2016 AAAS Annual Meeting (February 11-15, 2016)

February 10 - 15, 2016

Interpersonal Violence and Conflict Escalation: Situational Dynamics

This panel addresses a topic of global concern – interpersonal violence and conflict escalation – that demands engagement between scientists, policymakers, and the broader community. Panelists from criminology, sociology, and the human sciences will focus on situational dynamics. The first presenter uses network science, gunshot victimization, and arrest data to study diffusion of gun violence within high-risk populations, finding that the odds of being a gunshot victim increase sharply with exposure to other gunshot victims, and 70% of gunshot victims are part of co-offending networks comprising less than 6% of the population. The second presenter uses qualitative methods and narrative accounts from urban male youths to distinguish retaliatory from non-retaliatory events, different types of conflict situations from each other, and violent from nonviolent conflicts. The third presenter uses data from inmates and from non-incarcerated controls to examine how personal traits and situational dynamics interact to affect violence and conflict escalation, suggesting that aggressive people do not abide by norms of social interaction and the nature and social settings of their conflicts are distinctive. Results from these studies have direct implications for policy and violence prevention, including interventions that teach strategies of nonviolent conflict management, and disrupt processes that enable violence to become a resource for decision-making.