Deviant Behaviors

What's deviance? One answer is that deviance involves an action that is negatively evaluated.

Below is an overview of behaviors that have been rated as bad in the U.S.A. All of the listed behaviors have an evaluation (E) rating of -0.5 or less for both males and females. The acts are classified according to their potency (P) and activity ratings (A) depending on whether each of these ratings is less than -0.5, between -0.5 to +0.5, or greater than 0.5. The chart shows only behaviors that get classified the same for both males and females. (Actually males and females don't entirely agree on the classification of "envy" and "laugh at", but they are included anyway in order to show something in the weak-lively cell.)

The behaviors in the chart vary quite a bit in terms of how bad they are, from relatively minor offenses, like stalling or evading someone, to heinous acts of rape and murder.

The most serious offenses tend to be rated as potent and vigorous. At least in the U.S.A., bad behaviors never are rated as downright quiet. On the other hand, only a few behaviors of any kind are rated as quiet by both males and females in the U.S.A. (for example: placate, contemplate, pamper, counsel, forgive). Bad behaviors are mostly potent. However, this is not because bad acts are stronger than good acts. In fact, the only distinctly impotent behaviors in the Interact dictionary are bad acts.

While the listing of negatively evaluated behaviors shows many despicable acts, it also shows that negative evaluation of behavior alone does not guarantee social deviance. Some negatively evaluated behaviors are legitimate actions for normal actors in certain institutions. Judges are supposed to convict, fine, and sentence; professors should flunk some people; police can properly confine, control, interrogate suspects; those in charge of discipline are expected to punish and silence others. Such actions are properly directed only at deviants, but when that is the case the acts themselves are not social deviant.

Deviance also has been interpreted as rare or unlikely action. This is not as popular a view now as it was a few decades ago, but the idea relates neatly to the issues of deflection and likelihood in affect control theory. Deflection measures are workable predictors of event likelihood according to research studies. The larger the deflection produced by an event, the less likely is the event. For example, directing a bad strong action at a good weak object - say, murdering a baby - massively deflects the meanings of both the behavior and the object and therefore creates a deviant event, in the sense of being seen as rare or unlikely. Most large-deflection events combine a negatively evaluated action with a positively valued person - "the salesclerk cheated the child",  "the champion raped the prostitute", "the grandfather tortured the granddaughter" - and all such events do seem very unlikely and deviant. So far, so good.

The trouble with this approach to defining deviance is that good actions performed by deviants - for example, a mugger helping a child - also deflect meanings and therefore must be deviant because they are unlikely actions. However, it doesn't really make sense to call good actions deviant, regardless of who performs them. Moreover, some positive events, like "the charming woman loves the cynic" or "God forgives the sinner" - also produce moderate deflection. Normal individuals involved in such events may find such experiences extraordinary,  but they do not ordinarily think of themselves as being involved in deviance; instead they typically try to understand the events in terms of how the events affect their own unique destinies.

Another problem is that villainous behavior among deviants does not generate much deflection; such events seem likely. For example, a mugger punching a prostitute produces practically no deflection because that kind of behavior is expected from a mugger and those kinds of predicaments are expected for a prostitute. Nevertheless the event would be deviant by most people's standards.

So identifying deviance is not an easy matter. Events with negatively evaluated behaviors are deviant for the most part, except by this definition sanctioning responses to deviance also are deviant. High-deflection events often involve deviance - a fact that usefully reminds us that deviance may generate stress - but some deviant events do not generate high deflection, and some non-deviant events generate moderate deflections.

Deviant Identities

The chart below lists identities that have negative evaluation for U.S.A. males and females. Cells show three levels of activity combined with three levels of potency, the same as in the chart above. The chart does not include all of the deviant identities measured in the U.S.A.; only those that fit the cells in the same way for both males and females.

A variety of deviants are viewed as weak, ranging from quiet types to noisy types. As the perceived potency increases, however, the deviants are more and more constrained to high levels of activity. In fact, in the U.S.A. no strong and quiet deviants have been found at all, so far. "Stepfather" doesn't actually make it to the quiet level for females - it is in the chart just to give you a sense of the content of that cell. Here is one way to interpret this finding: in the U.S.A.a deviant is not significant (high potency) unless such a person frequently initiates events (high activity).

Aside from levels of potency and activity, you can see great variety in kinds of deviants that exist. For instance, individuals may be deviants because of their: social relations (hermit, flunky); expressive displays (zombie, sorehead); appearance (hag, slob); use of money (miser, tightwad); means of gaining money (beggar, gold-digger); style of work participation (loafer, slave-driver); use of substances (drunkard, junkie); mental ability (dullard, scatterbrain); thought disorders (neurotic, psychopath); orientation to rules (fuddy-duddy, fanatic); trustworthiness (stoolpigeon, turncoat); sexual behavior (homosexual, hooker); and propensity to violence (gunmoll, vigilante). Additionally there are words to identify: deviant youths (sissy, brat); family deviants (bigamist, adulteress); supernatural deviants (vampire, devil); judicial deviants (speeder, outlaw). And there are labels for those who are stigmatized because of the actions of others (captive, fugitive).

The diversity of deviants shows why affect control theory has trouble coming up with unique labels that "fit the crime" in reidentification analyses. ACT analyses predict appropriate sentiments toward people involved in a deviant event, but labels for deviants also have to match the functional significance of their actions. It won't do to explain violent behavior by identifying someone as a safecracker, or sexual behavior by labeling someone as a vandal. Put differently, our affective response to an act of deviance evokes a bunch of labels that are affectively right, but the final decision about which label to apply has to be made on non-affective grounds.

Something else to remember in labeling analyses is that reidentifications may not occur at all. Labeling is an attempt to align feelings with realities, not punish or vindicate, and it occurs only when one's own definition of the situation does not predict another's conduct or emotional expression. We generally try to correct predictions with justifications first, going back over events and seeing if we interpreted everything correctly. Next we may try relatively minor attributions. Only if none of this works are we forced to seek new identities for participants under the assumption that others are acting the way they do in order to confirm identities we have not acknowledged.

Deviant labels often remain tacit - we just assume we are right. If the labelings are made public, then they may be denied, and we may find ourselves confronting others, influencing, negotiating in order to impose our conception of reality.

Interactions With Deviants

Sentiments about deviants allow us to predict illicit actions and to sense risks intuitively. For example, having the appropriate feelings about muggers, we expect them to bully, steal, rape, and kill, and we know we are in danger if a mugger is present.

When deviants confirm their negative selves by acting on normal individuals, the emotions of all participants turn negative, and validation of deviants' identities occurs at the expense of the normal individuals who are disconfirmed by the menacing acts of the deviants. Meanwhile, normal individuals cannot confirm themselves well by acting on deviants, and even trying to do so emboldens the deviants to perform worse behaviors than usual.

Use the interaction simulator to examine a normal individual interacting with a deviant. Enter 3 as the fundamental evaluation of X (the normal individual) and -3 as the fundamental evaluation of Y (the deviant). Let the deviant perform optimal actions for a while to see how deviants can confirm themselves with normals. Then let the normal individual perform an optimal action. Does the deviant's optimal action get nicer after the normal's action on the deviant?

Notice the wild swings of emotion on the part of the deviant when you exchange actions back and forth between the deviant and the normal individual. As actor, the deviant feels negative, but the deviant feels calmness or delight or euphoria as the object of a normal individual's confronting, or groveling, or attempts to redeem the deviant.

Suppose specifically that Mary is a woman encountering a mugger named John. As soon as Mary realizes who John is, then according to affect control theory she expects unpleasant actions from him - acts like pushing, interrupting, mimicking, threatening, laughing at. Suppose the first thing John does is interrupt her: the ACT prediction is that Mary is not too upset at this initial event though she might have tinges of feeling overwhelmed or anxious. Her predicted responses are behaviors like dissuading or reprimanding John. Suppose she does make an effort to dissuade him, feeling self-conscious, anxious, tense as she does this. The mugger's predicted behavioral response is to get tough: push, threaten, shock, mug, dare, interrupt, mimic, attack. Suppose John threatens Mary. Now Mary - sensing that the scene is getting out of hand - feels terrified, petrified, embarrassed, desperate. The mugger next might push Mary, making her feel  cowardly, tormented, afraid, ashamed. Despite her plummeting emotions, Mary's behavioral inclinations continue to be valiant as she tries to maintain the strength and goodness of her identity as woman. She might try any acts like persuading, exonerating, disciplining, converting John. Say she engages in an act like persuading John; her resolute behavior lets her feel more in-control with emotions like irritability and scorn, even as she implicitly knows her action will trigger further aggressive behavior from the mugger.

On the other hand, Mary has the potential for reidentifying herself. Right at the beginning she could ask: Whom would a mugger interrupt? Answers include a hostage or a victim. So Mary might not stay with her stout-hearted woman identity. She might recast herself as a victim. Then the affect control theory prediction is that Mary's courage would be gone and her predicament in some ways worse! As a victim Mary's behavior options are mainly begging and beseeching, while the mugger's options with a victim expand to a variety of violent and sexual acts. Curiously, even though the objective behavior expectations are worse in her role of victim, Mary's emotions are mollified somewhat. Resigning herself to the role of victim replaces terror with anxiety, tenseness, and self-consciousness.

Mary's long term reaction to the trauma of being assaulted by a mugger might be to weaken her self concept, while perhaps keeping her self esteem to avoid the negative emotions of being a victim. The usefulness of such a child-like self is shown in the following graph.

Adopting a nice but weak self conception lets Mary be stress free in any expected event (the dark blue area on the graph). That is, if nice people treat her nicely then she experiences positive emotions and no stress. If she remembers the bad individual treating her badly then she experiences horrible emotions but still no stress. (This would not be the case if she maintained a sense of potency, as displayed on a comparable graph in the discussion of stress.)

Psychology of Deviants

Emotional swings, or emotional lability, are observed clinically in individuals with very negative self concepts, and that corresponds to what you see when you simulate interaction of a deviant with a normal individual. The ACT explanation is this. Individuals who understand themselves as being fundamentally bad are disposed to experience themselves as quite bad, regardless of what is happening with others. So in order to experience themselves as relatively good when social events definitely warrant a more positive impression of themselves they have to over-react emotionally, and work themselves into emotional beatitude. To experience themselves as extra bad when circumstances warrant that, they have to evoke emotional hell within themselves. Their emotions are flat in the sense that small variations - a little smile, a little frown - don't work for them.

Cultural sentiments about deviants have evolved to make the characters predictable in their interactions with normal people. Most of us have no contact with the underworlds of deviance, and so we could hardly adjust our sentiments to improve the way the sentiments predict acts of deviants with other deviants. Nevertheless, our sentiments provide us with fantasies about what happens in deviant worlds. We easily imagine that deviants betray each other, frustrate each other, ridicule each other, exact vengeance on each other - plots like you see on television soap operas. Additionally we imagine that deviants often have positive emotions as they do these malevolent acts!

Use the interaction simulator to set up an interaction among two deviants: enter -2 as the fundamental evaluation of both X and Y. (Entering -3 instead of -2 causes too much emotional lability.) Then run optimal events, exchanging initiative back and forth between X and Y. Do the deviants engage in positive or negative actions toward each other, or both? Are their emotions positive or negative, or labile? Do their actions toward one another confirm their identities?