Review of Milburn & Conrad (1996), followed by references on the long-term results of the use of corporal punishment by parents.
A review of:
Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, 1996, The Politics
of Denial, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. pp. x + 292. ISBN
0-262-13330-X.
This book's message is nothing less than that spanking is the root cause of anything that a modern psychologist is likely to call evil. According to the authors, social environmentalism no longer requires any "overly elaborate or implausible argument" (p. 4). Supposedly, spanking is an abuse that on its own leads to delinquency, crime, drug addiction, depression, suicidal thoughts, political authoritarianism, torture, war, genocide, wife-beating and, of course, further "child abuse." Occasionally, the authors allow it would be a "gross oversimplification" to conclude that spanking produces "conservatives who hold punitive political attitudes" (p. 10); nevertheless, this is the very proposition which draws them like a magnet. Though conventional and unrelenting in its politics, this book is an unwonted piece of realism in today's social psychology. Liberal-left post-modernists who can believe Milburn and Conrad's thesis will kick themselves for their fifteen-year flirtation with the vagaries of hermeneuticism.
Can M&C be believed? First, can they establish what most psychologists would certainly suspect, that families in which spanking is regularly practised are likely to house quite a wide range of psychological problems? If so, can they demonstrate that the link between physical punishment and pathology remains even when statistical allowance is made for other possible causal factors such as low intelligence, low social class or high Psychoticism? In short, is there distinct evidence that spanking is actually causal to any of its down-market correlates?
Milburn & Conrad show occasional concern with answering causal questions. Mainly, however, they make immediate propaganda with whatever correlations come to hand (plus anecdotes about US Republican politicians having their hides tanned in childhood and perhaps later). On the particular, long-standing issue of the relation between physical punishment and naughtiness, the classic 1950's evidence of Bandura and Walters and of the Cambridge-Somerville Project is wheeled in for a sentence or three, together with half-a-dozen other studies (none conducted in the 1990's, and several only mentioned as references, not explained or discussed). Yet these studies show only that naughty boys are spanked more often, not the direction of causation between naughtiness and being spanked. Inviting considerable suspicion as to how the research literature was trawled, Sears' (1961) classic report of there being no relation at all between spanking and later naughtiness in his 160 middle-class children goes unmentioned. The authors' crusading determination stops them undertaking the scientific job of asking just whether, when, and where spanking is harmful -- or, just possibly, helpful.
Pursuing their own condemnatory purposes, M&C make no effort to distinguish between gratuitous physical abuse, rule-governed corporal punishment, high parental standards, and tightness of parental supervision. The last three of these variables are well known to be largely independent of each other, and the first is probably independent too. Yet this book often runs them all together in flagrant pursuit of evidence that is congenial to the authors. Nor is any systematic effort made to distinguish between spanking (with an open hand or a soft object on the bottom or hand, causing no tissue damage) and beating (hitting with a closed fist or hard object with intent to damage). Still more annoying, conventional evidence does not matter much to M&C's thesis anyway: those hypothetical victims who deny 'abuse' and say they actually loved their parents are written off whenever necessary as 'in denial' -- as is anyone who has never been 'in therapy' (p. 64).
Even the reader who sympathizes with M&C's shameless biases is due for disappointment. At the very outset of the book's coverage of supposedly spanking-induced right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), the authors crash into the barriers that constrain normal academic argument. In their own research, it was only males who showed the desired result -- that those who reported having been spanked as children were "slightly more conservative." Spanked females were actually more liberal and humanistic -- requiring instant invocation by M&C of a version of the 'denial' argument. [Females are supposedly socialized by their mothers to 'deny their anger' at abuse and thus to turn their anger into friendship.... Two references (dated 1966 and 1989) are provided.] That the authors' theory fits only 50% of the population, and then only "slightly", will dampen the spirits of all but the wildest supporters of the child abuse industry.
What is there for readers who stay the course? Alas, worse is in store. By p. 117 -- with the book far advanced as a hymn-sheet for left-of-Clinton Democrats -- the authors are moved to spend two pages spelling out the 'significant correlations' between childhood spanking and adult RWA in 1,175 adults. The grisly attitudinal sequelae of parental punitivity take up almost a page: in summary, 'Young people need discipline', 'Everything changes so quickly', 'The old days were better', 'Sex criminals should be whipped', 'Growing boys should have a few fist fights', 'Militias are OK', 'War is OK', 'Police beatings are OK', 'Death threats against some politicians are well deserved', etc. As so often, M&C offer no matching control for IQ or income. Yet they hardly need to do so. For what were the 'significant correlations'? The reader who turns to the Appendix will find they range from .04 to .15 around a median of .07. If this is the best that the new realists can do, it is small wonder that left-ish social psychologists of the 1980's took to constructivism!
How could M&C have landed themselves in such a pickle? Their own frequent accusation against the right is that of 'denial.' However, over the years, it has increasingly seemed that the 'liberal'-left have not even bothered to read what they themselves wish so fervently to deny. For example, arch-environmentalists Maurice Schiff and Richard Lewontin can hardly have read a word of Hans Eysenck or Arthur Jensen (Brand, 1987). In 1996, the leading critic of IQ testing, Leon Kamin, declared that he had no intention of trying to read my own banned -- but freely available -- book, The g Factor. And Phil Rushton (1997) observes that Stephen Jay Gould's 'revision' of The Mismeasure of Man shows no sign of Gould's having read even key articles in Intelligence by Jensen and John Carroll. In the case of M&C, these authors simply cannot have read the APA-prize-winning work of Bob Altemeyer (1988) even though they use Altemeyer's own scales. In painstaking and systematic researches with his Canadian undergraduates (thus partly controlling out socio-economic and IQ differences) Altemeyer found his data to be largely unsupportive of the idea that parental violence or chastisement had any connection with a child's later RWA score. On Altemeyer's measures (including assessment of fantasies, so as to avoid social desirability response set), right-wing authoritarians were not even higher in 'aggression.'
Rather, what Altemeyer found central to RWA psychology was the rejection of homosexuality. Such rejection presumably reflects a mixture of genes and individual developmental choices (cf. Badcock, 1994; Sulloway, 1996). The fifty-year-old 'redirected aggression' yarn of Theodore Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt School in psychology has simply little or nothing to do with RWA. Unpleasant, low-social-class fathers have more violent and unhappy children not because they beat them but because (a) they supplied the children with their own poor genes, and (b) their behaviour suggested to the child that paternal investment was likely to be restricted. In response to such parental offerings, children make dramatic but divergent responses: some mimic parental RWA to solicit investment, while others seek a peace with the world via feminization and homosexuality. Spanking itself does not predict the route that will be taken. Such horror-charged development will be all too common until parents are made legally responsible for the full costs of the upbringing of their children, including the costs of providing criminal justice in adolescence. But excessive parental chastisement will have no more link to authoritarianism than to humanitarianism -- as, indeed, in M&C's own research.
As environment-realists, M&C are thus a flop. This is because
they are too hysterical to look at the facts and appreciate the
involvement of individual (genetically guided) choices. Indeed,
pace M&C, the children of heavy-handed fathers might
possibly have benefited from even more beating than they
in fact received -- if only it had been administered by higher-IQ
parents in a spirit of proper punishment rather than out of drunken
impulse or sheer brutality. Hereditarians can certainly take much
consolation from M&C's failure to prove their case. The only
proper caveat about ridiculing this book is that any comparable
volume from typical pro-spankers would probably be still worse.
REFERENCES
ALTEMEYER, Bob (1988). Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism. San Diego : Jossey-Bass.
BADCOCK, C. (1994). PsychoDarwinism. London : HarperCollins.
BRAND, C. R. (1987). 'A touch of class.' Nature 325, 767-768.
RUSHTON, J. P. (1997). 'Race, intelligence and the brain: the errors and omissions of the "revised" edition of S. J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.' (Special Review.) Personality & Individual Differences.
SEARS, R. R. (1961). 'Relation of early socialization experiences to aggression in middle childhood.' Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology 63, 466-492.
SULLOWAY, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family
Dynamics and Creative Lives.
London : Little Brown.
Publication reference:
BRAND, Chris (1997). 'New realism in social psychology.' Personality
& Individual Differences 23, 2, 61-2.
BANDURA, A. & WALTERS, R. H. (1959). Adolescent Aggression: A Study of the Influence of Child-Training Practices and Family Interrelationships. New York : Ronald Press.
BECKER, W. C. (1964). 'Consequences of different kinds of parental discipline.' In M. L. Hoffman & L. W. Hoffman, Review of Child Development Research. New York : Russell Sage Foundation.
BONGIOVANNI, A. F. (1979). 'An analysis of research on punishment and its relation to the use of corporal punishment in schools.' In I. A. Hyman & J. H. Wise, Corporal Punishment in American Education: Readings in History, Practice and Alternatives. Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press.
BRAND, C. R. (1998). 'New realism in social psychology.' A review of Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, 1996, The Politics of Denial, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Personality & Individual Differences.
EMBRY, D. & MALFETTI, J. L. (1982). Safe Playing: Final Report on Process Field Test. Washington, DC : AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
ERON, L. D. (1982). 'Parent-child interaction, television violence and aggression of children.' American Psychologist 37, 197-211.
LARZELERE, R. E. (1986). 'Moderate spanking: model or deterrent of children's aggression in the family?' Journal of Family Violence 1, 27-36.
McCORD, J. (1983). 'A longitudinal study of aggression and antisocial behaviour.' In K. T. Van Dusen & S. A. Mednick, Prospective Studies of Crime and Delinquency. Boston, MA : Kluwer-Nijhoff.
McCORD, J. (1988). 'Parental aggressiveness and physical punishment in long-term perspective.' In G. T. Hotaling, D. Finkelhor, J. T. Kirkpatrick, et al., Family Abuse and Its Consequences: New Directions in Research. Newbury Park, CA : Sage.
MILBURN, M. A. & CONRAD, Sheree D. (1996). The Politics of Denial. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
SEARS, R. R. (1961). 'Relation of early socialization experiences to aggression in middle childhood.' Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology 63, 466-492.
STRAUS, M. A. & KANTOR, G. K. (1994). 'Corporal punishment
of adolescents by parents: a risk factor in the epidemiology of
depression, suicide, alcohol abuse, child abuse, and wife beating.'
Adolescence 29, 543-561.
Last modified: 26 vi 1998