Respect and Aggression

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