Respect and Aggression | Talking Points Memo

Respect and Aggression | Talking Points Memo: 

by Josh Marshall

In this week’s podcast we talked about the Chris Cuomo/Fredo story and that got me onto a topic I’ve thought about for a couple decades – one tied to my fascination with American regionalism and aggression. Back in the 1990s, psychologists at the University of Michigan conducted a study about regionalism and aggression. Link to study 

As is often the case, the ‘real’ took place before the participants actually thought it was happening. The participants are all white male college students. They are walking down a hall when an apparent bystander thoughtlessly bumps into him while closing a file cabinet and calls him an “asshole”.

This is the core experiment. Does the study participant react with some version of amused indifference or does he move into an aggressive affront response? The experiment showed that participants from the South were significantly more likely to have the latter, aggressive affront response....