The micro‐sociology of violence

Abstract

In recent years, sociologists have acquired much better evidence of what happens in violent situations. The advent of video cameras in the 1990s shocked public sensibilities about police violence. Much more data is now available from CCTV surveillance film for violence of many kinds. Videos made by cell phones now record the realities of brawls in everyday life. Still photographers have become more ubiquitous and intrepid, and there is now an abundance of photography of the details of riots, demonstrations, and military violence. In addition to these new sources of visual evidence, forensic reconstructions of shootings show how many bullets are fired, how many hit, and which hit the wrong targets. Military battles have been recontructed with lasers, and the physical realities and impossibilites of classic battle accounts have been shown. No evidence speaks for itself, and one always needs a theoretical eye in order to see what is before us. Thus as micro-sociological theory comes to bear on violent situations, we become better able not only to interpret the details of visual evidence but also to use ethnographic observations and interviews with better focus on crucial processes. Ethnographers and interviewers have become more intrepid too, and we have gotten much closer to violence as it actually happens. Over the decades we have come a long way from reliance on official statistics, through victim surveys (mostly producing bare incidence numbers), interviews of incarcerated populations, interviews in the wild, and into the scene of violence itself. Explanations in terms of background variables – the usual suspects of class, ethnicity, age, gender, family, culture – are a long way from explaining whether violence happens or does not happen. Instead we now are able to focus on the dynamics of interaction in situations. We are getting nearer the holy grail of evidence on all situations, rather than sampling on the dependent variable. We need to explain why violence fails to come off in many – indeed a majority – of the situations in which it threatens, and what is distinctive about the dynamics of situations which proceed more and more deeply into the tunnel of violence. A key micro-sociological tool for dissecting violent situations is indicators of emotions. Psychologists have shown universal expressions of basic emotions, above all in faces but also in body postures (Ekman and Friesen 1975; Ekman 1985) Emotions are shown in three zones of the face: the mouth and jaw; the region around the eyes; and the forehead. Anger is displayed in strong muscular clenching of the jaw, either with lips tightly pressed or with a square open, shouting mouth; eyes tightly focused to stare down the opponent; and the unmistakable tell-tale sign of vertical wrinkles between the eyebrows. Fear contrasts with anger in every facial zone: the jaw is slack with the mouth falling weakly open; eyes staring widely with lids pulled back unable to resist what is being seen; eyebrows turned up at the inner corners producing horizontal waves across the forehead. Cultural clichés and common discourse assume that anger is the emotion of violence. But my examination of hundreds of photos of individuals in military combat, police arrests, riots, and robberies show that anger is rare on the faces of persons engaged in violence; by far the most common emotion is fear, or its milder version, tension. (Collins 2008; in what follows, this is the source for photographic or ethnographic evidence not otherwise cited.) The prevalence of fear and tension is supported by studies both of the subjective phenomenology of violence and its physiological correlates. Interviews with the police about occasions when they fired their guns typically describe visual distortions (tunnel vision), auditory distortions (being unable to hear gunshots, though these are normally painfully loud), time distortions (feelings of moving in slow motion) (Klinger 2004; Artwohl and Christensen 1997). Grossman (1995, 2004) documents ubiquitous symptoms of fear and stress in combat situations, above all in close contact with the enemy. The experience of a pounding heartbeat is common, produced by the elevation of adrenaline and cortisol (Mazur 2005). I call the emotion of violent situations confrontational tension/fear (ct/f). Its major effects are: first, to inhibit most violence from happening; and second, when ct/f is sufficiently overcome for violence to occur, violence is typically incompetent at hitting its desired targets. One of the earliest findings of military sociology was that only 15–25 per cent of front-line soldiers regularly fired their guns in combat (Marshall 1947); subsequent training efforts have raised the firing ratio somewhat, but at the cost of increasing the amount of wild firing which does not hit its target (Collins 2008: 43–59). I have calculated, on the basis of photographic evidence and available statistics, that virtually all of the violence in each conflict-engaging population – crowds in riots and brawls, police, gangs, criminals – is carried out by a small proportion, typically on the order of less than 15 per cent at maximum (Collins 2008: 370–4). And not only is violence confined to a small minority of groups which ostensibly set out to use violence, but violence itself when unleashed is widely incompetent. Soldiers and police hit their targets in actual combat much less frequently than in practice on firing ranges; missing ones targets is extremely common in violence by criminals (where we can calculate this from numbers of bullets fired); similar patterns appear from blows thrown in fights. Friendly fire – hitting members of ones own side, including shooting oneself by accident – is common in military zones, where accidents account for up to 15 per cent of casualties; friendly fire happens frequently (though at unknown rates) for gang violence, carousing brawls and other civilian violence. And it is not only military who hit civilian targets; such wild firing is common in criminal violence as well as in weaponless brawls causing bystanders to be hurt. The cause of all this incompetent violence is ct/f. Violence is difficult, not easy; we have been led astray in thinking otherwise, both by media violence (which typically portrays fighters as good or bad, but nevertheless as brave and competent) and by our criminological theories (which assume that background conditions in an individual's biography are sufficient to account for violence). On the basis of micro-situational evidence, I say not so; the very situation of confrontation, when violence is threatened, generates ct/f, and this creates a barrier to the effective use of violence against ones opponent. The perceptual distortions noted above make the effective performance of violence difficult. Grossman (2004: 31) notes that when heart rate rises above 115 beats per minute (bpm), fine motor skills deteriorate; above 145 bpm, complex motor skills deteriorate; above 175 bpm, one loses peripheral and depth perception, audition, and cognitive processing. These are the effects of fear, not merely of heartbeat elevated by bodily exercize. Under these emotional conditions, violence does not come off as intended. Why are humans not good at violence? One argument is that we are culturally socialized, as modern people, not to be violent. But the same patterns of incompetent violence are found in tribal warfare, where the culture does not prohibit killing neighbouring tribes and even enjoins it, and in gang fighting (which structurally and culturally resembles adjacent tribes); and the same psychological and physiological processes appear on both sides of the law, in legitimate and illegitimate violence. A second argument is rationalistic: people fear being hurt by the enemy they are fighting. But this is variable; fighters are much more fearful and tense in close confrontations, even though long-distance weapons such as bombs and artillery are much more dangerous; and it is especially difficult to commit violence against a person who is looking in ones eyes than from behind or with head hooded. (Grossman 1995; Collins 2008: 73–8) A Mafia boss compared the ease of killing an animal with the difficulty of killing a human being: When you aim at a man, your hands shake, your eyes twitch, your heart flutters, your mind interferes . . . If possible you should always touch the body with your gun to make sure the man is dead. Man is the hardest animal to kill. (Bonanno 1985) This is a high level of realistic observation by a professional killer. Conventional styles of discourse favour boasting and a self-portrayal of toughness which hides ct/f, although detailed interview questioning almost always turn up admissions of fear and physiological symptoms of tension. It is the moment of interactional confrontation, more than anything else, which causes the tension. I have presented evidence elsewhere (Collins 2004) that ordinary non-conflictual human interaction shows a tendency for persons who establish a common focus of attention to become mutually entrained in a common rhythm of speech and bodily movements, and to intensify a shared emotional mood, what I have called an interaction ritual. Here I would argue that ct/f arises precisely because violent interaction cuts against the grain of the micro-processes which make up an interaction ritual. The tension arises because one is struggling not just against the other person, but against the tendency within ones own nervous and endocrinological systems to become entrained in the rhythms and emotions of the other person. From this point of view, ct/f is the exception which proves the rule of the solidarity-producing tendency of focused micro-interaction. Where mutual entrainment is blocked by action at cross-purposes but the focus of attention is sustained – since violence-threatening interaction produces an extremely intense focus of attention on the other person – the human individual is subjected to deeply disturbing tension. It is also possible that an individual in a violence-threatening situation experiences objective fear of being hurt by the other, and the two sources of tension/fear may add together. Nevertheless, persons who objectively have the upper hand in the situation of power and have little chance of being hurt also tend to experience ct/f. This is why the bodily indicators of fear rather than anger are seen at the moment of violence. This is not to deny that anger has a strong physiological base in the so-called reptile brain which dates back deep in infra-human and indeed pre-mammalian evolution. But the human brain is dominated by cognitive areas which are entwined with emotional connections; and these emotions are easily communicated to other humans through finely tuned bodily organs (Turner 2002). It is this evolved hardwiring for cognitions-plus-socially-entraining-emotions which produce the solidarity of interaction rituals. Anger gives explosive muscular energy, useful chiefly for bursts of effort to overcome an obstacle; as a social communication of the intention to treat the other person as an obstacle to one's will, however, anger runs up against the tendency for interaction ritual entrainment, and hence the arousal of anger produces ct/f. Although anger can be a precursor of a fight, it tends to be shut off during the fight itself. The main display of anger is as bluster – a social performance which may begin spontaneously but can be consciously encouraged in an attempt to dominate the other person without fighting. Anger is by no means a sufficient condition for violence; to the extent that we see anger in photos of violent confrontations, it is almost entirely in safely controlled situations, such as a demonstrator making angry gestures while the rest of the line holds firmly in place. Anger does not make violence automatic or easy; it remains to overcome the barrier of ct/f. And anger is not a necessary condition for violence; much military, police, crowd, and criminal violence happens without anger. For violence to take place, persons must find a pathway around the barrier of ct/f. Examining the micro-situational evidence for many kinds of violence, I suggest five main pathways which these take (Collins 2008). Here I will concentrate on one such pathway: finding a weak victim, someone who situationally gives in to emotional dominance and thereby eliminates the action at cross-purposes which generates ct/f. There are several other pathways: audience-oriented staged and controlled fair fights; confrontation-avoiding by remote violence; confrontation-avoiding by deception; confrontation-avoiding by absorption in technique. With limited space here I will explicate only the micro-mechanisms of attacking the weak, which is particularly central in military and crowd violence, as well as in individual fights and criminal violence. The most striking photographic evidence of attacking the weak concerns violence in riots. Photos of hostile demonstrations and riots show two chief phases: either two sides are lined up in orderly masses, confronting one another, but without violence; or the crowd has broken up into small groups, which is when virtually all the violence happens. (I am ignoring here the occasional phase where a few individuals are in front of a crowd throwing rocks at a distance.) Moreover, this violence shows a distinct numerical pattern: one individual has been isolated from supporters and is running away or has fallen to the ground, and is being attacked by small cluster of between three and six attackers (the upper number sometimes rising to eight). This pattern is found in police attacking demonstrators and demonstrators attacking police; in whites attacking blacks and vice versa; in many different ethnic combinations. The underlying dynamic is not merely racism or ethnic hostility, since one can find it in intraethnic violence, including labor violence and sports violence. Nor is it masculinity that produces this unequal violence; although most crowd violence is male on male, there are also photos of female-on-female violence, again in the ratio ranging between 3-to-1 and 6-to-1 of attackers versus fallen victim. Women, in general, commit less violence than men; but when they do so in groups, they are especially likely to attack another woman, and they adhere to the usual numerical ratio. This is a truly Simmelian pattern: the most dangerous social number is a ratio in the range of 3-to-1 and 6-to-1. Crowd violence is thus very one-sided. At the point where violence actually happens, the victim is isolated from social support, passive, not resisting. This illustrates a key point about attacking the weak: dominance is not merely physical but emotional. Some photos of military violence show an isolated soldier or policeman being attacked; in a photo of the overthrow of Milosevic in Serbia in 2000, the soldier has his gun still in holster, while he holds his hands covering his head, trying to escape the blows of four men who are attacking him with sticks and tyre irons. Other photos, of US troops in Iraq, and of peace-keeping forces elsewhere, show an isolated soldier with a machine gun in hand, who is backing away from a crowd who pursues him with angry gestures. The effective use of force is not in the weapons per se, but in establishing emotional dominance. Emotion dominence opens the way to physical dominance; it is after one side has become emotionally weak, emotionally dominated in the interaction, that violence generally does its damage. Until this point, weapons are largely an item of theatrical display, an effort at bluster, since even if weapons are fired ct/f makes most of their firing miss. This fits with the micro-interactional pattern I have argued above: as long as individuals (or groups) confront one another at cross purposes, they are up against the barrier of ct/f, runnning contrary to the physiologically ingrained tendency to fall into a common rhythm with each other. Passivity on one side allows the other side to impose their own rhythm upon the interaction; on the detailed micro level, the victim falls into participation with the rhythm of violence being perpertrated upon him or herself. A spectacularly atrocious form of violence happens in a dynamic sequence which I have called forward panic. Here, two sides confront each other over a period of time, during which tension builds up. This is documented in video sequences of police chases, such as the famous Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, which came at the end of a chase at up to 115 miles per hour. At the end of the chase, a number of police this King when he his four of all the beating while the and The point is the from a tense to on one side and the of the opponent. This to the emotional entrainment of the attackers in their own of the attack of the many against the the strong against the and the beating or other of violence far what is necessary to establish dominance. the Rodney King beating of attacking a the culturally available of the beating was But this be the or even the most of the hostility, and fear can be of the pattern which to the up of however, racism by itself does not overcome the barrier of even need a micro-situational which allows the of violence. Moreover, racism is not a necessary condition for either the tension or its forward in a of ethnic including within the same with the pattern of and come at the end of a forward This is found in police violence, including where a number of bullets are in such it is striking how many bullets their target – typically of even though fired at close also in crowd violence and in military violence; I have the forward from the military who called it the a pattern of emotional a but in this a fallen no able to In the when battles at close most major forward a period of tension during which both sides little – because of the effects of was by an which made one side weak and unable to itself – typically by accident such as a human where one side unable to or to the ground, off a by the In military emotional dominance most of the physical also make up the most of with the pattern of and both in violence against against weak and in violence by men against There are several kinds of of which are not forward the micro-situational sequences of each are to in and in (Collins 2008: of violent typically have a pattern of attacking the In this since the is not in much or far in the sequence of tension and is the of being a criminal finding weak and Collins 2008: this finding a victim who is typically who are and on on and with the of two or three against physical dominance is the who have the of a over nevertheless their moment when their victim is off and can be emotionally A key is the rhythm of by the victim, such as at the moment when a is up the The of the is to of the micro-interactional his upon the victim. The male here is tend to with male when it is most typically by a who has the victim into an typically down with his off and who are in a or to their are of who both to have indicators of social and emotionally weak, a nervous and The most targets in zones are likely to be and here the needs to have an especially good micro-interactional to their target off in use the to to persons who are but with little to back up their typically this is by for they and These are almost to the of interactional it is not a of a but of the moment for emotional dominance; when a gun is actually in it is more likely to be to hit the victim with than to him or and the of including by a use of blacks on to add the of to the dominance of the This is similar to famous argument off in in which in are not expressions of but are to make of a situation of of bodily on the In this the who another a is in a and use of ritual for and although they to establish emotional are not to they psychological in upon and tend to in for m

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