Program & Abstract Book - EPFL Latsis Symposium 2009

EPFL Latsis Symposium 2009: Understanding Violence
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Abstracts for Speakers
gr o u p s , by s t a n D e r s a n D t h e in f o r m a l
re g u l a t i o n o f vi o l e n c e
Levine, Mark
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UKA
Ever since Nisbett and Wilson’s (1977) essay, “Telling More Than We Can
Know”, social psychologists have been sensitised to the fact that people
have very little introspective access to the underlying causes of their own
behaviour. In other words, what our participants tell us in questionnaires
and interviews and focus groups should not be treated as a veridical route
to psychological reality. This raises some important questions about methods
and the conclusions we draw from them. For example, in the study of
helping behaviour, there is often a gap between what people say and what
they do in real-life helping situations. Thus, reactive and non-reactive measures
need to be combined in order to develop a more complete picture of
the likelihood of helping.
This strategy of combining verbal reports and behavioural studies works
well, as long as it is possible to combine both levels of analysis. However,
there are some domains in which it is difficult, for ethical and practical reasons,
to carry out robust behavioural research. The study of violence, and in
particular, bystander intervention in violence, is one such domain. There are
many ethical challenges to be overcome in attempting to expose research
participants to violent events, and many logistical difficulties in (re)creating
violent events that can be used and manipulated in robust empirical studies.
In this paper I will suggest that, one consequence of this has been a rather
partial view of the role of groups in social psychological explanations of
violence. For the most part, in traditional social psychology, groups tend to
be seen as psychologically dangerous. On the one hand, the presence of
others can lead to ‘peer-group pressure’, ‘mob violence’ or mass hysteria
– all threats to individual rationality which are likely to produce anti-social
behaviour. On the other hand, the presence of others can lead to ‘diffusion
of responsibility’, ‘pluralistic ignorance’ and ‘bystander apathy’ – threats to
individual rationality that are likely to prevent people from helping those
under threat of violent attack. Thus, groups are damned for causing ‘excitation’
and damned for causing ‘inhibition’ – with both paths deriving from the
same set of circumstances.
I will argue that this idea of the danger of the group misunderstands the
role of group processes in violence. I will demonstrate, using data from
experiments exploring bystander behaviour in emergencies, that groups
can facilitate pro-social behaviour. I will then go on to describe a detailed
behavioural analysis of a corpus of 42 clips of CCTV footage
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