Violence’s past use can teach either more violence or its prohibitive cost

Evidence

There is much writing about the role of learning and culture in relation to political violence. Bandura (1973) is the leading exponent of the view that using violence individually is learned, and he makes a good case. On the macro-level, though, we should expect ambiguous findings about the relation of present to past violence. The use of violent action might, logically, become a learned response, but it might also teach people that its costs tend to be disproportionately large, even if successful. The problem here (as with violence by authorities, repression) is that any curve, or none, can support the cultural interpretation. Much, in other words, is made in the literature of “cultures” of violence, but nothing definitive for the debate between contingency and inherency theories is likely to emerge from studies linking past to present violence. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4363

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that a cultural-learning theory of violence is unfalsifiable because any temporal curve (positive, negative, or null) can be read as confirmation strikes at a genuine methodological dead end in comparative politics.