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In recent years, sociologists have acquired much better evidence of what happens in violent situations. The advent of video cameras in the 1990s shocked public sensibilities about police violence. Much more data is now available from CCTV surveillance film for violence of many kinds. Videos made by cell phones now record the realities of brawls in everyday life. Still photographers have become more ubiquitous and intrepid, and there is now an abundance of photography of the details of riots, demonstrations, and military violence. In addition to these new sources of visual evidence, forensic reconstructions of shootings show how many bullets are fired, how many hit, and which hit the wrong targets. Military battles have been recontructed with lasers, and the physical realities and impossibilites of classic battle accounts have been shown. No evidence speaks for itself, and one always needs a theoretical eye in order to see what is before us. Thus as micro-sociological theory comes to bear on violent situations, we become better able not only to interpret the details of visual evidence but also to use ethnographic observations and interviews with better focus on crucial processes. Ethnographers and interviewers have become more intrepid too, and we have gotten much closer to violence as it actually happens. Over the decades we have come a long way from reliance on official statistics, through victim surveys (mostly producing bare incidence numbers), interviews of incarcerated populations, interviews in the wild, and into the scene of violence itself. Explanations in terms of background variables – the usual suspects of class, ethnicity, age, gender, family, culture – are a long way from explaining whether violence happens or does not happen. Instead we now are able to focus on the dynamics of interaction in situations. We are getting nearer the holy grail of evidence on all situations, rather than sampling on the dependent variable. We need to explain why violence fails to come off in many – indeed a majority – of the situations in which it threatens, and what is distinctive about the dynamics of situations which proceed more and more deeply into the tunnel of violence. A key micro-sociological tool for dissecting violent situations is indicators of emotions. Psychologists have shown universal expressions of basic emotions, above all in faces but also in body postures (Ekman and Friesen 1975; Ekman 1985) Emotions are shown in three zones of the face: the mouth and jaw; the region around the eyes; and the forehead. Anger is displayed in strong muscular clenching of the jaw, either with lips tightly pressed or with a square open, shouting mouth; eyes tightly focused to stare down the opponent; and the unmistakable tell-tale sign of vertical wrinkles between the eyebrows. Fear contrasts with anger in every facial zone: the jaw is slack with the mouth falling weakly open; eyes staring widely with lids pulled back unable to resist what is being seen; eyebrows turned up at the inner corners producing horizontal waves across the forehead. Cultural clichés and common discourse assume that anger is the emotion of violence. But my examination of hundreds of photos of individuals in military combat, police arrests, riots, and robberies show that anger is rare on the faces of persons engaged in violence; by far the most common emotion is fear, or its milder version, tension. (Collins 2008; in what follows, this is the source for photographic or ethnographic evidence not otherwise cited.) The prevalence of fear and tension is supported by studies both of the subjective phenomenology of violence and its physiological correlates. Interviews with the police about occasions when they fired their guns typically describe visual distortions (tunnel vision), auditory distortions (being unable to hear gunshots, though these are normally painfully loud), time distortions (feelings of moving in slow motion) (Klinger 2004; Artwohl and Christensen 1997). Grossman (1995, 2004) documents ubiquitous symptoms of fear and stress in combat situations, above all in close contact with the enemy. The experience of a pounding heartbeat is common, produced by the elevation of adrenaline and cortisol (Mazur 2005). I call the emotion of violent situations confrontational tension/fear (ct/f). Its major effects are: first, to inhibit most violence from happening; and second, when ct/f is sufficiently overcome for violence to occur, violence is typically incompetent at hitting its desired targets. One of the earliest findings of military sociology was that only 15–25 per cent of front-line soldiers regularly fired their guns in combat (Marshall 1947); subsequent training efforts have raised the firing ratio somewhat, but at the cost of increasing the amount of wild firing which does not hit its target (Collins 2008: 43–59). I have calculated, on the basis of photographic evidence and available statistics, that virtually all of the violence in each conflict-engaging population – crowds in riots and brawls, police, gangs, criminals – is carried out by a small proportion, typically on the order of less than 15 per cent at maximum (Collins 2008: 370–4). And not only is violence confined to a small minority of groups which ostensibly set out to use violence, but violence itself when unleashed is widely incompetent. Soldiers and police hit their targets in actual combat much less frequently than in practice on firing ranges; missing ones targets is extremely common in violence by criminals (where we can calculate this from numbers of bullets fired); similar patterns appear from blows thrown in fights. Friendly fire – hitting members of ones own side, including shooting oneself by accident – is common in military zones, where accidents account for up to 15 per cent of casualties; friendly fire happens frequently (though at unknown rates) for gang violence, carousing brawls and other civilian violence. And it is not only military who hit civilian targets; such wild firing is common in criminal violence as well as in weaponless brawls causing bystanders to be hurt. The cause of all this incompetent violence is ct/f. Violence is difficult, not easy; we have been led astray in thinking otherwise, both by media violence (which typically portrays fighters as good or bad, but nevertheless as brave and competent) and by our criminological theories (which assume that background conditions in an individual's biography are sufficient to account for violence). On the basis of micro-situational evidence, I say not so; the very situation of confrontation, when violence is threatened, generates ct/f, and this creates a barrier to the effective use of violence against ones opponent. The perceptual distortions noted above make the effective performance of violence difficult. Grossman (2004: 31) notes that when heart rate rises above 115 beats per minute (bpm), fine motor skills deteriorate; above 145 bpm, complex motor skills deteriorate; above 175 bpm, one loses peripheral and depth perception, audition, and cognitive processing. These are the effects of fear, not merely of heartbeat elevated by bodily exercize. Under these emotional conditions, violence does not come off as intended. Why are humans not good at violence? One argument is that we are culturally socialized, as modern people, not to be violent. But the same patterns of incompetent violence are found in tribal warfare, where the culture does not prohibit killing neighbouring tribes and even enjoins it, and in gang fighting (which structurally and culturally resembles adjacent tribes); and the same psychological and physiological processes appear on both sides of the law, in legitimate and illegitimate violence. A second argument is rationalistic: people fear being hurt by the enemy they are fighting. But this is variable; fighters are much more fearful and tense in close confrontations, even though long-distance weapons such as bombs and artillery are much more dangerous; and it is especially difficult to commit violence against a person who is looking in ones eyes than from behind or with head hooded. (Grossman 1995; Collins 2008: 73–8) A Mafia boss compared the ease of killing an animal with the difficulty of killing a human being: When you aim at a man, your hands shake, your eyes twitch, your heart flutters, your mind interferes . . . If possible you should always touch the body with your gun to make sure the man is dead. Man is the hardest animal to kill. (Bonanno 1985) This is a high level of realistic observation by a professional killer. Conventional styles of discourse favour boasting and a self-portrayal of toughness which hides ct/f, although detailed interview questioning almost always turn up admissions of fear and physiological symptoms of tension. It is the moment of interactional confrontation, more than anything else, which causes the tension. I have presented evidence elsewhere (Collins 2004) that ordinary non-conflictual human interaction shows a tendency for persons who establish a common focus of attention to become mutually entrained in a common rhythm of speech and bodily movements, and to intensify a shared emotional mood, what I have called an interaction ritual. Here I would argue that ct/f arises precisely because violent interaction cuts against the grain of the micro-processes which make up an interaction ritual. The tension arises because one is struggling not just against the other person, but against the tendency within ones own nervous and endocrinological systems to become entrained in the rhythms and emotions of the other person. From this point of view, ct/f is the exception which proves the rule of the solidarity-producing tendency of focused micro-interaction. Where mutual entrainment is blocked by action at cross-purposes but the focus of attention is sustained – since violence-threatening interaction produces an extremely intense focus of attention on the other person – the human individual is subjected to deeply disturbing tension. It is also possible that an individual in a violence-threatening situation experiences objective fear of being hurt by the other, and the two sources of tension/fear may add together. Nevertheless, persons who objectively have the upper hand in the situation of power and have little chance of being hurt also tend to experience ct/f. This is why the bodily indicators of fear rather than anger are seen at the moment of violence. This is not to deny that anger has a strong physiological base in the so-called reptile brain which dates back deep in infra-human and indeed pre-mammalian evolution. But the human brain is dominated by cognitive areas which are entwined with emotional connections; and these emotions are easily communicated to other humans through finely tuned bodily organs (Turner 2002). It is this evolved hardwiring for cognitions-plus-socially-entraining-emotions which produce the solidarity of interaction rituals. Anger gives explosive muscular energy, useful chiefly for bursts of effort to overcome an obstacle; as a social communication of the intention to treat the other person as an obstacle to one's will, however, anger runs up against the tendency for interaction ritual entrainment, and hence the arousal of anger produces ct/f. Although anger can be a precursor of a fight, it tends to be shut off during the fight itself. The main display of anger is as bluster – a social performance which may begin spontaneously but can be consciously encouraged in an attempt to dominate the other person without fighting. Anger is by no means a sufficient condition for violence; to the extent that we see anger in photos of violent confrontations, it is almost entirely in safely controlled situations, such as a demonstrator making angry gestures while the rest of the line holds firmly in place. Anger does not make violence automatic or easy; it remains to overcome the barrier of ct/f. And anger is not a necessary condition for violence; much military, police, crowd, and criminal violence happens without anger. For violence to take place, persons must find a pathway around the barrier of ct/f. Examining the micro-situational evidence for many kinds of violence, I suggest five main pathways which these take (Collins 2008). Here I will concentrate on one such pathway: finding a weak victim, someone who situationally gives in to emotional dominance and thereby eliminates the action at cross-purposes which generates ct/f. There are several other pathways: audience-oriented staged and controlled fair fights; confrontation-avoiding by violence; confrontation-avoiding by confrontation-avoiding by in I will only the of the which is in military and violence, as well as in individual and criminal violence. 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accident such as a human where one unable to or to the off a by the In military emotional dominance most of the physical also make up the most of with the of and both in violence against against weak and in violence by against There are several kinds of of which are not the micro-situational of each are to in and in (Collins 2008: of violent typically have a of the In this since the is not in much or far in the of tension and is the of being a criminal finding weak and Collins 2008: this finding a victim who is typically who are and on on and with the of two or three against physical dominance is the who have the of a nevertheless their moment when their victim is off and can be A key is the rhythm of by the victim, such as at the moment when a is up the The of the is to of the the The is tend to with when it is most typically by a who has the victim into an typically down with off and who are in a or to their are of who both to have indicators of social and a nervous and The most targets in zones are to be and the needs to have an especially good to their target off in use the to to persons who are but with little to back up their typically this is by for they and These are almost to the of interactional it is not a of a but of the moment for emotional when a gun is actually in it is more to be to hit the victim with than to or and the of including by a use of on to add the of to the dominance of the This is similar to argument off in in which in are not expressions of but are to make of a situation of of bodily on the In this the who a is in a and use of ritual for and although they to establish emotional are not to they psychological in and tend to in for more on their and A majority of to their victim from the since they being in the This be as a not to be but it as well the that hit and also to from the and to have a victim the most situation is where are especially on both (Grossman the same say they to use a gun to and the victim and even though they the victim not to see the is that the gun is a of dominance their own which is with the of with their guns at when they are not actually on the and too, are tense and about into someone this tension by the of someone and to to that the is at the This a but it has strong of it is that the may be to in the by shooting as the come in through the In this is the off at a precisely what a to with their even describe their fear of this as a for their own someone and But this be objectively a very common this of per cent have been of during their and that their of is on the order of to or more per cent of this of the chance of in must be These of their fear of a more than the of being when in their own nevertheless they close to their as the tension rises when they are from A of the at which tension that the emotional is while the and the target and safely the tends to less tense and especially the and finding no one at This is a in ct/f precisely because their is no human But the remains high while someone we see this through a of who have their and are back at on their own through a of including and per cent of in this very and the even though a would turn up more and their of being are very and they the need to use the but many on the – not out of of but because they fear being in a small with only one and This is similar to the of soldiers to per who in their in combat (Collins 2008: are frequently and many use or to even though they have a realistic that these make and The of and gives a to the of violence. of criminals experience a amount of ct/f at the moment of their with their even though they have in of contact and communication with The tension at the moment of the actual of the this the criminal into a rhythm of own and into a But ct/f is and on the of the victim tends to set off a of Thus persons who resist a have a chance of being even though the majority of to overcome and when a is by a – what most – the will typically I have the that violence is down into a tunnel (Collins 2008: the most difficult is the mouth of the the barrier of this getting into the rhythm of the action itself when a victim is even one up one is able to into of violence. The of violence is all the way through the of violent It is for humans to but it tends to set a rhythm of its own which is to Here we see why is not easily from background variables such as or There are far more persons who the than who actually commit such because or for and violence are a long way from the interactional to A criminal is someone who has which are a of the who not these one can from this is than the amount which comes from being The of and of violence as is itself a who are have of emotional dominance not only their but to a their as criminals and A small minority how to overcome their own ct/f or at to their emotions sufficiently to out violence; they this above all by good of other ct/f, which they turn to their own It is little to say that violent persons are in ct/f.
Randall Collins (Mon,) studied this question.