CrimeMany violent criminals driven by a desire to do the right thing: Researchers
To the extent that their heinous behavior can be understood, murders, wife beaters, gang bangers, and other violent criminals are acting out of a breakdown of morals, right? Not so fast, say two social scientists say. In a new book, they ascribe most acts of violence to a truly surprising impulse: the desire to do the right thing. “When someone does something to hurt themselves or other people, or to kill somebody, they usually do so because they think they have to,” explained one of the researchers. “They think they should do it, that it’s the right thing to do, that they ought to do it and that it’s morally necessary.”
To the extent that their heinous behavior can be understood, murders, wife beaters, gang bangers, and other violent criminals are acting out of a breakdown of morals, right? Not so fast, say social scientists from UCLA and Northwestern University.
In a new book, Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai ascribe most acts of violence to a truly surprising impulse: the desire to do the right thing.
“When someone does something to hurt themselves or other people, or to kill somebody, they usually do so because they think they have to,” explained Fiske, a UCLA professor of anthropology and lead author of Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships, which will be published 15 January Cambridge University Press. “They think they should do it, that it’s the right thing to do, that they ought to do it and that it’s morally necessary.”
Co-author Rai said killings and physical attacks are often committed in retribution for wrongs — real or perceived — or as an effort to teach lessons and instill obedience or, amazingly, an attempt to rectify a relationship that in the perpetrator’s mind has gone awry and cannot be corrected in any other way.
“We’re not talking just about the way perpetrators excuse or justify their behavior afterwards,” said Rai, Fiske’s former graduate student at UCLA and now a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “We’re talking about what motivates them to do it in the first place.
“When we say that violence is morally motivated, we mean that it is so in the mind of the perpetrator. We don’t mean that we think that violence is good.”
A UCLA release reports that Fiske and Rai arrived at their startling conclusion after analyzing a wide array of scholarly research on violence, including thousands of interviews with violent offenders. Their book quotes from real-life perpetrators as well as those from works of fiction, ranging from The Iliad to Huckleberry Finn.
“When we started writing this book, we thought, ‘We’ll never figure out what really motivates perpetrators of violent acts,’” Fiske said. “But actually it turned out not to be that hard.”
They even uncovered moral motivations behind suicide, war and rape, and the authors say the finding transcends modern and historical cultures.
The authors admit there are exceptions — people who do not have such virtuous motivations for their violent acts. Those exceptions, however, typically are psychopaths, who make up
