Quote:
Originally Posted by Shawnee123
I agree, mtp, and I think you hit the nail on the head.
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Typical Southerner reaction, hitting things on the head. Bloody violent rednecks.
Maybe it is just that Northerners are more willing to eat shit than Southerners? I mean if some asshole bumped into me and called me an asshole, I might well call him an asshole back. Why not?
(and how did they get this experiment approved by the ethics committee?)
For MTP's questions, once, while beating my head against the brick wall that is Radar, I posted the statistics on crime rates in USA, Britain, Australia, Canada and maybe a few others. The stats for assault, robbery, and theft were all fairly similar - differences of up to 50% or so, but the murder rate in the USA was 600 to 800% higher than the others; i.e. 6 to 8 times higher. This was from UN statistical database. My interpretation of these numbers was simply that the relative availability of guns makes it much easier for a dispute to end in killing.
The study here has several components, some good, others pretty lame.
Firstly, they noted that the levels of violent crime in the South are higher, and looked for explanations. They ruled out temperature and slave history, and found that relative poverty was no more than a partial explanation.
Thus, there is a difference without an explanation.
They put forward the hypothesis that there is something in Southern Culture that makes people more likely to behave violently.
So far, so good, IMHO. That some cultures are more disposed toward violence than others is perfectly reasonable and possible. And, the combined images of the honour-duelling "killin' gentleman", and the trigger-happy red-neck, make it seem plausible.
It is an empirical matter whether this is true of any particular culture, though, so they did an experiment, the hallway-bump business.
That experiment strikes me as pretty lame. Maybe it it is just badly described here, but it seems to me that it doesn't get at the real issue very well. An in depth interview asking "what would you do if..." questions might be better.
The proper procedure, and what will probably happen, is to do lots of different experiments - surveys, tests, comparisons, etc. A huge literature will be produced, and after a few decades someone will summarise all this and try and find a clear answer. That is the scientific method.
Let me get them started:
(1) You come home to find a man screwing your sister. Do you:
(a) apologise for interrupting and leave them to it.
(b) go on Dr Phil and wail about how heartbroken you are.
(c) shoot the no-good varmint.
(d) set up the video camera, then join in.
Results:
a = Northerner
b = Mid-westerner
c = Southerner
d = West Coast