The form of violence reflects institutional structure, not underlying hostility.

Evidence

Other researchers have demonstrated that, contrary to Allport’s argument, violence does not require a history of animosity at either the group or individual level. Weingast (1997) has shown that social groups can become poised for armed conflict, even when they have a history of good relations and a preference for peace, if political institutions fail to safeguard each group’s interests and mutual trust is undermined. At the individual level, experimental research has shown that organizational factors alone transform ordinary people with no personal pathologies or prior hostility into demons who torture and punish their victims for minor infractions or for no reason at all (e.g., Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo, 2004). … Such organizational factors include instructions that permit or legitimize the use of violence, a chain of command that relieves perpetrators of responsibility for their acts, the assignment of anonymous identities to perpetrators, and granting pervasive powers to perpetrators without threat of retaliation or sanctions. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 655

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the archival claims being built about Allport’s model and its empirical failures; corroborates Zimbardo/Milgram findings already in the reader’s scholarly vocabulary. — connects to: Southern violence is explained by social-capital deficit, not culture of honor — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1079; Group violence arises from interacting cultural, situational, and motivational influences, not single causes — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 174
• SEED: Essay angle: contact theory assumes prejudice drives conflict, but institutional-failure models reverse the causal arrow — implications for peacebuilding policy.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 655