| Smart and Dangerous: How Cognitive Skills Drive the Intergenerational Transmission of Retaliation Continual inter-gang violence exemplifies the degree to which retaliation is entrenched in gang societies. In fact, previous research shows that retaliatory acts actually help gangs grow. Furthermore, because mortality is high in gangs, their vitality also rests in recruiting new members who believe in retaliation. This motivates the need to understand how people develop an aggressive, retaliatory conflict resolution policy vs. a more passive reconciliation stance. I contribute a choice-theoretic model that explains how cognitive skills drive the transmission of conflict resolution policies. A child’s resolution policy depends on parental effort and the influence of the outside environment. The model has the implication that high-cognitive parents socialize children to their conflict resolution culture more successfully than parents with low cognitive skills. Indeed, I test the model using the cognitive skills and conflict resolution skills of parents and children from the UK National Childhood Development Survey. I find that the parent's effort is reinforced by the prevalence of their conflict resolution values in society. The data confirm that children of retaliating high-cognitive parents are more likely to be socialized to that resolution culture than children of low-cognitive retaliating parents when retaliation is more prominent in society. In relevant socioeconomic contexts, parents who believe in forgiveness could deter the growth of gangs by socializing children to reconciliation, which is incompatible with the retaliatory gang ideology, thus reducing the pool of potential gang recruits. Keywords: socioemotional skills, cultural transmission |
Ruby Henry's Papers |