Motivations for Targeted School Violence: Examining the Influence of Social Rejection and Violent Video Games on Aggression
This Thesis Project investigates putative causes for mass casualty violence in America's schools. Both popular and scientific literatures suggest a variety of factors to explain these events, including violence in media such as movies and video games, gun culture, social constructions of masculinity, as well as social isolation, rejection, and disaffection among youth. Whereas such factors are not present in every incidence of mass violence and have yet to be demonstrated as explicitly causal variables, significant evidence points to social rejection in the form of bullying experiences and consumption of violent media such as first person shooter video games as representing key driving forces that promote violence and aggression among the nation's youth. Accordingly, this project reviews previous findings to determine whether and how the factors operate independently and interactively to promote aggression. Subsequently, this project proposes a survey assessment to identify these interrelations among college age individuals. The proposed study examines the central hypothesis that frequent combination of social rejection (e.g. bullying victimization) experience with interactive violent media use (e.g. shooter video games) can lead to heightened aggression intent by producing negative cognitions, antisocial attitudes, and moral disengagement to a greater degree than each factor would contribute individually. Implications for future research and application are discussed. MOTIVATIONS FOR TARGETED SCHOOL VIOLENCE Christensen 4 Violence is one of the most enthralling public health challenges facing the United States today. The most recent estimates by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) place the national number of violent crimes at over 1.2 million for the year 2012 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2012) While this figure may seem astounding, it actually represents a decline from the start of the 21 century. Indeed, since their peak in the 1980s and 1990s, national homicide rates across the United States have declined significantly (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2013) However, recent research by Blair and colleagues (2014) highlights that Americans have seen an unfortunate increase in the number of active shooter events events where a suspect engages in an attempt to inflict mass casualties on a general population and continues to pose a threat to general safety, typically with a firearm or other weapons. As members of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, these investigators identified 110 active shooter events occurring across the country from 2000 to 2012, and noted that 29% took place in American schools and institutes of higher education. This increase in active shooter events has also been coupled with escalating casualty and fatality figures, representing a troubling shift from an earlier United States Secret Service and United States Department of Education investigation that identified 37 similar incidents taking place in American schools between 1974 and June 2000 (Vossekuil et al. 2002) These attacks, and the resulting mass casualties, have been some of the most tragic experiences for the American people over the past few decades and have continued to cause great concern amongst the public, popular news media, and political figures. MOTIVATIONS FOR TARGETED SCHOOL VIOLENCE Christensen 5 The proposed research seeks to address a potential gap in the literature concerning mass casualty events in the nations schools. Through a review of the relevant literature, our study will examine how the two putative causal factors of social rejection (as exemplified by bullying) and interactive media violence (as exemplified by violent video games) may operate synergistically, as well as independently, to influence the aggressive attitudes and behaviors of individuals who may be at risk for committing mass shootings. We will then suggest an assessment that may be used to survey a relevant population (e.g. college students) and determine how specific combinations of experiences may relate to aggression within the community at large, and more specifically among vulnerable young men. The goal of this research is to add to existing literature about the causes of active shooter events in schools by looking into the complex set of interrelated factors that may jointly influence them. We believe that the present study will provide researchers and university officials with an additional assessment tool to identify individuals who may be at heightened risk for expressing aggression, thereby allowing appropriate preventative measures to be administered to those at the highest level of risk. Previous mass casualty events focused research attention on teenagers as a potentially at risk population. This occurred because many mass casualty events took place in high schools and shooters were current students 95% of the time (Vossekuil et al. 2002) While this concern was well justified, recent events necessitate an expansion of scientific inquiry into older populations, specifically college students. Three of America's most extreme mass casualty events featuring an active shooter have occurred over the past decade, all involve perpetrators who were college age. These events have included the nation's highest casualty incident (in Aurora, Colorado) as well as the MOTIVATIONS FOR TARGETED SCHOOL VIOLENCE Christensen 6 nation's two deadliest incidents (in Blackburg, Virginia and Newtown, Connecticut) As college age individuals may continue to commit these atrocities, college students represent an appropriate population for further research on aggression and violence. Just as they did during the 1990's (Vossekuil et. al. 2002; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2003) mass casualty events occurring in the nations schools demand attention not only from the press, but also the scientific community, security analysts, law enforcement officials, politicians and other policy makers. Recent increases in the prevalence of mass casualty events (Blair, Martaindale Nichols, 2014) have prompted a variety of these figures and groups to address what causes these events occur and how to prevent them. For example, examiners of mass casualty events have included President Obama's Administration (Moriarty, 2013) gun lobbies (LaPierre Hutchinson, 2012) social scientists (Anderson Dill, 2000; Anderson et al. 2003; Ferguson, 2008) and the entertainment industry (Goldfarb, 2013) among others. However, one commonality with these investigations is that suggested causal factors often reflect the nature of the given stakeholder. The video game industry, for instance, has argued that violent games do not have an impact on real world violence and instead can have a positive impact on the lives of gamers (Entertainment Software Association, 2014) In contrast, the gun industry frequently suggests that violent games are a corrupting force on the public, and that firearms are needed for self defense (LaPierre Hutchinson, 2012) Popular and scientific literatures have also intensely debated which of a variety of influences may be most likely acting on young adults who perpetrate masscasualty events. These candidate causes can be summarized as mental illness (Walkup Rubin, 2013) access to guns (Sapien, 2013) social experiences (Aronson, Wilson MOTIVATIONS FOR TARGETED SCHOOL VIOLENCE Christensen 7 Akert, 2013) violent masculinity (Katz, Jhally Earp, 2013) and popular media (Anderson et al. 2003) Of these factors, research has found particularly compelling evidence that aggressive tendencies in humans can be driven by negative social interactions (Bushman Baumeister; 1998; Renda, Vassallo Edwards, 2011) and persistent exposure to violent media (Anderson et al. 2003; Willoughby, Adachi Good, 2012) This wealth of established literature both informs and inspires the proposed research focus that specific instances of some suggested factors (i.e. bullying and violent video game exposure, respectively) represent critical points of inquiry for potential synergistic effects on aggression. Social Connections and the Impacts of Rejection Abundant scientific literature establishes that social relationships are critical for human functioning and survival (Aronson et al. 2013) This understanding of the importance of human interaction has also led to a range of literature that addresses the consequences of even the threat of losing and the absence of social relationships (i.e. social rejection and social isolation; see Baumeister Leary, 1995, for reviews) The effects of social rejection and isolation are so pervasive that now historic experiments easily demonstrate that individuals will commonly alter their behavior in order to avoid such consequences. For instance, one classic experiment found that individuals would regularly alter their answers to an unambiguous line length judgment task so that their answers better fit with the rest of a group (Asch, 1956) Another seminal experiment found that many individuals are willing to administer electric shocks to another human being in obedience to an authority figure, even when those shocks are believed to cause MOTIVATIONS FOR TARGETED SCHOOL VIOLENCE