Study of Violence in Business Names--论文代写范文精选

搜索结果揭示了许多地区的初步情况,处理暴力的方式,如枪械和自卫训练。然而,这些差异并不会反映文化名称选择的直接影响。下面的report代写范文进行叙述。

This difference is consistent with the historically higher levels of violence in the South and West, and these fossil remnants of that history may help to maintain current regional differences in violent attitudes and behavior. Such effects might be amplified if violent words in more recent name coinages also cluster in the South and West. Study 2 will test this possibility in the area of business names.

Method

Regional Definitions. Northern, southern, and western states were defined as in Study 1.

Business Name Source. DeLorme's electronic telephone directory known as Phone Search USA (1997, Version 3.0) was used to find businesses in the continental United States that began with certain keywords. Like the GNIS source for place names in Study 1, the program only returned business names that began with the keywords.

Violent Keywords and Controls. A new set of violent words was randomly drawn from the list described in Study 1. Since selection was weighted by frequency, many of the keywords from study 1 were also chosen here. Keywords were submitted to the electronic directory in order of selection until twenty successful searches were obtained. Successful searches returned at least ten businesses that began with the target word or a morphological variant, such as "gunsmoke" for the keyword "gun" or "cannonball" for the keyword "cannon." Thirty-two words had to be submitted to the directory search to meet this frequency requirement. The words that failed the constraint were accused, artillery, assault, backlash, conscript, destroy, invasion, ordnance, prosecutor, robbery, shrapnel, and weapon.

Twenty nonviolent control words were drawn from the Battig and Montague (1968) category dominance norms. These norms were generated by presenting subjects with a category name, such as "fruit," and then asking them to list as many category members as they could recall in 30 seconds. Category dominance was then measured by the number of subjects who listed a particular category member. I obtained nonviolent control words from these norms by randomly selecting twenty categories and, within each of these categories, one of the five most dominant members. Business names that began with each of these control words were then extracted from the directory. Appendix 2 lists the violent and control keywords for this study.

Results

An initial examination of the search results revealed many businesses that dealt in violent products or services, such as firearms and self-defense training. It is not surprising that the name for a gun shop begins with the word "gun." Any regional differences in the prevalence of such shops could create corresponding differences in the frequency with which violent words appear in business names. However, such differences would not reflect direct effects of culture on name choice, but only indirect effects mediated by correlations between culture and business proclivities. It would be more interesting to find violent words used to name businesses like restaurants or automobile repair shops that do not have an intrinsic connection with violence. Name choices here could be attributed more easily to the overall cultural milieu. Violent businesses were therefore excluded from the analyses. These cases could be identified easily and objectively because the directory coded each listing for business type. Appendix 3 lists the exclusions. Some listings did not have a specific code, and were accordingly labeled with a "0." The business type could be inferred from the name for many of these cases (e.g., "Killer Chicken Caf�"), but just to be conservative, businesses coded with "0" were also dropped from the analyses.

Another potential confound in the data concerns the lack of independence between business and place names. In particular, many businesses are named after the city or town in which they are located (e.g., "War Taxi" in War, WV and "Rifle Realty" in Rifle, CO). The presence of such cases in the data could make it seem as though southern and western businesses are named more often with violent words. However, such effects would in reality be driven by the greater frequency of violent place names in the South and West rather than any additional inclination to use violent names by current residents of these regions. I therefore excluded businesses from the analyses if their names began with the same word as the city or town in which they resided. This restriction was imposed on the businesses in both the violent condition and the nonviolent control condition. The latter needed to be included because the relative scarcity of violent place names in the North could artificially dilute the presence of violent business names in this region.

The number of businesses that began with each keyword was tabulated separately for southern, western, and northern states. Each keyword then received a score corresponding with the proportion of hits that occurred in the southern and western states. The means for the violent and nonviolent words were then compared. As predicted, business names that began with violent words came from the South and West more than names that began with the nonviolent control words. On average, 68% of the violent names came from southern and western businesses compared with only 53% of the nonviolent names (t(38) = 4.07, p < .0005). The relative scarcity of violent names in northern businesses appeared in separate comparisons with the South and West. Among southern and northern businesses, 58% of those with violent names were located in the South, but only 39% of those with nonviolent names (t(38) = 4.06, p < .0005). Among western and northern businesses, 45% of those with violent names were located in the West compared with only 34% of those with nonviolent names (t(38) = 2.75, p < .01). Relative to the nonviolent control words, the South and West did not differ significantly in the prevalence of violent business names as 61% of violent names and 56% of nonviolent names appeared in southern businesses (t(38) = 1.11, p > .20). Once again, however, the trend is consistent with other evidence showing a stronger culture of violence in the South (Cohen 1996).

As in the place name study, statistical tests were also conducted with the state as the unit of analysis. Each state was scored for the proportion of businesses with violent names among the total businesses returned in the directory search. The mean proportions were .14, .13, and .08 for the southern, western, and northern states. Both the southern and western businesses contained a significantly higher proportion of violent names than the northern businesses (South vs. North: t(35) = 7.12; West vs. North: t(30) = 3.60, ps < .005). The values for the South and West were not significantly different (t(25) = 0.55). When the states were ranked according to proportion of businesses with violent names, not one northern state appeared among the top ten and only one appeared among the top twenty. In contrast, nine northern states were among the bottom ten and fifteen among the bottom twenty.

Discussion

If so inclined, a family in Alabama could have their television serviced at Warrior Electronics, their dog housed at Gunsmoke Kennels, their home addition built by Bullet Construction, and their children taught at Battleground School. A Texan could be born in Gun Barrel City, pray at Battle Ax Church, fish at Bullet Creek, dine at Shotguns Bar BQ, work at Outlaw Avionics, and be interred in Battle Creek Cemetery. Of course, northerners can also encounter places or businesses with violent names, such as Bloody Pond, New York and Shotgun Willie's Saloon in Massachusetts. In a nation like the United States, one does not have to travel far to see violence highlighted. However, such opportunities are rarer in the North than in the South and West.

There is as yet no evidence that these linguistic patterns affect attitudes or behaviors involving violence. In particular, we cannot say whether the predominance of violent names in the South and West helps to maintain the greater acceptability of violence in these regions. However, there are many psychological mechanisms that could produce such effects. For example, the more frequently an object is encountered, the more it is liked in general (Zajonc 1968). The greater frequency of violent words in southern and western names could therefore increase the positive evaluations given to the objects and actions that those words denote. More generally, high frequency conveys many perceptual and cognitive advantages. Thus, high frequency words are easier to identify (e.g., Forster and Chambers 1973) and recall (e.g., Rubin and Friendly, 1986) than low frequency words. While driving down a road crowded with businesses and their banners, hungry southerners and westerners should find it easier than northerners to identify or remember a restaurant with a violent name. More interestingly, research suggests that the attractiveness of an object increases when it is easier to identify (Bornstein and D'Agostino 1992). The greater frequency of violent names in the South and West might not only make such names and their meanings easier to recognize by residents of those regions, but, as a direct consequence, also more attractive or desirable.

In sum, the greater environmental availability of violent names in the South and West will make them more cognitively available to residents of those regions than to northerners. The research discussed above suggests that this increased availability could affect attitudes toward violence. But could violent behavior also be influenced? There is evidence that increasing the environmental and cognitive availability of violence can indeed stimulate violent actions (see Berkowitz 1974 and 1984 for reviews). For example, Berkowitz and LaPage (1967) placed undergraduates in a situation where they could use mild but annoying electric shocks to punish a fellow student for mistakes on a laboratory task. More shocks were administered when the laboratory contained some salient violent objects, such as a gun, than when it contained neutral objects, such as a badminton racquet. Of more relevance to the present paper, similar effects occurred when subjects were merely exposed to words with violent meanings (Loew 1967; Parke, Ewall, and Slaby 1972; Turner and Layton 1976). For example, Turner and Layton (1976) asked their subjects to first learn a set of violent or neutral words. Subjects exposed to the violent words later gave more intense shocks to a fellow participant who made mistakes on a laboratory task. Such experiments suggest that mere exposure to violent words could increase predispositions to violence, perhaps by activating violent thoughts and schemas with which those words are associated (Berkowitz 1974; Anderson, Benjamin and Bartholow 1998). Such effects might be amplified where violent words are particular frequent, as in the South and West.

Violent words and concepts might also inherit some acceptability from the socially positive entities with which they are associated through naming, such as schools, churches, and respected businesses. One possible mechanism for such inheritance could involve a desire for cognitive consistency (see Sabini 1992 for a review of this large literature). A person who regularly attends church services presumably has positive attitudes toward religion. If that person also had negative or neutral attitudes toward guns, an apparent conflict would arise while praying in "Rifle Range Church." Cognitive consistency could be achieved by lowering one's opinion of religion or raising one's opinion of firearms, and history suggests that the church militant generally triumphs over atheistic pacifism. Of course, any positive views toward violence might also generalize to businesses with which they are associated. Thus, a business in the South and West might be regarded more favorably if it contained violent words in its name. Smaller or opposite effects should be found with similar businesses in the North.

In sum, regional differences in American values concerning violence predict corresponding regional differences in name usage. On many measures, Americans from southern and western states view violence more positively and constructively than Americans from northern states. The research presented here found that place and business names in the South and West are more likely than those in the North to begin with violent words. Southerners and westerners who hear, read, say, or write these names are therefore given repeated reminders of their regional values. It remains to be seen whether such exposures reinforce those values, but given the regular association of violent words with positive objects in the South and West, it is doubtful that such words erode them. After all, how profane can guns, pistols, rifles, bullets, etc. be when they are repeatedly linked to the sacred in places like "Gunpowder Church" and "Bullets Chapel?"

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