Randall Collins: The Micro-Sociology of Violence

Here's a puzzle: humans are supposedly violent animals with long histories of warfare, murder, and brutality. But watch two angry people in an argument. Their faces are red, their fists are clenched, their words are vicious—and yet violence almost never happens. They posture, threaten, and bluff. Then they walk away.

This observation sits at the center of sociologist Randall Collins's work on violence. Violence isn't easy. It's hard. Humans are not natural killers. We have powerful inhibitions against harming others, and overcoming those inhibitions requires specific conditions that are difficult to create and harder to maintain.

This micro-sociological perspective offers a different entry point into the violence debate. Rather than asking whether violence is declining at the macro level, Collins asks: what actually happens in violent situations at the micro level? And the answer turns out to be surprising.

Confrontational Tension and Fear

Collins's central concept is "confrontational tension/fear" (ct/f). When humans face potential violence—in a fight, a robbery, a battlefield—they experience overwhelming tension. Fear, adrenaline, conflicting impulses. Their bodies shake. Their aim deteriorates. Their cognition narrows.

This tension makes violence difficult to perform. Watch real fight videos (as opposed to choreographed movie fights) and you'll see: most punches miss, most struggles are clumsy, most confrontations end without significant harm. The physiological response to confrontational threat undermines effective violence.

Even trained soldiers struggle with this. Studies of World War II combat found that only 15-25% of riflemen actually fired their weapons at the enemy. The rest—despite being trained, armed, and in life-threatening situations—couldn't pull the trigger. They hid, they fired over the enemy's heads, they pretended to shoot. The human reluctance to kill is so strong that it overrides even survival instinct.

This finding was so troubling that the U.S. military redesigned training to overcome it. Modern conditioning methods have increased firing rates—but the underlying human resistance persists. Killing is not a bug in human psychology. Inhibition against killing is a feature.

Consider what this means. We send young men into combat with weapons designed to kill, train them to use those weapons, place them in situations where their lives depend on killing—and still most of them can't do it. The inhibition against killing fellow humans is so deep that even self-preservation can't reliably overcome it.

When Violence Happens

If violence is so difficult, how does it happen at all? Collins identifies several pathways through confrontational tension:

Attacking the weak. Violence becomes much easier when the target can't fight back—when they're outnumbered, restrained, unconscious, or otherwise helpless. The confrontational tension is one-sided. This explains why so much violence is asymmetric: bullying, gang attacks, domestic abuse, massacres of unarmed populations. It's not that humans are good at violence. It's that we're good at finding victims who can't resist.

Emotional domination. Sometimes one party achieves emotional dominance over another—through confidence, rage, or intimidation—that short-circuits the target's resistance. The weaker party freezes, submits, or flees. This creates the asymmetry that enables violence.

Forward panic. When confrontational tension suddenly breaks—when one side routs or surrenders—the victorious side often erupts into extreme violence. This explains battlefield massacres, police brutality during arrests, and riot violence. The release of tension triggers a forward rush where normal inhibitions collapse. Forward panic produces the most gruesome violence—overkill, atrocities, torture of captives—precisely because inhibitions have temporarily dissolved.

Forward panic is what turns a fight into a massacre. It explains the often-reported pattern where most casualties occur after one side has already lost—when retreating soldiers are cut down, when surrendering enemies are murdered, when the violence continues long after any tactical purpose has been served. The emotional momentum carries violence forward beyond any rational stopping point.

Ritual solidarity. Group violence requires group preparation. War dances, military drills, chanting crowds—these rituals build emotional solidarity that enables individuals to overcome their reluctance. Violence is easier in groups because the group provides emotional scaffolding that individuals lack alone.

Technical distance. The further the attacker is from the victim, the easier violence becomes. Bombing from 30,000 feet is psychologically easier than stabbing someone. Drone operators experience less trauma than infantry soldiers. Artillery crews rarely see their victims. Distance—physical and psychological—reduces confrontational tension.

Competent Violence Is Rare

A consistent finding across Collins's research: genuinely competent violence is rare. Most violent actors are bad at violence—they're shaking, missing, hesitating, acting clumsily.

The exceptions prove the rule. Elite soldiers, trained assassins, experienced fighters—these are people who have been conditioned or selected to overcome normal inhibitions. Their competence stands out precisely because most people, even in violent situations, perform poorly.

This has implications. The decline in violence might partly reflect reduced opportunities for competent violence. If violence requires specific conditions—weakness in targets, emotional scaffolding, distance—then social arrangements that eliminate these conditions reduce violence without changing underlying human nature.

Modern policing creates confrontational tension for potential criminals. Surveillance makes violence risky. Legal systems provide alternatives to private vengeance. These institutional arrangements don't make humans less violent at the psychological level—they make violence harder to perform successfully.

Implications for the Decline Debate

Collins's framework cuts across the Pinker-Taleb debate:

Neither violent nature nor peaceful nature. Humans aren't naturally violent (most people in most situations don't fight) but aren't naturally peaceful either (under the right conditions, ordinary people commit atrocities). The question isn't human nature but social conditions.

Institutional arrangements matter. Effective states, rule of law, and credible deterrence don't change human hearts—they change the tactical situation that potential violent actors face. They make violence harder to accomplish without getting punished.

Technology cuts both ways. Distance and technology make some violence easier (bombing, drone strikes) while surveillance and communication make other violence harder (getting away with murder is increasingly difficult). The net effect on violence rates depends on how these factors balance.

Violence is situational, not dispositional. The most important predictors of violence aren't personality traits but situations. Put ordinary people in Abu Ghraib or the Stanford Prison Experiment, and many will commit violence. Put psychopaths in strongly constrained environments, and most won't. Situations select for violence more than people do.

The Paradox of Deterrence

Collins's work illuminates why deterrence can be so effective even though humans are already reluctant to commit violence.

Standard deterrence theory imagines rational actors calculating costs and benefits. Collins adds a micro-sociological dimension: violence already faces tremendous friction from confrontational tension. Deterrence adds additional friction—the fear of punishment—on top of the already-existing fear of the confrontation itself.

This means that even modest increases in the difficulty or risk of violence can have large effects. The person hesitating before an assault is already struggling against their own inhibitions. Knowing that police response is quick, that cameras are watching, that punishment is likely—these additional pressures often tip the balance toward non-violence.

Deterrence doesn't stop determined killers. But most potential violent actors aren't determined. They're ambivalent, scared, conflicted. Deterrence makes the decision easy for them: they were looking for a reason not to fight anyway.

This helps explain why certainty of punishment matters more than severity. The person hesitating before violence is making an emotional decision under stress. The abstract threat of years in prison barely registers. But the immediate presence of a witness, a camera, a potential intervener—that tips the emotional balance in the moment when it matters.

Emotional Energy and Violence Clusters

Violence doesn't happen uniformly. It clusters—in time, in space, in social networks. Collins explains this through "emotional energy": the confidence and motivation that flows through successful interactions.

When violence succeeds, it generates emotional energy for the perpetrator. That energy enables further violence—creating hot spots, crime sprees, and escalating conflicts. When violence fails or is punished, it drains emotional energy, inhibiting further attempts.

This helps explain why interventions can have outsized effects. Breaking a violence cluster—through arrests, community intervention, or mediation—doesn't just stop that violence but drains the emotional energy that would have fueled future violence. Conversely, letting violence succeed creates cascades of further violence.

The policy implication: focus on interrupting violence clusters rather than trying to change underlying psychology. Violence is self-reinforcing when successful and self-limiting when interrupted.

Violence as Performance

Much apparent violence is actually performance. Threats, posturing, displays of aggression—these often substitute for actual harm. The function is social: establishing dominance, deterring rivals, signaling toughness.

Collins distinguishes between "bluster" (aggressive display) and actual violence. Most barroom confrontations are bluster. Most international saber-rattling is bluster. The aggression is real, but the physical harm never materializes because neither party wants to pay the cost of actual fighting.

Understanding this distinction matters for the decline debate. Some of what looks like declining violence might be declining bluster—societies where aggressive display has become less socially acceptable. Other apparent violence was always mostly bluster that rarely produced harm.

The challenge is distinguishing performance from genuine threat. When does posturing become attack? When do threats become credible? These questions have no clean answers, but recognizing that much aggression is performative helps explain why actual violence rates can change dramatically while human aggression remains relatively constant.

This also explains why honor cultures are so violent. In honor cultures, failing to respond to a challenge with violence damages reputation—which has real social and economic consequences. The performance must be real, or it fails to signal. Thus honor cultures create situations where backing down is more costly than fighting, overriding the natural inhibitions that would otherwise prevent violence.

The Takeaway

Randall Collins offers a bottom-up view of violence that complements the top-down statistics of Pinker and Taleb. Violence is hard—humans face powerful inhibitions that make killing difficult even when motives exist.

Violence happens when specific conditions overcome these inhibitions: attacking the weak, achieving emotional dominance, forward panic after tension breaks, ritual solidarity, and technological distance. Remove these conditions, and violence becomes rare regardless of underlying psychology.

This suggests that declining violence might be more fragile than it appears—dependent on institutional arrangements that could be disrupted—but also more achievable than pessimists assume—because it doesn't require changing human nature, just changing situations.

The micro-level perspective reveals that violence has always been difficult for most humans in most circumstances. What's changed isn't human nature but the social arrangements that enabled violence's exceptional occurrences. Understanding those arrangements helps preserve the peace we've achieved—and helps us recognize what could undo it.

Collins's bottom-up approach reminds us that macro statistics emerge from millions of micro situations. In each of those situations, violence is difficult, inhibited, and unlikely. But change the conditions—create asymmetry, provide emotional scaffolding, increase distance—and violence becomes possible, even probable. The question isn't whether humans are violent but whether we design social environments that make violence hard or easy.

Further Reading

- Collins, R. (2008). Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton University Press. - Grossman, D. (1995). On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Little, Brown. - Marshall, S. L. A. (1947). Men Against Fire. William Morrow.

This is Part 5 of the Violence and Its Decline series. Next: "Democratic Peace Theory"