Attitudes toward violence: the subculture of violence revisited ; Conflict and control functions of sexual humor ; Resistance to genocide : victim response during the holocaust

Abstract

I. According to the subculture of violence theory (Wolfgang, 1957), people engage in interpersonal violence because they have internalized values that encourage this form of behavior. Data from the 1984 NORC General Social Survey were examined for correlations between the demographic variables specified in the theory and six items eliciting attitudes about interpersonal violence. The findings generally did not uncover the value differences between those social groups with low and high rates of involvement in violent crime as predicted by the subcultural explanation of violent behavior. Contrary to the theory, the relation of the demographic variables to approval of violence varied inconsistently across the items. Also, middle and upper class whites were more pro-violence than lower class blacks. II. This paper involves a functional analysis of sexual humor using a sample of jokes obtained from students in lower division Sociology of Human Sexuality classes. It was found that while the jokes provided some information about standards of sexual activity, they also communicated information consistent with traditional gender stereotypes. Both men and women were caricatured in a way that portrayed women as less important and lower in status than men. Sexual humor has much in common with racial and ethnic humor; all of these forms of humor distinguish dominant from subordinant groups, exaggerating the weaknesses of the out-group and the strengths of the in-group. III. This paper involves a critical evaluation of the current psychologically-based research on the Holocaust. The argument is made that the Nazi devastation occurred on two levels, the individual and the social. While the destruction of lives has been thoroughly discussed by Holocaust scholars, the social disorganization experienced by Jews while under Nazi rule has yet to be considered as a factor in the literature. We will discuss the destruction of the Jewish pre-war community infrastructure, examining how this destruction affected the outcome of Jewish armed revolt and how it led to the creation of a body of literature stimulating a sense of group cohesion and pride in group membership.