How Some People Decide to be Violent

Very few people understand what goes on in the minds of people who commit violent acts. The killings at Virginia Tech bring out how little we know. The following is way of thinking about how violence occurs. It's a theory but it has many applications.

The following outlines the application of social cognition theory and neuroscience to how persons respond to and cope with stressful events in real time as they make choices about how they will cope: prosocially, antisocially, self-destructively, or inappropriately. These possible ways of coping are encoded in neural pathways that can be thought of as inner representations that cognitive scientists call schemas. Schemas are organized through a network of associations. Typically, schemas are activated in clusters that are associated.

Schemas usually are activated automatically, sometimes even outside of human awareness (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). The process of the activation of schemas in stressful conditions is hypothesized to be as follows.

Persons perceive an event they interpret as stressful. In response to these perceptions, schemas activate themselves. Different schemas represent possible ways to respond to the stressful event: pro-social, anti-social, self-destructive, inappropriate, or inconsistent.
The choices persons make depend upon salience and accessibility—in other words, how habitually or frequently particular schemas have been activated in the past. Salience is related to the rewards that persons have experienced in the past for acting on these schemas and priming, which means that the inner state prior to experiencing the stressor can influence which schemas are accessible, which schemas are activated, which schemas persons act on.

In salience, some neural pathways are more developed because they have been activated frequently and thus are more accessible than others. Thus, for example, if a person’s response to stress has habitually been to eat a quart of chocolate mint ice cream, the schema to do so is well developed and is much more likely to activate itself in stressful situations than schemas that are activated much more frequently, such as going for a long walk or talking to someone. Eating so much ice cream tends toward being self-destructive, though comforting for a time, while going for a walk or talking to someone can be considered pro-social.

In priming, persons who are stressed in a supportive, pro-social environments are more likely to be guided by the automatic activation of pro-social schemas in response to environmental stressors. These pro-social schemas are more accessible because a pro-social environment has primed their accessibility and salience. Thus, in such a supportive environment, persons who have tendencies to over-eat in response to stress may instead talk to a sympathetic person who would be readily available in pro-social situations. If this occurs on a regular basis, seeking someone to talk to may become more salient than over-eating.

The experience of stress typically is uncomfortable. In some cases, stress activates schemas that recall traumatic events. In these conditions, the individual experiences discomfort or extreme emotional pain, which can lead to dysregulation, which is the disruption of rational thought, emotions, and the autonomic nervous system that regulates heart rate, blood pressure, and other neuron-physiological responses (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 2001; Shields & Cicchetti, 1998). Under conditions of stress, emotional pain, and dysregulation, persons seek to soothe themselves or to re-regulate. If they have well-developed executive skills, they will also have capacities for self-regulation and thus be able to handle the stress in ways that are planful and pro-social. If they have diminished executive skills for planful self-regulation, they are at risk to behave in anti-social, self-destructive, or inappropriate ways, or combinations (Gilgun, 2006a, 2005a).

An application of these ideas to the man who sexually assaulted a woman on the street would be as follows. The man experienced stress when his partner fell asleep on him. He experienced dysregulation of his thoughts, emotions, and autonomic nervous system. He experienced this state as painful. He sought to re-regulate and to soothe himself. His executive skills for re-regulation habitually focus upon anti-social plans for self-soothing. The schemas most salient and accessible to him were connected to rage and desires to leave the situation. The schema that activated itself in response to his dysregulation was a schema that he had habitually acted upon in the past. He began to fantasize about raping someone. He saw a woman alone. He sexually assaulted her. His stress was reduced. He felt soothed restored to some sort of emotional equilibrium.

Another condition related to Model 1 is when individuals do not feel stressed and still act out in antisocial ways. For these individuals, the model works as follows. Individuals want something. Schemas that will allow them to get what they want activate themselves. Which schemas activate depend upon priming, salience, accessibility, and executive function. Schemas related to executive function activate themselves because these schemas are associated with planful actions that anticipate consequences associated with various behavioral options. Persons with good executive skills and a fine-tuned moral sense will choose options that do not harm themselves or others while at the same time lead to their getting what they want.

Persons with fragmented or truncated executive skills and moral sense will seek to get what they want but they will suspend considerations of what the consequences of these behaviors might be for themselves and others, will distort what the consequences might be, will pay selective attention to consequences, will accept consequences, or will not even consider consequences. The schemas that are activated typically are those that are most salient.

An example of accepting consequences is the man who told me, “Rape is worth giving up a whole bundle for.” An example of selective attention is the man who murdered someone who double-crossed him in a drug deal in order to set an example for others who might also try to double-cross him. He paid no attention to the consequences of being caught and spending the rest of his life in jail. Lack of consideration of consequences as well as distortion of consequences characterized the executive skills of a man who sexually abused his children out of what he thought was love. His goal was to show love and to help the children understand what love was. The distorted consequence was his lack of forethought about what sex with their father might mean to two and three year-old children and the lack of forethought was how the sexual abuse would affect the children, their mother, and his own status in his family and community.

These perpetrators were not in stressful situations. They acted upon what they considered rational thought. The schemas they activated were schemas they had habitually activated in the past and were thus salient.