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Violence and the mind
Framing Question: Do processes occurring in the mind relate to interpersonal violence?
WEEK ONE: Does seeing violence make us act violently?
In Week One we’ll cover evidence linking exposure to violence with individual behavior from very different sources. The Bingenheimer (H&SS alum) study provides a very simple propensity score analysis estimating the effect of exposure to firearm violence with subsequent violent behavior. The reason I included this paper is that it is probably the best evidence we have that exposure to violence has a causal effect on individual violence. But there are problems with the analysis and we might not want to take this relationship for granted. The Kelly paper is an imaging study done by some people here at Columbia that looks at how exposure to violent scenes in movies and TV affects brain activity. We may need Kim to interpret the details of this one for us. But what I find interesting is that there appears to be something unique about seeing violent acts, as opposed to seeing other arousing media, that affects brain activity. What does this mean? Not sure, except that it moves us closer to thinking that violence in the environment may have an impact upon brain functioning, and may suggest a neurological mechanism. Or perhaps there is a social cognitive mechanism? Since no seminar would be complete without a discussion of efficacy, I decided to include a brief overview of experimental evidence on the impact of efficacy beliefs on individual behavior (Bandura’s excerpt). This is a very quick summary of evidence (some of the original articles that he reviews will also be posted on the Courseworks site for those interested). The point here is to assess whether the theory seems more or less plausible given the experimental evidence that has been done. I’ve also included my paper linking “street efficacy” with individual violence, which we already read for Erika’s seminar. The broad argument is that seeing violence may influence kids’ confidence in their ability to avoid violent confrontations, influencing their future behavior. This looks like a lot, but it is actually not too much reading. You’ve already read my article and you can skim the Bingenheimer study unless you are interested in the details of the methods. And the other two are both extremely short.
WEEK 1 READINGS:
WEEK TWO: How do children interpret and respond to violence around them?
In the second week we’ll continue any lingering discussion from Week One and move on to some sociological interpretations of how individuals respond to violent environments. The excerpt from Anderson provides a case study of a young man living in a Philadelphia ghetto. Code of the Street is probably the classic ethnography of ghetto violence, and this excerpt is what Anderson is good at, in my mind: providing a rich account of important sequences of events in a young adult’s life and his interpretations of them. The case study in this excerpt give a unique sense of the issues that are central to Anderson’s work, and they inform Massey’s paper as well. But I think they also raise some of the complicating factors involved in attempting to understand individual actions in violent or disadvantaged settings. Massey’s paper builds on Anderson’s argument but takes it further, arguing that it is rational for youth living within an extremely violent environment to adapt to that environment through the strategic exhibition of violence and the formation of potentially violent social networks. The desire for physical protection (and, if we extend the argument, for status) is thus a driver of individual violent behavior, serving to reproduce the code of violence that structures interpersonal relationships in urban ghettos. Lastly, I’m including the Raine paper as an optional addition to the week’s readings. The paper I’ve included provides a very good overview of the evidence that has been produced on biological correlates of criminal or antisocial behavior. It is not a challenge to the other perspectives but a reminder that in focusing on the relationship between violent environments and individual behavior it is possible that we may be explaining only a small portion of the variance in violence. At the same time, one of the key findings from the studies that Raine reviews is that biological markers appear to matter more for children who are raised in relatively advantaged home settings. This can be interpreted in different ways, but one interpretation is that biology becomes important in the absence of social factors that make crime or violence more likely. An alternative hypothesis is that in focusing on the environment we may just be missing the underlying biological bases for criminal or antisocial behavior. WEEK 2 READINGS:
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