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Social psychology studies how we think about and influence one another, and also how we relate to one another. What are the roots of prejudice? What causes us to harm, or to help, or to fall in love? How can we move a destructive conflict toward a just peace? In this section we ponder insights into antisocial relations gleaned by researchers who have studied prejudice and aggression.

12-8 What is prejudice? What are its social and emotional roots?

Prejudice means “prejudgment.” It is an unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group—often a different cultural, ethnic, or gender group. Like all attitudes, prejudice is a three-part mixture of

Some stereotypes may be at least partly accurate. If you presume that young men tend to drive faster than elderly women, you may be right. People perceive Australians as having a rougher culture than the British, and in one analysis of millions of Facebook status updates, Australians did use more profanity (Kramer & Chung, 2011). But stereotypes can exaggerate—as when liberals and conservatives overestimate the extremity of the other’s views (Graham et al., 2012). In the 14 years after the terror of September 11, 2001, many Americans feared attacks in the United States by the Muslim radical fringe, yet were nearly twice as likely to be killed by home-grown White supremacists and other non-Muslim extremists (Shane, 2015).

Stereotypes can also bias behavior. To believe that obese people are gluttonous, and to feel dislike for an obese person, is to be prejudiced; prejudice is a negative attitude. To pass over all the obese people on a dating site, or to reject an obese person as a potential job candidate, is to discriminate; discrimination is a negative behavior.

How Prejudiced Are People?

Prejudice comes as both explicit (overt) and implicit (automatic) attitudes toward people of a particular ethnic group, gender, sexual orientation, or viewpoint. Some examples:

EXPLICIT ETHNIC PREJUDICE Americans’ expressed racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the last half-century. “It’s all right for Blacks and Whites to date each other,” agreed 48 percent of Americans in 1987 and 86 percent in 2012 (Pew, 2012). “Marriage between Blacks and Whites” was approved by 4 percent of Americans in 1958 and 87 percent in 2013 (Newport, 2013).

Yet as overt prejudice wanes, subtle prejudice lingers. Despite increased verbal support for interracial marriage, many people admit that in socially intimate settings (dating, dancing, marrying), they, personally, would feel uncomfortable with someone of another race. And many people who say they would feel upset with someone making racist slurs actually, when hearing such racism, respond indifferently (Kawakami et al., 2009). Subtle prejudice may also take the form of “microaggressions,” such as race-related traffic stops or people’s reluctance to choose a train seat next to someone of a different race (Wang et al., 2011). A slew of recent experiments illustrates that prejudice can be not only subtle but also automatic and unconscious.

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IMPLICIT ETHNIC PREJUDICE As we have seen throughout this book, the human mind processes thoughts, memories, and attitudes on two different tracks. Sometimes that processing is explicit—on the radar screen of our awareness. To a much greater extent, it is implicit—below the radar, leaving us unaware of how our attitudes are influencing our behavior. Modern studies indicate that prejudice is often implicit, an automatic attitude—an unthinking knee-jerk response. Consider these findings:

IMPLICIT RACIAL ASSOCIATIONS Using Implicit Association Tests, researchers have demonstrated that even people who deny harboring racial prejudice may carry negative associations (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013). For example, 9 in 10 White respondents took longer to identify pleasant words (such as peace and paradise) as “good” when presented with Black-sounding names (such as Latisha and Darnell) rather than with White-sounding names (such as Katie and Ian). Moreover, people who more quickly associated good things with White names or faces also were the quickest to perceive anger and apparent threat in Black faces (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). (By 2014, about 16 million people had taken an Implicit Association Test, as you can at www.implicit.harvard.edu.)

Although the test is useful for studying automatic prejudice, critics caution against using it to assess or label individuals (Oswald et al., 2013, 2015). Defenders counter that implicit biases predict behaviors ranging from simple acts of friendliness to the evaluation of work quality (Greenwald et al., 2015). In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, those demonstrating explicit or implicit prejudice were less likely to vote for candidate Barack Obama. His election in turn served to reduce implicit prejudice (Bernstein et al., 2010; Payne et al., 2010; Stephens-Davidowitz, 2014).

UNCONSCIOUS PATRONIZATION In one experiment, White university women assessed flawed student essays. When assessing essays supposedly written by White students, the women gave low evaluations, often with harsh comments, but not so when the same essays were said to have been written by Black students (Harber, 1998). Did the evaluators calibrate their evaluations to their racial stereotypes, leading to less exacting standards and a patronizing attitude? In real-world evaluations, such low expectations and the resulting “inflated praise and insufficient criticism” could hinder minority student achievement, the researcher noted. (To preclude such bias, many teachers read essays while “blind” to their authors.)

RACE-INFLUENCED PERCEPTIONS Our expectations influence our perceptions. In 1999, Amadou Diallo was accosted as he approached his apartment house doorway by police officers looking for a rapist. When he pulled out his wallet, the officers, perceiving a gun, riddled his body with 19 bullets from 41 shots. Curious about this tragic killing of an unarmed, innocent man, two research teams simulated the situation (Correll et al., 2002, 2007; Greenwald et al., 2003; Sadler et al., 2012). They asked viewers to press buttons quickly to “shoot” or not shoot men who suddenly appeared on screen. Some of the on-screen men held a gun. Others held a harmless object, such as a flashlight or bottle. People (both Blacks and Whites, in one study) more often shot Black men than White men who were holding the harmless objects. Priming people with a flashed Black face rather than White face also made them more likely to misperceive a flashed tool as a gun (FIGURE 12.6). Fatigue, which diminishes one’s conscious control and increases automatic reactions, amplifies racial bias in decisions to shoot (Ma et al., 2013).

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In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court, in upholding the Fair Housing Act, affirmed implicit bias research when noting that “unconscious prejudices” can cause discrimination even without conscious discriminatory intent. If your own gut-check reveals you sometimes have feelings you would rather not have about other people, remember this: It is what we do with our feelings that matters. By monitoring our feelings and actions, and by replacing old habits with new ones based on new friendships, we can work to free ourselves from prejudice.

GENDER PREJUDICE Overt gender prejudice has also declined sharply. The one-third of Americans who in 1937 told Gallup pollsters that they would vote for a qualified woman whom their party nominated for president soared to 95 percent in 2012 (Gallup Brain, 2008; Jones, 2012). Nearly everyone now agrees that women and men should receive the same pay for the same job.

But gender prejudice and discrimination persist. Despite equality between the sexes in intelligence scores, people have tended to perceive their fathers as more intelligent than their mothers (Furnham & Wu, 2008). We pay more to those (usually men) who care for our streets than to those (usually women) who care for our children. Worldwide, women are more likely to live in poverty (UN, 2010); they represent nearly two-thirds of illiterate adults (UNESCO, 2013); and 30 percent have experienced intimate partner violence (Devries et al., 2013).

Unwanted female infants are no longer left out on a hillside to die of exposure, as was the practice in ancient Greece. Yet natural female mortality and the normal male-to-female newborn ratio (105-to-100) hardly explain the world’s estimated 163 million (say that number slowly) “missing women” (Hvistendahl, 2011). In many places, sons are valued more than daughters. In India, there are 3.5 times more Google searches asking how to conceive a boy than how to conceive a girl (Stephens-Davidowitz, 2014). With scientific testing that enables sex-selective abortions, several Asian countries have experienced a shortfall in female births. Although China has declared that sex-selective abortions—gender genocide—are now a criminal offense, the country’s newborn sex ratio has been 111 boys for every 100 girls, similar to India’s 112 to 100 ratio (CIA, 2014). Some 95 percent of the children in Chinese orphanages have been girls (Webley, 2009). With under-age-20 males exceeding females by 32 million, many Chinese bachelors will be unable to find mates (Zhu et al., 2009). A shortage of women also contributes to increased crime, violence, prostitution, and trafficking of women (Brooks, 2012).

SEXUAL ORIENTATION PREJUDICE In most of the world, gay and lesbian people cannot openly and comfortably disclose who they are and whom they love (Katz-Wise & Hyde, 2012; United Nations, 2011). Dozens of countries have laws criminalizing same-sex relationships. But cultural variation is enormous—ranging from the 6 percent in Spain who say that “homosexuality is morally unacceptable” to 98 percent in Ghana (Pew, 2014). Anti-gay prejudice, though rapidly subsiding in Western countries, persists. In national surveys, 39 percent of LGBT Americans reported having “been rejected by a friend or family member” because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. And 58 percent reported being “subject to slurs or jokes” (Pew, 2013). Worldwide, anti-gay attitudes are most common among men, older adults, and those less educated (Jackle & Wenzelburger, 2014).

Do attitudes and practices that label, disparage, and discriminate against gay and lesbian people increase their risk of psychological disorder and ill health? In U.S. states without protections against LGBT hate crimes and discrimination, gay and lesbian people experience substantially higher rates for depression and related disorders, even after controlling for income and education differences. In communities where anti-gay prejudice is high, so are gay and lesbian suicide and cardiovascular deaths. In 16 states that banned same-sex marriage between 2001 and 2005, gays and lesbians (but not heterosexuals) experienced a 37 percent increase in depressive disorder rates, a 42 percent increase in alcohol use disorder, and a 248 percent increase in general anxiety disorder. Meanwhile, gays and lesbians in other states did not experience increased psychiatric disorders (Hatzenbuehler, 2014).

Social Roots of Prejudice

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Why does prejudice arise? Social inequalities and divisions are partly responsible.

SOCIAL INEQUALITIES When some people have money, power, and prestige and others do not, the “haves” usually develop attitudes that justify things as they are. The just-world phenomenon reflects an idea we commonly teach our children—that good is rewarded and evil is punished. From this it is but a short leap to assume that those who succeed must be good and those who suffer must be bad. Such reasoning enables the rich to see both their own wealth and the poor’s misfortune as justly deserved. When slavery existed in the United States, slaveholders perceived slaves as innately lazy, ignorant, and irresponsible—as having the very traits that justified enslaving them. Stereotypes rationalize inequalities.

Victims of discrimination may react in ways that feed prejudice through the classic blame-the-victim dynamic (Allport, 1954). Do the circumstances of poverty breed a higher crime rate? If so, that higher crime rate can be used to justify discrimination against those who live in poverty.

US AND THEM: INGROUP AND OUTGROUP We have inherited our Stone Age ancestors’ need to belong, to live and love in groups. There was safety in solidarity (those who didn’t band together left fewer descendants). Whether hunting, defending, or attacking, 10 hands were better than 2. Dividing the world into “us” and “them” entails prejudice and war, but it also provides the benefits of communal solidarity. Thus, we cheer for our groups, kill for them, die for them. Indeed, we define who we are partly in terms of our groups. Through our social identities we associate ourselves with certain groups and contrast ourselves with others (Dunham et al., 2013; Hogg, 1996, 2006; Turner, 1987, 2007). When Ian identifies himself as a man, an Aussie, a University of Sydney student, a Catholic, and a MacGregor, he knows who he is, and so do we.

Evolution prepared us, when encountering strangers, to make instant judgments: friend or foe? Those from our group, those who look like us, and also those who sound like us—with accents like our own—we instantly tend to like, from childhood onward (Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010; Kinzler et al., 2009). Mentally drawing a circle defines “us,” the ingroup. But the social definition of who you are also states who you are not. People outside that circle are “them,” the outgroup. An ingroup bias—a favoring of our own group—soon follows. Even arbitrarily creating us-them groups by tossing a coin creates this bias. In experiments, people have favored their own group when dividing any rewards (Tajfel, 1982; Wilder, 1981). Much discrimination involves not outgroup hostility but ingroup networking and mutual support, such as hiring a friend’s child at the expense of other job candidates (Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014).

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The urge to distinguish enemies from friends predisposes prejudice against strangers (Whitley, 1999). To Greeks of the classical era, all non-Greeks were “barbarians.” In our own era, most children believe their school is better than all other schools in town. Many high school students form cliques—theater people, athletes (sorted by sport), gangsters, preps, nerds—and disparage those outside their own group. Even chimpanzees have been seen to wipe clean the spot where they were touched by a chimpanzee from another group (Goodall, 1986). They also display ingroup empathy by yawning more after seeing ingroup (rather than outgroup) members yawn (Campbell & de Waal, 2011).

Ingroup bias explains the cognitive power of political partisanship (Cooper, 2010; Douthat, 2010). In the United States in the late 1980s, most Democrats believed inflation had risen under Republican president Ronald Reagan (it had dropped). In 2010, most Republicans believed that taxes had increased under Democratic president Barack Obama (for most, they had decreased).

Emotional Roots of Prejudice

Prejudice springs not only from the divisions of society but also from the passions of the heart. Scapegoat theory notes that when things go wrong, finding someone to blame can provide a target for anger. Following the 9/11 attacks, some outraged people lashed out at innocent Arab-Americans. Others called for eliminating Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader whom Americans had been grudgingly tolerating. “Fear and anger create aggression, and aggression against citizens of different ethnicity or race creates racism and, in turn, new forms of terrorism,” noted Philip Zimbardo (2001). A decade after 9/11, anti-Muslim animosities still flared in the United States, with mosque burnings and efforts to block construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York City.

Evidence for the scapegoat theory of prejudice comes from high prejudice among economically frustrated people. And it comes from experiments in which a temporary frustration intensifies prejudice. Students who experienced failure or were made to feel insecure often restored their self-esteem by disparaging a rival school or another person (Cialdini & Richardson, 1980; Crocker et al., 1987). To boost their own sense of status, people may denigrate others. That explains why a rival’s misfortune sometimes provides a twinge of pleasure. (The German language has a word—Schadenfreude—for this secret joy that we sometimes take in another’s failure [Hoogland et al., 2015].) By contrast, those made to feel loved and supported become more open to and accepting of others who differ (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001).

Negative emotions feed prejudice. When facing death, fearing threats, or experiencing frustration, people cling more tightly to their ingroup and their friends. Fears of terrorism both heighten patriotism and produce loathing and aggression toward “them”—those who threaten our world (Pyszczynski et al., 2002, 2008). The few individuals who lack fear and its associated activity in the emotion-processing amygdala—such as children with the genetic disorder Williams syndrome—also display a notable lack of racial stereotypes and prejudice (Santos et al., 2010).

Cognitive Roots of Prejudice

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12-9 What are the cognitive roots of prejudice?

Prejudice springs from a culture’s divisions, the heart’s passions, and also from the mind’s natural workings. Stereotyped beliefs are a by-product of how we cognitively simplify the world.

FORMING CATEGORIES One way we simplify our world is to categorize. A chemist categorizes molecules as organic and inorganic. Therapists categorize psychological disorders. All of us categorize people by race, with mixed-race people often assigned to their minority identity. Despite his mixed-race background and being raised by a White mother and White grandparents, President Barack Obama has been perceived by White Americans (and American culture) as Black. Researchers believe this happens because people’s attention is drawn to the distinctive features of the less-familiar minority. Jamin Halberstadt and his colleagues (2011) illustrated this learned-association effect by showing New Zealanders blended Chinese-Caucasian faces. Compared with participants of Chinese descent, European-descent New Zealanders more readily classified ambiguous faces as Chinese (see FIGURE 12.7).

When categorizing people into groups, we often stereotype. We recognize how greatly we differ from other individuals in our groups. But we overestimate the homogeneity of other groups (we perceive outgroup homogeneity). “They”—the members of some other group—seem to look and act alike, while “we” are more diverse (Bothwell et al., 1989). To those in one ethnic group, members of another often seem more alike than they really are in attitudes, personality, and appearance. Our greater recognition for individual own-race faces—called the other-race effect (also called the cross-race effect or own-race bias)—emerges during infancy, between 3 and 9 months of age (Anzures et al., 2013; Telzer et al., 2013).

With effort and with experience, people get better at recognizing individual faces from another group (Hugenberg et al., 2010; Young et al., 2012). People of European descent, for example, more accurately identify individual African faces if they have watched a great deal of basketball on television, exposing them to many African-heritage faces (Li et al., 1996). And the longer Chinese people have resided in a Western country, the less they exhibit the other-race effect (Hancock & Rhodes, 2008).

REMEMBERING VIVID CASES As we saw in Chapter 9, we often judge the frequency of events by instances that readily come to mind. In a classic experiment, researchers showed two groups of University of Oregon students lists containing information about 50 men (Rothbart et al., 1978). The first group’s list included 10 men arrested for nonviolent crimes, such as forgery. The second group’s list included 10 men arrested for violent crimes, such as assault. Later, both groups were asked how many men on their list had committed any sort of crime. The second group overestimated the number. Vivid—in this case violent—cases are more readily available to our memory and feed our stereotypes (FIGURE 12.8).

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BELIEVING THE WORLD IS JUST As we noted earlier, people often justify their prejudices by blaming victims. If the world is just, they assume, people must get what they deserve. As one German civilian is said to have remarked when visiting the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after World War II, “What terrible criminals these prisoners must have been to receive such treatment.”

Hindsight bias is also at work here (Carli & Leonard, 1989). Have you ever heard people say that rape victims, abused spouses, or people with AIDS got what they deserved? In some countries, such as Pakistan, rape victims have been sentenced to severe punishment for violating adultery prohibitions (Mydans, 2002). In one experiment illustrating the blame-the-victim phenomenon, people were given a detailed account of a date that ended with the woman being raped (Janoff-Bulman et al., 1985). They perceived the woman’s behavior as at least partly to blame, and in hindsight, they thought, “She should have known better.” Others, given the same account with the rape ending deleted, did not perceive the woman’s behavior as inviting rape. Hindsight bias promoted a blame-the-victim mentality among members of the first group. Blaming the victim also serves to reassure people that it couldn’t happen to them.

People also have a basic tendency to justify their culture’s social systems (Jost et al., 2009; Kay et al., 2009). We’re inclined to see the way things are as the way they ought to be. This natural conservatism makes it difficult to legislate major social changes, such as health care or climate change policies. Once such policies are in place, however, our “system justification” tends to preserve them as well.

12-10 How does psychology’s definition of aggression differ from everyday usage? What biological factors make us more prone to hurt one another?

Prejudice hurts, but aggression sometimes hurts more. In psychology, aggression is any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone, whether done out of hostility or as a calculated means to an end. The assertive, persistent salesperson is not aggressive. Nor is the dentist who makes you wince with pain. But the person who passes along a vicious rumor about you, someone who bullies you in person or online, and the attacker who mugs you for your money are aggressive.

Aggressive behavior emerges from the interaction of biology and experience. For a gun to fire, the trigger must be pulled; with some people, as with hair-trigger guns, it doesn’t take much to trip an explosion. Let’s look first at some biological factors that influence our thresholds for aggressive behavior, then at the psychological factors that pull the trigger.

The Biology of Aggression

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Aggression varies too widely from culture to culture, era to era, and person to person to be considered an unlearned instinct. But biology does influence aggression. We can look for biological influences at three levels—genetic, neural, and biochemical.

GENETIC INFLUENCES Genes influence aggression. Animals have been bred for aggressiveness—sometimes for sport, sometimes for research. The effect of genes also appears in human twin studies (Miles & Carey, 1997; Rowe et al., 1999). If one identical twin admits to “having a violent temper,” the other twin will often independently admit the same. Fraternal twins are much less likely to respond similarly.

Researchers continue to search for genetic markers in those who commit violent acts. One is already well known and is carried by half the human race: the Y chromosome. Another such marker is the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, which helps break down neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. Sometimes called the “warrior gene,” people who have low MAOA gene expression tend to behave aggressively when provoked. In one experiment, low (compared with high) MAOA gene carriers gave more unpleasant hot sauce to someone who provoked them (McDermott et al., 2009).

NEURAL INFLUENCES There is no one spot in the brain that controls aggression. Aggression is a complex behavior, and it occurs in particular contexts. But animal and human brains have neural systems that, given provocation, will either inhibit or facilitate aggression (Denson, 2011; Moyer, 1983; Wilkowski et al., 2011). Consider:

BIOCHEMICAL INFLUENCES Our genes engineer our individual nervous systems, which operate electrochemically. The hormone testosterone, for example, circulates in the bloodstream and influences the neural systems that control aggression. A raging bull becomes a gentle giant when castration reduces its testosterone level. Conversely, when injected with testosterone, gentle, castrated mice once again become aggressive.

Humans are less sensitive to hormonal changes. But as men age, their testosterone levels—and their aggressiveness—diminish. Hormonally charged, aggressive 17-year-olds mature into hormonally quieter and gentler 70-year-olds. Drugs that sharply reduce testosterone levels also subdue men’s aggressive tendencies.

Another drug that sometimes circulates in the bloodstream—alcohol—unleashes aggressive responses to frustration. Across police data, prison surveys, and experiments, aggression-prone people are more likely to drink, and to become violent when intoxicated (White et al., 1993). National crime data indicate that 73 percent of Russian homicides and 57 percent of U.S. homicides are alcohol-influenced (Landberg & Norström, 2011). Alcohol affects aggression both biologically and psychologically (Bushman, 1993; Ito et al., 1996; Taylor & Chermack, 1993). Just thinking you’ve imbibed alcohol can increase aggression (Bègue et al., 2009). Alcohol also inclines people to interpret ambiguous acts (such as a bump in a crowd) as provocations (Bègue et al., 2010).

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Psychological and Social-Cultural Factors in Aggression

12-11 What psychological and social-cultural factors may trigger aggressive behavior?

Biological factors influence how easily aggression is triggered. But what psychological and social-cultural factors pull the trigger?

AVERSIVE EVENTS Suffering sometimes builds character. In laboratory experiments, however, those made miserable have often made others miserable (Berkowitz, 1983, 1989). This phenomenon is called the frustration-aggression principle: Frustration creates anger, which can spark aggression. One analysis of 27,667 hit-by-pitch Major League Baseball incidents between 1960 and 2004 revealed this link (Timmerman, 2007). Pitchers were most likely to hit batters when

Other aversive stimuli—hot temperatures, physical pain, personal insults, foul odors, cigarette smoke, crowding, and a host of others—can also evoke hostility. In laboratory experiments, when people get overheated, they think, feel, and act more aggressively. When provoked, simply thinking about words related to hot temperatures is enough to increase hostile behavior (Fay & Maner, 2014). In baseball games, the number of hit batters rises with the temperature (Reifman et al., 1991; see FIGURE 12.9). In the wider world, violent crime and spousal abuse rates have been higher during hotter years, seasons, months, and days (Anderson et al., 1997). Studies from other social science fields converge in finding that throughout history, higher temperatures have predicted increased individual violence, wars, and revolutions (Hsiang et al., 2013). Craig Anderson and his colleagues (2000, 2011) have projected that, other things being equal, global warming of 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 2 degrees Celsius) could induce tens of thousands of additional assaults and murders—and that’s before the added violence inducement from climate-change-related drought, poverty, food insecurity, and migration.

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REINFORCEMENT, MODELING, AND SELF-CONTROL Aggression may naturally follow aversive events, but learning can alter natural reactions. As Chapter 7 explained, we learn when our behavior is reinforced, and we learn by watching others.

In situations where experience has taught us that aggression pays, we are likely to act aggressively again. Children whose aggression has successfully intimidated other children may become bullies. Animals that have successfully fought to get food or mates become increasingly ferocious. To foster a kinder, gentler world we had best model and reward sensitivity and cooperation from an early age, perhaps by training parents to discipline without modeling violence. Parent-training programs often advise parents to avoid modeling violence by avoiding screaming and hitting. Instead, parents should reinforce desirable behaviors and frame statements positively. (“When you finish loading the dishwasher you can go play,” rather than “If you don’t load the dishwasher, there’ll be no playing.”).

Different cultures model, reinforce, and evoke different tendencies toward violence. For example, crime rates have also been higher and average happiness has been lower in times and places marked by a great disparity between rich and poor (Messias et al., 2011; Oishi et al., 2011; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). In the United States, cultures and families in which fathers are minimally involved also have had high violence rates (Triandis, 1994). Even after controlling for parental education, race, income, and teen motherhood, American male youths from father-absent homes are incarcerated at twice the rate of their peers (Harper & McLanahan, 2004).

Violence can vary by culture within a country. Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen (1996) analyzed violence among White Americans in southern towns settled by Scots-Irish herders whose tradition emphasized “manly honor,” the use of arms to protect one’s flock, and a history of coercive slavery. Compared with their White counterparts in New England towns settled by the more traditionally peaceful Puritan, Quaker, and Dutch farmer-artisans, the cultural descendants of those herders have had triple the homicide rates and were more supportive of physically punishing children, of warfare initiatives, and of uncontrolled gun ownership. “Culture-of-honor” states also have higher rates of students bringing weapons to school and of school shootings (Brown et al., 2009).

MEDIA MODELS FOR VIOLENCE Parents are hardly the only aggression models. In the United States and elsewhere, TV, films, video games, and the Internet offer supersized portions of violence. Repeatedly viewing on-screen violence tends to make us less sensitive to cruelty (Montag et al., 2012). It also primes us to respond aggressively when provoked. And it teaches us social scripts—culturally provided mental files for how to act. When we find ourselves in new situations, uncertain how to behave, we rely on social scripts. After watching so many action films, adolescent boys may acquire a script that plays in their head when they face real-life conflicts. Challenged, they may “act like a man” by intimidating or eliminating the threat. More than 100 studies together confirm that people sometimes imitate what they’ve viewed. Watching risk-glorifying behaviors (dangerous driving, extreme sports, unprotected sex) increases viewers’ real-life risk taking (Fischer et al., 2011).

Music lyrics also write social scripts. In experiments, German university men who listened to woman-hating song lyrics administered hotter chili sauce to a woman. Man-hating song lyrics likewise increase aggression in women (Fischer & Greitemeyer, 2006).

Sexual scripts depicted in pornographic films can also be toxic. Repeatedly watching pornographic films, even nonviolent films, makes sexual aggression seem less serious (Harris, 1994). In one experiment, undergraduates viewed six brief, sexually explicit films each week for six weeks (Zillmann & Bryant, 1984). A control group viewed films with no sexual content during the same six-week period. Three weeks later, both groups read a newspaper report about a man convicted of raping a hitchhiker and were asked to suggest an appropriate prison term. Sentences recommended by those viewing the sexually explicit films were only half as long as the sentences recommended by the control group.

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While nonviolent sexual content affects aggression-related sexual attitudes, violent sexual content can increase men’s readiness to actually behave aggressively toward women. A statement by 21 social scientists, including many of the researchers who conducted these experiments, noted, “Pornography that portrays sexual aggression as pleasurable for the victim increases the acceptance of the use of coercion in sexual relations” (Surgeon General, 1986). Contrary to much popular opinion, viewing such depictions does not provide an outlet for bottled-up impulses. Rather, “in laboratory studies measuring short-term effects, exposure to violent pornography increases punitive behavior toward women.”

To a lesser extent, nonviolent pornography can also influence aggression. One set of studies explored pornography’s effects on aggression toward relationship partners. The result: pornography consumption predicted both self-reported aggression and participants’ willingness to administer laboratory noise blasts to their partner (Lambert et al., 2011). Abstaining from one’s customary pornography consumption decreased aggression. Abstaining from a favorite food did not (FIGURE 12.10).

DO VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES TEACH SOCIAL SCRIPTS FOR VIOLENCE? Experiments in North America, Western Europe, Singapore, and Japan indicate that playing positive games produces positive effects (Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2010, 2011; Prot et al., 2014). For example, playing Lemmings, where a goal is to help others, increases real-life helping. So, might a parallel effect occur after playing games that enact violence? Violent video games became an issue for public debate after teenagers in more than a dozen places seemed to mimic the carnage in the shooter games they had so often played (Anderson, 2004a, 2013).

In 2002, three young men in Michigan spent part of a night drinking beer and playing Grand Theft Auto III. Using simulated cars, they ran down pedestrians, then beat them with fists, leaving a bloody body behind (Kolker, 2002). These same young men then went out for a real drive. Spotting a 38-year-old man on a bicycle, they ran him down with their car, got out, stomped and punched him, and returned home to play the game some more. (The victim, a father of three, died six days later.)

Such violent mimicry causes some to wonder: What are the effects of actively role-playing aggression? Does it cause young people to become less sensitive to violence and more open to violent acts? Nearly 400 studies of 130,000 people offer an answer (Anderson et al., 2010). Video games can prime aggressive thoughts, decrease empathy, and increase aggression. University men who spent the most hours playing violent video games have also tended to be the most physically aggressive (Anderson & Dill, 2000). (For example, they more often acknowledged having hit or attacked someone else.) And people randomly assigned to play a game involving bloody murders with groaning victims (rather than to play nonviolent Myst) became more hostile. On a follow-up task, they were more likely to blast intense noise at a fellow student. Studies of young adolescents reveal that those who play a lot of violent video games become more aggressive and see the world as more hostile (Gentile, 2009; Hassin et al., 2013). Compared with nongaming kids, they get into more arguments and fights and earn poorer grades.

Ah, but is this merely because naturally hostile kids are drawn to such games? Apparently not. Comparisons of gamers and nongamers who scored low on hostility measures revealed a difference in the number of fights reported. Almost 4 in 10 violent-game players had been in fights, compared with only 4 in 100 of the nongaming kids (Anderson, 2004). Some researchers believe that, due partly to the more active participation and rewarded violence of game play, violent video games have even greater effects on aggressive behavior and cognition than do violent TV shows and movies (Anderson & Warburton, 2012).

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Other researchers are unimpressed by such findings (Ferguson, 2013, 2014). They note that from 1996 to 2006, youth violence declined while video game sales increased, and argue that other factors—depression, family violence, peer influence—better predict aggression. Also, game playing keeps people off the streets and out of trouble (Engelstätter et al., 2011). The focused fun of game playing can also satisfy basic needs for a sense of competence, control, and social connection (Granic et al., 2014).

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To sum up, research reveals biological, psychological, and social-cultural influences on aggressive behavior. Complex behaviors, including violence, have many causes, making any single explanation an oversimplification. Asking what causes violence is therefore like asking what causes cancer. Those who study the effects of asbestos exposure on cancer rates may remind us that asbestos is indeed a cancer cause, but it is only one among many. Like so much else, aggression is a biopsychosocial phenomenon (FIGURE 12.11).

A happy concluding note: Historical trends suggest that the world is becoming less violent over time (Pinker, 2011). That people vary across time and place reminds us that environments differ. Yesterday’s plundering Vikings have become today’s peace-promoting Scandinavians. Like all behavior, aggression arises from the interaction of persons and situations.

Learning Objectives

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Test Yourself by taking a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within the chapter). Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term memory of the concepts (McDaniel et al., 2009).

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Terms and Concepts to Remember

Test yourself on these terms.

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Experience the Testing Effect

Test yourself repeatedly throughout your studies. This will not only help you figure out what you know and don’t know; the testing itself will help you learn and remember the information more effectively thanks to the testing effect.

Question 12.10

Question 12.11

Question 12.12

Question 12.13

Question 12.14

Question 12.15

Question 12.16

Use to create your personalized study plan, which will direct you to the resources that will help you most in .