation rarely coincide, and racial separatists therefore find themselves embedded in hostile environments or cut off from fellow members. They consequently may see political authorities as enemies to be challenged and overcome.

The vagueness and transnational character of racial boundaries also places stress on group cohesion. Hence the group’s own sense of purity may take precedence over the struggle with outsiders. As a result, violence is often directed at perceived enemies within—”race traitors,” defectors, informers, infiltrators, doctrinal heretics, and leadership rivals—who must be destroyed in the interests of boundary maintenance. When violence is directed against external foes, the targets are likely to be symbols of the imagined conspiracy.

Mental Representations of Attachment in Twins: A Study of Monozygotic Female Pairs Concordant and Discordant for Abnormally Aggressive Behavior

John N. Constantino, Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine

Research Grant, 2001, 2002

---

Previous research has suggested a link between the quality of early social relationships and the development of aggression. This association is most pronounced when children are maltreated, but the mechanism by which social experience influences social developmental outcome is poorly understood. One possible mechanism is that relationship-relevant experiences are incorporated into an internal working model (mental representation) of social relationships that is used on a moment-to-moment basis in the context of social interaction. Most previous studies of attachment characteristics and psychopathology have not been able to control adequately for the possibility that any observed association might be due to genetic influences that independently affect both. This study represents an initial step in elucidating the genetic structure of mental representations of attachment (MRA) and the extent to which MRA in turn might mediate the development of abnormally aggressive behavior. Specifically, this study examines concordance in attachment status among pairs of female adolescent monozygotic twins, as well as their non-twin siblings (NTS) and relates attachment classification to several parameters of antisocial development.

The results to date indicate that mental representations of attachment are substantially influenced by shared environmental influences and are associated with current levels of aggressive behavior, as well as histories of arrest and symptoms of conduct disorder.

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) has been completed on 40 pairs of identical female twins, concordant or discordant for a presence or absence of conduct disorder. The AAI is an established, one-hour, audiotaped interview that assesses an adult or adolescent subject’s current state of mind with respect to relationships. It inquires about the subject’s own early relationships with caregivers, and about previous experience with separation, loss, or trauma. It classifies an individual’s mental representation of attachment into one of four categories (secure-autonomous, insecure-dismissing, insecure-preoccupied, insecure-unresolved), which correspond to the four attachment categories used to classify parent-infant dyads in the Ainsworth Strange Situation.

The results to date indicate that mental representations of attachment are substantially influenced by shared environmental influences and are associated with current levels of aggressive behavior, as well as histories of arrest and symptoms of conduct disorder. These findings support the notion that mental representations of attachment are, in large part, a function of environmental factors, and that they may play a mediating role in the development of abnormally aggressive patterns of behavior. Interventions that promote the development of secure parent-child relationships early in life may help prevent the development of abnormally aggressive patterns of behavior.