When does a provocation demand a violent response? A randomized scenario study of the Code of the Street

Elijah Anderson's (1999) seminal work on the "Code of the Street" details how individuals use violence to defend and gain respect in violent neighborhoods. We provide this theory with more explicit choice-theoretic micro-foundations that allows us to derive hypotheses on how individuals’ willingness to use violence depends on their street code beliefs, the strength of provocation, and the exposure to violence in their neighborhoods. To evaluate these hypotheses, we use data from a large-scale criminological survey of 10th graders in 46 schools located in five neighboring cities in Germany. Our analysis focuses on violent intentions in a neighborhood-based scenario that randomly varied the strength of provocation and uses geo-coded police-recorded data to measure the level of violence in respondents’ neighborhoods. Our results suggest a complex interplay of environmental, situational, and individual variables. While provocation strength generally increases violent intentions, adolescents who reject the street code and live in low-violence neighborhood report no violent intentions even when strongly provoked. Among adolescents with strong street code beliefs, responses to provocations vary depending on their residential environment. We discuss implications for choice-theoretic accounts of youth violence and methodological challenges of linking scenarios to social contexts.