Coercive Control and Deviance

Research Stage: Analysis

This project studies how people with different histories of coercive environments respond to everyday social conflicts, such as poor service at a restaurant or a tense interaction with a police officer.

Differential coercion and social support theory hypothesizes that people who grow up in coercive environments where their behavior is either erratically or consistently controlled are more likely to commit crime in response to that coercion.

In this project, we use experimental vignettes to measure whether those who grew up in more coercive environments are more likely to respond punitively to those who treat them poorly. We also pilot a lexical decision task (LDT)–a reaction-time measure that is a possible alternative to the Implicit Association Test–to assess whether it has utility to measure implicit cognitions such as hostile attributions/calculative view of others or retaliatory ethos/toughness image; we also explore its value as a data quality check. Read more about the analysis of the LDT in the Measurement and Analysis of Implicit Cognitions Using a Lexical Decision Task project.