Violence in todays society and culture-interesting information (long, really long)

[Mark Berglund]

I have just finished reading a book called "On Killing" by
Lt Col Dave Grossman
isbn 0-316-33011-6

It deals with the psychological factors surrounding killing another
person, both in wartime and in the civilion setting. It brought up
some interesting points concerning operant and classical conditioning
in todays media including movies and video games.

The first part of the book deals with killing in the military, the
training, the rates of failure to fire among soldiers in WW1, WW2 and
Vietnam, and the factors that make it easier to overcome the natural
resistance to killing, ie., increased psychological distance,
mechanical distance, etc.

The second part deals with factors in our civilion society that
operate on us in much the same manner as military training does in
lowering our natural resistance to violence and killing. I have
included some excerpts of this second part below.

Now everyone knows that no one factor is to blame for our tremendous
increase in crime and violence in the past few decades, but this book
goes a long way towards an explanation of some of the factors that
operate on the impressionable and maleable minds of kids and young
adults today.

I have no connection to the author and no interest in sales of this
book, I am just pleasantly supprised when I find a good source of
information that has a solid foundation in science and relatively free
from spurious emotional arguments.

Special thanks to Karl Rehn and his Advanced Training Classes for
leading me to this book.

Any errors are mine and my OCR's fault.

Please do not use this material without attribution and permission
from the author. I was hesitent to post this much of the book on the
web but the the concepts and ideas are not easily explained in a few
short sound bites.

***********************************
"On Killing" by
Lt Col Dave Grossman
isbn 0-316-33011-6

What is the root cause of this epidemic of violence in our society?
An application of the lessons of combat killing may have much
to teach us about the constraint and control of peacetime violence.
Are the same processes the military used so effectively to enable
killing in our adolescent, draftee soldiers in Vietnam being
indiscriminately applied to the civilian population of this nation?
The three major psychological processes at work in enabling
violence are classical conditioning (A la Pavlov's dog), operant
conditioning (@ la B. F. Skinner's rats), and the observation and
imitation of vicarious role models in social learning.
In a kind of reverse Clockwork Orange classical conditioning
process, adolescents in movie theaters across the nation, and watch-
ing television at home, are seeing the detailed, horrible suffering
and killing of human beings, and they are learning to associate this
killing and suffering with entertainment, pleasure, their favorite
soft drink, their favorite candy bar, and the close, intimate contact
of their date.

Operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and
immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern
armies, are found in the interactive video games that our children
play today. But whereas the adolescent Vietnam vet had stimulus
discriminators built in to ensure that he only fired under authority,
the adolescents who play these video games have no such safeguard
built into their conditioning.
And, finally, social learning is being used as children learn to
observe and imitate a whole new realm of dynamic vicarious role
models, such as Jason and Freddy of endless Friday the 13th and
Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, along with a host of other
horrendous, sadistic murderers. Even the more classic heroes, such as
the archetypal law-abiding police detective, is today portrayed as a
murderous, unstable vigilante who operates outside the law.
There are more factors involved. This is a complex, interactive
process that includes all the factors that enable killing in combat.
Gang leaders and gang members demand violent, even killing,
activity and create diffusion of individual responsibility; and gang
affiliation, loosening family and religious ties, racism, class
differences, and the availability of weapons provide forms of real and
emotional distance between the killer and the victim. If we look
again at our model for killing-enabling factors and apply it to
civilian killing, we can see the way in which all of these factors
interact to enable violence in America.
...
In the 1950s and 1960s students brought knives to high school,
whereas today they bring .22s. But those .22s were pretty much al-
ways present at home. And while there is new weapons technology
available, fifteen minutes with a hacksaw will make a pistol out
of any double-barrel shotgun, a pistol every bit as effective in close
combat as any weapon in the world today - this was true one
hundred years ago, and it is true today.'
The thing we need to ask ourselves is not where did the guns
come from? They came from home, where they have always been
available, or they may have been bought in the street thanks to
the drug culture - which deals in illegal weapons as readily as it
deals in illegal drugs. But the question we need to ask is, What
makes today's children bring those guns to school when their
parents did not? And the answer to that question may be that the
important ingredient, the vital, new, different ingredient in killing
in modern combat and in killing in modern American society, is the
systematic process of defeating the normal individual's age-old,
psychological inhibition against violent, harmful activity toward
one's own species. Are we taking the safety catch off of a nation,
just as surely and easily as we would take the safety catch off of a
gun, and with the same results?
Between 1985 and 1991 the homicide rate for males fifteen to
nineteen increased 154 percent. Despite the continued application
of an ever-increasing quantity and quality of medical technology,
homicide is the number-two cause of death among males ages
fifteen to nineteen. Among black males it is number one. The
AP wire article reporting this data had a headline announcing,
"Homicide Rate Wiping Out Whole Generation of Teens." For
once the press was not exaggerating.
In Vietnam a systematic process of desensitization, conditioning,
and training increased the individual firing rate from a World War
11 baseline of 15 to 20 percent to an all-time high of up to 95
percent. Today a similar process of systematic desensitization,
conditioning, and vicarious learning is unleashing an epidemic, a
virus of violence in America.
The same tools that more than quadrupled the firing rate in
Vietnam are now in widespread use among our civilian population.
Military personnel are just beginning to understand and accept
what they have been doing to themselves and their men. If we
have reservations about the military's use of these mechanisms to
ensure the survival and success of our soldiers in combat, then how
much more so should we be concerned about the indiscriminate
application of the same processes on our nation's children?
...
Classical Conditioning at the Movies

If we believe that Commander Narut's techniques might work,
and if we are horrified that the U.S. government might even
consider doing such a thing to our soldiers, then why do we permit
the same process to occur to millions of children across the nation?
For that is what we are doing when we allow increasingly more
vivid depictions of suffering and violence to be shown as
entertainment to our children.
It begins innocently with cartoons and then goes on to the
countless thousands of acts of violence depicted on TV as the child
grows up and the scramble for ratings steadily raises the threshold
of violence on TV. As children reach a certain age, they then
begin to watch movies with a degree of violence sufficient to
receive a PG-13 rating due to brief glimpses of spurting blood, a
hacked-off limb, or bullet wounds. Then the parents, through
neglect or conscious decision, begin to permit the child to watch
movies rated R due to vivid depictions of knives penetrating and
protruding from bodies, long shots of blood spurting from severed
limbs, and bullets ripping into bodies and exploding out the back
in showers of blood and brains.
Finally, our society says that young adolescents, at the age of
seventeen, can legally watch these R-rated movies (although most
are well experienced with them by then), and at eighteen they
can watch the movies rated even higher than R. These are films
in which eye gouging is often the least of the offenses that are
vividly depicted. And thus, at that malleable age of seventeen
and eighteen, the age at which armies have traditionally begun
to indoctrinate the soldier into the business of killing, American
youth, systematically desensitized from childhood, takes another
step in the indoctrination into the cult of violence.

Adolescents and adults saturate themselves in such gruesome
and progressively more horrific "entertainment," whose antiheroes -
like Hannibal the Cannibal, Jason, and Freddy - are sick, unkillable,
unquestionably evil, and criminally sociopathic. They
have nothing in common with the exotic, esoteric, and misunderstood
Frankenstein and Wolf Man villains of an earlier generation
of horror films. In the old horror stories and movies, very real but
subconscious fears were symbolized by mythic but unreal monsters,
such as Dracula, and then exercised exotically, such as by a stake
through the heart. In contemporary horror, terror is personified
by characters who resemble our next-door neighbor, even our
doctor. Importantly, Hannibal the Cannibal, Jason, and Freddy
are not killed, much less exercised; they return over and over again.
Even in movies where the killer is not an obvious sociopath,
the common formula is to validate violent acts of vengeance by
beginning the movie with a vivid depiction of the villain per-
forming horrible acts on some innocents. These victims are usually
related in some way to the hero, thereby justifying the hero's
subsequent (and vividly depicted) vigilante acts.
Our society has found a powerful recipe for providing killing
empowerment to an entire generation of Americans. Producers,
directors, and actors are handsomely rewarded for creating the
most violent, gruesome, and horrifying films imaginable, films in
which the stabbing, shooting, abuse, and torture of innocent men,
women, and children are depicted in intimate detail. Make these
films entertaining as well as violent, and then simultaneously pro-
vide the (usually) adolescent viewers with candy, soft drinks, group
companionship, and the intimate physical contact of a boyfriend
or girlfriend. Then understand that these adolescent viewers are
learning to associate these rewards with what they are watching.
Powerful group processes often work to humiliate and belittle
viewers who close their eyes or avert their gaze during these
gruesome scenes. Adolescent peer groups reward with respect and
admiration those who reflect Hollywood's standard of remaining
hardened and undisturbed in the face of such violence. In effect
many viewers have their heads bolted in a psychological clamp so
they cannot turn away, and social pressure keeps their eyelids open.
Discussing these movies and this process in psychology classes at
West Point, I have repeatedly asked my students how the audience
responds when the villain murders some innocent young victim
in a particularly horrible way. And over and over again their answer
was "The audience cheers." Society is in a state of denial as to
the harmful nature of this, but in efficiency, quality, and scope, it
makes the puny efforts of Clockwork Orange and the U.S. government
pale by comparison. We are doing a better job of desensitizing
and conditioning our citizens to kill than anything Commander
Narut ever dreamed of. If we had a clear-cut objective of raising
a generation of assassins and killers who are unrestrained by either
authority or the nature of the victim, it is difficult to imagine how
we could do a better job.
...
Conditioning Killers in the Military

On the training bases of the major armies of the world, nations
struggle to turn teenagers into killers. The "struggle" for the mind
of the soldier is a lopsided one: armies have had thousands of years
to develop their craft, and their subjects have had fewer than two
decades of life experience. It is a basically honest, age-old,
reciprocal process, especially in today's all-volunteer U.S. Army.
The soldier intuitively understands what he or she is getting into and
generally tries to cooperate by "playing the game" and constraining
his or
her own individuality and adolescent enthusiasm, and the army
systematically wields the resources and technology of a nation to
empower and equip the soldier to kill and survive on the battlefield.
In the armed forces of most modem armies this application of
technology has reached new levels by integrating the innovations
of operant conditioning into traditional training methods.
Operant conditioning is a higher form of learning than classical
conditioning. It was pioneered by B. F. Skinner and is usually
associated with learning experiments on pigeons and rats. The
traditional image of a rat in a Skinner box, learning to press a bar
in order to get food pellets, comes from Skinner's research in
this field. Skinner rejected the Freudian and humanist theories of
personality development and held that all behavior is a result of
past rewards and punishments. To B. F. Skinner the child is a
tabula rasa, a "blank slate," who can be turned into anything
provided sufficient control of the child's environment is instituted
at an early enough age.

Instead of firing at a bull's-eye target, the modem soldier fires
at man-shaped silhouettes that pop up for brief periods of time
inside a designated firing lane. The soldiers learn that they have
only a brief second to engage the target, and if they do it properly
their behavior is immediately reinforced when the target falls down.
If he knocks down enough targets, the soldier gets a marksmanship
badge and usually a three-day pass. After training on rifle ranges
in this manner, an automatic, conditioned response called automa-
ticity sets in, and the soldier then becomes conditioned to respond
to the appropriate stimulus in the desired manner. This process
may seem simple, basic, and obvious, but there is evidence to
indicate that it is one of the key ingredients in a methodology that
has raised the firing rate from 15 to 20 percent in World War II
to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam.

Conditioning at the Video Arcade

In video arcades children stand slack jawed but intent behind
machine guns and shoot at electronic targets that pop up on the
video screen. When they pull the trigger the weapon rattles in
their hand, shots ring out, and if they hit the "enemy" they are
firing at, it drops to the ground, often with chunks of flesh flying
in the air.
The important distinction between the killing-enabling process
that occurs in video arcades and that of the military is that the
military's is focused on the enemy soldier, with particular emphasis
on ensuring that the U.S. soldier acts only under authority. Yet
even with these safeguards, the danger of future My Lai massacres
among soldiers drawn from such a violent population must not
be ignored, and, as we saw in the section "Killing and Atrocity,"
the U.S. armed forces are taking extensive measures to control,
constrain, and channel the violence of their troops in future
conflicts.
The video games that our children conduct their combat
training on have no real sanction for firing at the wrong target.
This is not an attack on all video games. Video games are an
interactive medium. They demand and develop trial-and-error
and systematic problem-solving skills, and they teach planning,
mapping, and deferment of gratification. Watch children as they
play video games and interact with other children in their neighbor-
hood. To parents raised on a steady diet of movies and sitcoms,
watching a child play Mario Brothers for hours on end may not
be particularly gratifying, but that is just the point. As they play
they
solve problems and overcome instructions that are intentionally
inadequate and vague. They exchange playing strategies, memorize
routes, and make maps. They work long and hard to attain the
gratification of finally winning a game. And there are no
commercials: no
enticements for sugar, no solicitation of violent toys, and no
messages of
social failure if they do not wear the right shoes
or clothes.

We might prefer to see children reading or getting exercise and
interacting with the real real world by playing outside, but video
games are definitely preferable to most television. But video games
can also be superb at teaching violence - violence packaged in
the same format that has more than quadrupled the firing rate of
modem soldiers.
When I speak of violence enabling I am not talking about video
games in which the player defeats creatures by bopping them on
the head. Nor am I talking about games where you maneuver
swordsman and archers to defeat monsters. On the borderline in
violence enabling are games where you use a joystick to maneuver
a gunsight around the screen to kill gangsters who pop up and
fire at you. The kind of games that are very definitely enabling
violence are the ones in which you actually hold a weapon in
your hand and fire it at human-shaped targets on the screen. These
kinds of games can be played on home video, but you usually see
them in video arcades.
There is a direct relationship between realism and degree of
violence enabling, and the most realistic of these are games in
which great bloody chunks fly off as you fire at the enemy.
Another, very different type of game has a western motif, in
which you stand before a huge video screen and fire a pistol at
actual film footage of "outlaws" as they appear on the screen. This
is identical to the shoot-no shoot training program designed by
the FBI and used by police agencies around the nation to train
and enable police officers in firing their weapons.
The shoot-no shoot program was introduced nearly twenty
years ago in response to the escalating violence in our society that
was resulting in an increase in deaths among police officers who
hesitated to shoot in an actual combat situation. And, of course,
we recognize it as another form of operant conditioning that has
been successfiil in saving the lives of both law-enforcement officers
and innocent bystanders, since the officer faces severe sanctions if
he fires in an inappropriate circumstance. Thus the shoot-no shoot
program has served successfully to both enable and constrain violence
among police officers. Its video arcade equivalent has nosuch
sanctions to constrain violence. It only enables.

Chapter Four

Social Learning and Role Models in the Media

Classical (Pavlovian) conditioning can be done with earthworms,
and operant (Skinnerian) conditioning can be conducted on rats
and pigeons. But there is a third level of learning that pretty much
only primates and humans are capable of, and that is what is called
social learning.
This third level of learning, in its most powerful form, revolves
primarily around the observation and irritation of a role model.
Unlike operant conditioning, in social learning it is not essential
that the learner be directly reinforced in order for learning to take
place. What is important in social learning is to understand the
characteristics that can lead to the selection of a specific
individual
as a role model.
The processes that make someone a desirable role model include:
Vicarious reinforcement. You see the role model being reinforced
in a manner that you can experience vicariously.

o Similarity to the learner. You perceive that the role model has

key trait that makes him/her similar to you.
o Social power. The role model has the power to reward (but does
not necessarily do so).
o Status envy. You envy the role model's receipt of rewards from
others.

An analysis of these processes can help us understand the role of
the drill sergeant as a role model in violence enabling in military
training, and it can help us understand why a new type of violent
role model is so popular among America's youth.

Violence, Role Models, and Drill Sergeants in Basic Training

From this time on I will be your mother, your father, your
sister and your brother. I will be your best friend and your worst
enemy. I will be there to wake you up in the morning, and I will be
there to tuck you in at night. You will j;4mp when I say 'frog" and
when I tell you to s- your only question will be ""at color." IS THAT
CLEAR?

- Drill Sergeant G., Fort Ord, California, 1974

Lives there a veteran who cannot close his eyes and vividly visualize
his drill sergeant? Over the years a hundred bosses, teachers,
professors, instructors, sergeants, and officers have directed various
aspects of my life, but none has had the impact that Drill Sergeant G.
had on that cold morning in 1974.
The armies of the world have long understood the role of social
learning in developing aggression in their soldiers. In order to do
this their venue has been basic training, and their instrument has
been the drill sergeant. The drill sergeant is a role model. He is
the ultimate role model. He is carefully selected, trained, and
prepared to be a role model who will inculcate the soldierly values
of aggression and obedience. He is also the reason that military
service has always been a positive factor for young people from
delinquent or disadvantaged backgrounds.

He is invariably a decorated veteran. The glory and recognition
bestowed on him are things that the trainees deeply envy and desire.
Within the young soldiers' new environment the drill sergeant has
enormous and pervasive authority, giving him social power. And
the drill sergeant looks like his charges. He wears the uniform.
He has the haircut. He obeys orders. He does the same things.
But he does all of them well.
The lesson that the drill sergeant teaches is that physical aggression

is the essence of manhood and that violence is an effective
and desirable solution for the problems that the soldier will face
on the battlefield. But it is very important to understand that the
drill sergeant also teaches obedience. Throughout training the drill
sergeant will not tolerate a single blow or a single shot executed
without orders, and even to point an empty weapon in the wrong
direction or to raise your fist at the wrong time merits the harshest
punishment. No nation will tolerate soldiers who do not obey
orders on the battlefield, and the failure to obey orders in combat
is the surest route to defeat and destruction.
...
Role Models, the Movies, and a New Kind of Hero

If such "manipulation of the minds of impressionable teenagers"
is a necessary evil, accepted only reluctantly and with reservations
for combat soldiers, how should we feel about its indiscriminate
application to the civilian teenagers of this nation? For that is
what we are doing through the role models being provided
by the entertainment industry today. But while the drill sergeant
teaches and models aggression in obedience to law and authority,
the aggression taught by Hollywood's new role models is unrestrained
by any obedience to law. And while the drill sergeant has a profound
one-time impact, the aggregate effect of a lifetime
of media may very well be even greater than that of the drill
sergeant.
...
In the war movies, westerns, and
detective movies of the past, heroes only killed under the authority
of the law. If not, they were punished. In the end the villain was
never rewarded for his violence, and he always received justice
for his crimes. The message was simple: No man is above the law,
crime does not pay, and for violence to be acceptable it must be
by the constraints of the law. The hero was rewarded for
obeying the law and channeling his desire for vengeance through
the authority of the law. The viewer identified with the hero
and was vicariously reinforced whenever the hero was. And the
audience members left the theater feeling good about themselves
and sensing the existence of a just, lawful world.
But today there is a new kind of hero in movies, a hero who
operates outside the law. Vengeance's a much older, darker, more
atavistic, and more primitive concept than law, and these new
antiheroes are depicted as being motivated and rewarded for their
obedience to the gods of vengeance rather than those of law. One
of the fruits of this new cult of vengeance in American society
can be seen in the Oklahoma City bombing, and if we look into
the mirror provided by the television screen, the reflection we see
is one of a nation regressing from a society of law to a society of
violence, vigilantes, and vengeance.
And if America has a police force that seems unable to constrain
its violence, and a population that (having seen the videotape of
Rodney King and the LAPD) has learned to fear its police forces,
then the reason can be found in the entertainment industry. Look
at the role models, look at the archetypes that police officers
have grown up with. Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry became the
archetype for a new generation of police officers who were not
constrained by the law, and when Hollywood's new breed of cop
was rewarded for placing vengeance above the law, the audience
was also vicariously rewarded for this same behavior.
...
At a lower level are the vicarious role models who kill without
even the tissue of any apparent justification whatsoever. Having
been desensitized by the kinds of movies outlined above, a portion
of our population is then willing to accept role models who
kill entirely without reason. The vicarious reinforcement here
is not even vengeance for supposed social slights, but simply
slaughter
and suffering for its own sake and, ultimately, for the sake
of power.
Notice the sequence in this downward spiral of vicarious role
models. We began with those who killed within the constraints
of the law. Somewhere along the line we began to accept role
models who "had" to go outside the law to kill criminals who
we know "deserved to die," then vicarious role models who killed
in retribution for adolescent social slights, and then role models
who kill completely without provocation or purpose.

At every step of the way we have been vicariously reinforced
by the fulfilment of our darkest fantasies. This new breed of role
models also has social power: the power to do whatever they want
in a society depicted as evil and deserving of punishment. These
role models transcend the rules of society, which results in great
"status" to be envied by a portion of society that has come to
adore this new breed of celebrity. And of course we have observed
a similarity to the learner in the role model's rage. A rage felt by
most human beings toward the slights and perceived crimes inflicted
upon them by their society, but which is particularly intense
in adolescence.

The increase in divorces, teenage mothers, and single-parent
families in our society has often been noted and lamented, but a
little-noted side effect of this trend has been to make America's
children even more susceptible to this new breed of violent role
models. In the traditional nuclear family there is a stable father
figure who serves as a role model for young boys. Boys who grow
up without a stable male figure in their lives are desperately seeking
a role model. Strong, powerful, high-status role models such as
those offered in movies and on television fill the vacuum in their
lives. We have taken away their fathers and replaced them with
new role models whose successful response to every situation is
violence. And then we wonder why our children have become
ever more violent.

This world is a comedy for those that think,
a tragedy for those that feel.
Horace Walpol

Mark Berglund
ma...@eden.com

[John A. Stovall]

On Wed, 08 Apr 1998 03:29:33 GMT, ma...@eden.com (Mark Berglund)
wrote:

>I have just finished reading a book called "On Killing" by
>Lt Col Dave Grossman
>isbn 0-316-33011-6
>

I thought I was the only person in the world, who had read "On
Killing". It is a great book and deserves more study than it has
gotten.

Not my provider’s views.
John Alex Stovall
XVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVO
"....Long live Freedom and damn the ideologies,"
Said the gamey old back-maned wild boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.
XVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVOXVO

[Mike Howard]

I thought it was outstanding... long posts are not an evil if they contain
something of value...Thanks!

Mike Howard

[ThomasW429]

Good work Mark. It is a shame that everyone in the US can't or won't read your
e-mail, or prefferbly the book. I tried to buy the book from Amazon but it is
out of print. I'll keep looking.
As a retired Army trainer who commanded a training battalion at FT. Polk
during the Vietnam War and later, the Armor Training Brigade at Ft. Knox I know
that LTC. Grossman paints a true picture of the techniques used to train people
to fight and kill, if need be. The parallels he draws are obivious in today's
society and the quicker we realize it the easier the solution will be.
As a start each of us can try to keep our own children and grand children from
becoming addicted to TV, vidio games and arcade games that stress violance or
risk taking w/o penality for failure. The next step, as I see it, is for the
organizations that target youth, and there are many, to attack the ones who
make money from providing the thrills mentioned above. It will not be easy as
Disney et.al. are BIG BUSINESS. It must be done!!
Keep up the good work.
Tom Williams, Col. US Army (Ret)

[William Harvey]

From what is in the post I'm going to have to read the book. I've
often thought along the same lines but intuitively. I never really
dreamed it went as far as it would seem. This sounds like it should be
required reading but then it doesn't support HCI's position.

Mike Howard <MNHo...@SWbell.com> wrote:

>Mike Howard

William Harvey
wha...@win.net
http://www.win.net/~wharvey
Team OS2