Respect and Aggression Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Respect and Aggression

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

In this week’s podcast we talked about the Chris Cuomo/Fredo story and that got me onto a topic I’ve thought about for a couple decades – one tied to my fascination with American regionalism and aggression. Back in the 1990s, psychologists at the University of Michigan conducted a study about regionalism and aggression. As is often the case, the ‘real’ took place before the participants actually thought it was happening. The participants are all white male college students. They are walking down a hall when an apparent bystander thoughtlessly bumps into him while closing a file cabinet and calls him an “asshole”.

This is the core experiment. Does the study participant react with some version of amused indifference or does he move into an aggressive affront response? The experiment showed that participants from the South were significantly more likely to have the latter, aggressive affront response.

This is not terribly surprising for anyone who has studied American history and perhaps for anyone who’s spent significant times in both parts of the United States. The Southern murder rate has always been substantially higher than any other region in the United States. Indeed, New England and the Prairie states have historical rates of murder that aren’t much different from those in Europe. The South is the big outlier and within the South Louisiana and to a lesser extent Mississippi are the big outliers, with murder rates substantially higher than the rest of the South. Even as murder rates has dropped rapidly across the country over the last quarter century the regional differential has remained unchanged.

This ‘heat’ map of murder rates from 2015 which I grabbed from Wikipedia tells the story vividly.

Other studies suggest the disproportionately high murder rates in the South and especially the Deep South are tied to aggression murders. So for instance, the bar fight that escalates out of control, spousal killings, murders that are tied to anger and escalating aggression rather than being part of more generic criminal activity like a stick up or bank robbery.

Unsurprisingly, the best historical explanations for this trace back to slavery, a system rooted in violence and domination in which the privileges and respect for the sanctity of the body are paramount. In such an honor and status bound society the consequences of one’s status being degraded or questioned are severe and thus they are aggressively defended.

This has always interested me because of my interest in American history but also because of the ways that the South has at various points and in different ways dominated American politics, whether in the Antebellum Era or today. I’ve also long been interested in murder statistics and how they vary regionally throughout the country. They are also, again unsurprisingly, tied to support for the death penalty.

In any case, this morning I noted this note from TPM Reader MK who informs us that he was actually a participant in the study.

I listened to the Golden Age of Conspiracy episode of the podcast on my commute this morning. I was a little blown away when Josh was talking about a study he had read on masculinity and honor. I knew exactly what he was talking about…not because I had read the study, but because I was a subject in it! I attended U. of Michigan in the early 90s and of course the Intro to Psych course had an option to complete part of the coursework by participating in studies.

Anyway, study link is below since I had to dig it up to confirm the details. They did debrief subjects but only said that it was a study about aggression and responses to it. I had no idea that they were looking at Northern versus Southern culture. That’s actually much more interesting! For the record, I was assigned to the control group (not bumped) and I’m form the North so I just contributed to their baseline responses, I guess.

Regardless, I certainly had no idea that the study became even remotely influential around the social sciences. What a small world…glad I could do my part!

Link to study.

Keep up all the great work!

I don’t know how influential the study has been in the social sciences. But it’s been highly influential on me. I think reviewed the actual study at some point years ago. But at this point I’m actually not certain. I first read it in the late 90s and then later, I think, looked up the actual study. But it’s possible I’ve always been going on descriptions of it rather than reading the study itself. When I read or reread it just now I did not remember that the bumper not only bumps the participant but calls him an “asshole”, which ups the ante significantly.

If you haven’t listened to this week’s edition of the podcast yet, please do. It’s a good one with me, my cohost David Taintor, newswriter Kate Riga and special guest Nell Scovell. You can subscribe through iTunes or other big podcast hubs or just listen to it right here on the site.

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