(Behavioural Genetics is a scientific field founded on the idea that genetic factors can make a person more or less prone to engage in certain behaviours, such as violent assaults, but that a person's experiences also help to determine whether these genetic tendencies actually lead them to engage in those behaviours and under what circumstances.)
Observational Learning
As far as learning principles go, a significant concern is that a person's tendency to cause harm to their intimate partner will get passed down from one generation to the next through a process called observational learning (also known as social learning, Bandura, 1989). For example, if children witness incidents of violence engaged in by one of their parents toward the other, what they learn is that violence is a component of intimate adult relationships. The outcome is that there will be a greater likelihood for those children to grow up and either engage in violence toward their romantic partners or expect as a routine part of life that they will be a target of violent assaults by their intimate partner. (This process is called "intergenerational transmission of violence". Some people refer to this transmission as the "cycle of violence", because children who witness violence and experience it within their families bring the violence back around again when they are older.)
Psychological studies confirm this link between exposure to violence in childhood and a host of negative consequences for those individuals (and the rest of society) as they develop into adulthood. The tendency for parents to use physical punishment to control the behaviour of children is known to cause a rather lengthy list of short- and long-term problems for children. Children who routinely experience physical punishment by their parents are more physically aggressive, they tend to have lower levels of concern or empathy for others, they are less likely to follow rules and behave pro-socially at home and in school, and they have less affection and respect for their parents (Gershoff, 2002; Graham-Behmann, 2009). In adulthood, people who experienced physical punishment during childhood tend to be more physically aggressive, they are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour, they are more likely to develop mental health problems, and they are more likely to perpetrate violence against their own children and intimate partners. Boys who witness their father engage in domestic violence are more likely to engage in domestic violence as adults. Thus, as a consequence of peoples' tendency to learn through watching others, violence has a tendency of generating yet more violence (Cappel & Heiner, 1990; Corvo & Carpenter, 2000; Dutton, 1995; Hyde-Nolan & Juliao, 2012; Kaufman & Zigler, 1987; Jackson, Thompson, & Christiansen, 1999; Marshall & Rose, 1990).
The Problems with Physical Punishment as a Technique of Behavioural Control
In our lectures on operant conditioning (see also Chapter 6 of the textbook, Weiten & McCann, 2013), we discussed that negative and positive punishments provide fairly effective ways to stop people from engaging in certain behaviours. The whole point of speeding tickets and prison sentences is to discourage people from doing illegal things in the future and there wouldn't be much hope of preventing people from committing those crimes without having those kinds of punishments as a threat. A problem occurs when punishments are more severe than necessary, which physical punishments tend to be, since the surprising truth is that the severity of a punishment often does not increase how successful it is at discouraging people from engaging in whatever behaviour we want them to stop doing. Also, even though physical punishment can discourage people from engaging in undesirable behaviours, the downsides should discourage anyone from relying on it as a method for controlling the behaviour of others. For one thing, anyone who experiences a physical attack will most certainly be cautious about doing whatever it was that set their attacker off, at least as long as that person is nearby. However, doing the right thing out of fear of getting hurt is not quite the same as following the rules because of their inherent value. We want people to refrain from cheating and stealing because they agree that it is unfair and wrong to cheat and steal. That's called doing the right thing for intrinsic motives; because doing the right thing feels good and doing the wrong thing gives people an uncomfortable guilty feeling. If a person's only motive not to cheat or steal is their selfish interest in avoiding physical punishment, there will be no restraint on their cheating and stealing whenever the threat of physical punishment is low. In addition, it's best if children do the right thing because they love and respect their parents and want to be like them. It is very challenging to retain affection for someone who beats you, even if they tell you that they're giving you the beating for your own good.
Physical punishments have these potential downsides even when parents apply them rationally and consistently and only when their children do something bad. The situation becomes a great deal worse when parents physically punish their child for bad behaviour sometimes, but then fail to react at all when the child does the same thing at other times. For example, suppose that a parent spanks their child for drawing on the wall on one day, but then ignores the same behaviour on the next day. Moreover, suppose that a parent physically punishes their child for no particular reason at all, sometimes, because they are under stress at work or for whatever reason that has nothing to do with the child's behaviour. These kinds of inconsistencies are a disaster for a child's development because it makes the child's behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour unpredictable. It can lead to two unpleasant outcomes. First, the child may stop doing anything at all, since they have no way to know what actions will provoke a physical punishment and what actions will not. Second, the child will have no motive to act in appropriate ways, since behaving badly may or may not result in a physical punishment and not behaving badly may result in the same painful consequence.
All of these comments are to establish that physical attacks are both wrong, to the extent that they cause pain and physical harm, and they are a horribly stupid way to maintain a long-term relationship with a loved one. An abusive spouse may succeed in controlling their partner's behaviour, but they may well lose their partner in the process. This outcome can occur quite literally, as we've indicated before. Physical violence can cause permanent damage or even result in death for women (and, less commonly, men) who find themselves in an abusive relationship. In other cases, victims of domestic violence will make the very understandable choice of abandoning their abusive partner in the search of a safer and less painful existence without them. Yet, even if an abused partner lives and stays, experiencing physical abuse can only harm the bond that intimate partners are meant to share and suppress the aspects of a person that originally made them attractive as a partner in the first place. Children can and will lose affection for a parent who beats them, so adults are all the more likely to experience a persistent disgust for a physically abusive partner.
Now, we can introduce the role of Pavolovian Classical Conditioning into considerations of IPV. Experiencing positive reactions to an object (or a person) depends on the history of associations between that thing (or person) and one's own thoughts and physiological responses. People will tend to love other people to the extent that they have a history of experiencing many more positive emotions than negative emotions during events involving that person. Once a person becomes a source of pain and danger, it is impossible for an intimate partner to feel the same affection for them. Through learning, the abusive individual will necessarily come to generate negative emotional reactions from that point onward. A victim of domestic violence might be strongly motivated to keep their partner happy, but it won't be out of an authentic love for that person. It will be out of fear for their own safety. The take-home message is: Once someone cares about your happiness because they are afraid of you, they are no longer actually your partner or your loved one. You have made them your slave. Quite appropriately, slavery is illegal in Canada.
The idea of these kind of conditioned responses to a stimulus originated with famous studies by Ivan Pavlov in which he paired a bell ringing with presenting food to dogs again and again and measured their salivation. After establishing that association, he removed the food and presented only the sound of the bell ringing. The dogs salivated in response to the bell, even in the absence of the food. This basic (and unconscious) learning process has been used to explain many psychological phenomena, ranging from severe phobias to sexual fetishes. The expectation that experiencing physical harm from a loved one will tend to make that person less of a loved one and more of an aversive, fear-inducing stimulus is a fairly straightforward implication of classical conditioning principles.
References
(These are just for giving credit to researchers.
We would never generate test questions based on this kind of thing.)
Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta. (Ed.), Annals of Child Development. Greenwich, CT: JAI.
Cappell, C., & Heiner, R. B. (1990). The intergenerational transmission of family aggression. Journal of Family Violence, 5, 135-152.
Corvo, K., & Carpenter, E. (2000). Effects of parental substance abuse on current levels of domestic violence: A possible elaboration of intergenerational transmission processes. Journal of Family Violence, 15, 123-137.
Dutton, D. G. (1995). Male abusiveness in intimate relationships. Clinical Psychology Review, 15, 567-581.
Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviours and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 539-579.
Hyde-Nolan, M., & Juliao, T. (2012). Theoretical basis for family violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Jackson, S., Thompson, R. A., Christiansen, E. H., et al. (1999). Predicting abuse-prone parental attitudes and discipline practices in a nationally representative sample. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23, 15-29.
Kaufman, J., & Zigler, E. (1987). Do abused children become abusive parents? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57, 186-192.
Marshal, L. L., & Rose, P. (1990). Premarital violence: The impact of family of origin on violence, stress, and reciprocity. Violence Victims, 5, 51-64.
Weiten, W., & McCann, D. (2013). Psychology: Themes and Variations, Third Canadian Edition. Nelson Education, Ltd: Toronto, ON.
cool story bro
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