Drs. Zoe Hilton and Grant Harris

  As mentioned in previous columns, members of our Research team have studied violence in the lives of teenagers for several years now. Here is some of what we’ve found so far.

1. Teenagers memories for violence. Although we don't have observations of actual violence, we were able to test teenagers memories in other ways. For example, we asked some teens to tell us about violence that had occurred in the last month, and others to tell us about violence in the last year. The group that reported on violence in the last year should have reported about 12 times as much violence as the one-month group. But the two groups reported roughly the same amount of violence. We knew that the students in the one-month group weren't actually a more violent group, and we didn't ask about one particularly violent month. It's impossible for the same amount of violence to happen in the last month as in the last year. Our results suggest that teens aren't deliberately lying but are mistaken, probably because memory doesn’t record numbers of things specifically. Instead, people have to estimate how many times events happened based on memory qualities. These qualities depend on how many times something has occurred, but other qualities -- publicity about violence, embarrassment or even pride, perhaps -- introduce error into the memory.

It is plain to see that people's memories are anything but a faithful videotape of the past and this is important for studies that depend on people telling researchers about the violence they have done. For example, the famous U.S. MacArthur Risk Assessment Program relies heavily on self-reported violence. If the qualities that influence memory are related to variables being used to make predictions, the MacArthur researchers could be easily misled.

2. Teenage boys are violent towards each other. No matter how we examine the question, violence appears to be a fact of life for most male teenagers. Almost all report doing and being the victim of some violence though most say that most of this violence did not cause serious injury. Despite impressions that might be created by the media about male violence against women, boys are more likely to be the victims of violence than are girls.

Again, these reports about boys' violent behavior contain some interesting impossibilities. For example, boys report that they caused more fear and injury when they did violence to other boys than they experienced as victims. Again, because of the way we did the research, we know this is impossible — the total amount of fear and injury caused has to be equal (in reality) to the total amount experienced. Why did we get this impossible result? Our guess is that violence (as well as a reputation for it) serves special "functions" in the lives of young males. It is used to acquire and maintain status. Boys who are known to be tough, fearless, and able to fight achieve status among their peers. Being afraid lowers status. So boys are motivated to enhance their own reputation for toughness, by over-reporting the fear and injury they cause to other boys and under-reporting what they experience.

3. Some boys are violent towards girls. Teenage girls report there is a lot of violence by boys against girls, although it is less common than boy-to-boy violence. Yet again, we found some impossibilities: boys report doing much less violence (and causing much less fear and injury) to girls than girls say they experienced. And again we know that this cannot be really so — the total amount of violence inflicted has to be equal to the amount sustained. Why this result?

We think that boys' violence towards girls serves very different functions than boys' violence towards other boys. Violence serves to control the girl's actions, maintaining the relationship (through fear), and keeping her from being with other boys. Far from bestowing status, a boy's violence towards a girl is something he would be ashamed of and try to keep secret, possibly by not even thinking of it as violent in the first place.

It s interesting that the different functions underlying boys violence lead to such opposite effects on their reports (relative to victims reports). They overestimate what they do to other boys and underestimate what they do to girls. Boys violence towards other boys involves strangers more often than close friends, while boys violence to girls rarely involves strangers and much more often involves dates and girlfriends. The kinds of conflicts for boy-to-boy violence seem much more to do with public display, while boy-to-girl violence seems to be about covertly controlling girls' social behavior.

4. Why are boys like this? A commonly advanced explanation for these male tendencies is that our culture promotes them. This idea, however, leads to an odd paradox when it comes to boys' violence against girls. If something is encouraged and approved of, why would boys deny and minimize it at the same time? This explanation also leaves unexplained where such cultural prescriptions could come from in the first place. Other researchers have reported that these male tendencies are almost universal across human societies and in many nonhuman animals. This leads one to ask why all cultures seem to exhibit this male human nature. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that males inherit psychological qualities that lead to this violence because the behavior led to reproductive success in past generations. There is some research to support this idea. The general theory of evolution by natural selection is beyond scientific doubt, but the hypothesis about teenage male violence is far from proven. In future columns we ll say more about our investigations of these ideas.