Program & Abstract Book - EPFL Latsis Symposium 2009

EPFL Latsis Symposium 2009: Understanding Violence
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February 11-13 2009
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 (co n t .)
Levine, Mark
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UKA
of violent incidents. I will show that an analysis of the behaviours of perpetrators,
targets and bystanders to real life violence reveals that, as group
size increases, more pro-social than anti-social acts occur. Moreover, I will
show that there is an implicit pattern to the sequences in the CCTV clips
such that violent and non-violent episodes are distinguished by what happens
on the ‘third bystander act’. I will argue that the violence in these
episodes cannot be understood with reference to the perpetrator, or the
victim, or even the relationship between perpetrator and victim. Instead
I will suggest that violence (and the informal control of potentially violent
episodes) needs to be understood as a group level ‘choreography’. It is what
the bystanders do – or do not do – that determines the trajectory of the
violence.
I will conclude by arguing that these findings would not be available from
methods that rely on participant accounts or other forms of reactive data
collection. To that end I will speculate on how conducting experiments using
violence in Virtual Environments can create the empirical conditions
required to test some of the important outstanding questions about the role
of group processes in understanding violence.