HOW DO NORMS RELATE TO VIOLENCE AND WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

Why do some societies tolerate sexual violence while others push back? Why do some men become champions for gender equity while others perpetuate harm? These are the questions that drive my research. I study ideological norms — shared belief systems like sexism or anti-immigrant sentiment — and their consequences for violence, discrimination, and inequality. But I don’t stop at diagnosis: I also study how to disrupt those norms through prevention programs and collective action.

The scale of the problem is staggering. Sexual violence, income inequality, and anti-immigrant discrimination are not rare aberrations — they are features of virtually every society. Yet so is resistance. Chilean students have flooded the streets. Movements for women’s rights have swept across continents. Uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa have challenged entrenched power. How do these dynamics work, and what can social psychology tell us about them? My research tackles these questions with theoretical pluralism, methodological rigor, and a commitment to practical application. I draw primarily on social dominance theory — one of the most comprehensive frameworks for understanding intergroup inequality — and integrate it with structural analyses of ideology and violence, theories of morality, intergroup emotions, and social identity.

HOW CAN WE PREVENT OR REDUCE INTERGROUP VIOLENCE?

Violence prevention is not a single strategy — it’s an ecosystem of interventions. My research focuses on two major pathways: (1) direct interventions and programming, and (2) building the conditions for collective action.

INTERVENTIONS AND PROGRAMMING

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most sexual assault prevention programs are aimed at women. They focus on risk reduction — teaching potential victims how to protect themselves. This approach, while valuable, fundamentally misplaces responsibility. A minority of men perpetrate the vast majority of sexual assaults. So why aren’t we targeting them?

That question is the foundation of my work. For nearly two decades, I have been developing, refining, and studying The Men’s Project, a primary prevention program designed specifically for college men. The results demonstrate that men who participate report lower sexism and rape myth acceptance, and greater feminist activism, collective action willingness, and bystander efficacy. 

THE MEN’S PROJECT

The Men’s Project is an 11-week intensive program that brings together male student leaders — young men with large social networks and real campus influence — to grapple seriously with masculinity, gender-based violence, and what they can do about it. The program was first developed in 2004 by Ryan Barone and Chris Linder through the Office of Women’s Programs and Studies at Colorado State University, and it has been evolving ever since, shaped by new cohorts of participants and advances in research and theory.

The curriculum unfolds in three acts. In the first three weeks, participants confront the social construction of gender: What does it mean to “be a man”? Where do those ideas come from? Who benefits? Topics include male privilege, homophobia, sexual prejudice, and the many forms masculine identity can take. The next five weeks turn to sexual assault itself — not as an abstraction, but in its full breadth and depth. Participants encounter the statistics, learn about the spectrum of gender-based violence (from stalking and harassment to rape), and start connecting seemingly minor behaviors — like casually calling women “girls” — to the broader cultural environment that allows assault to flourish. In Week 8, they hear directly from survivors. The final three weeks are about action: bystander intervention at the individual level (confronting a sexist joke, supporting a friend), at the institutional level (joining advocacy organizations, engaging with campus prevention efforts), and understanding the activist ecosystem already at work around them.

COLLECTIVE ACTION

Individual behavior change matters — but so does collective power. Most research on collective action leans on social identity theory, particularly the dual pathway model of protest. My work argues that this is only half the picture.

In one key paper (Stewart, 2017), I propose a model of theoretical complementarity: social identity models are the right tool for understanding disadvantaged groups (like women mobilizing for gender equality), while social dominance models are better suited to dominant groups (like men motivated to challenge patriarchy). A parallel finding emerges in research on White Americans’ motivations to engage in collective action to reduce racial inequality (Stewart & Tran, 2018) — social dominance theory explains their engagement in ways that social identity theory alone cannot.

Collective action isn’t only for members of aggrieved groups, though. In another paper (Stewart et al., 2016), I examine bystanders — people who witness injustice but are not its primary targets. I find that two things motivate bystanders to act: solidarity with the affected group, and positive beliefs about that group’s competence. Using an international sample of over 1,400 participants, I show that an integrated model combining social identity and social dominance frameworks fits the data better than either theory alone. Bystanders are more powerful than we think — and understanding what moves them to act is critical.

HOW DO SOCIETAL NORMS AFFECT ATTITUDES, BELIEFS, AND PHYSICAL WELL-BEING?

Two people with equally sexist beliefs can end up in very different places politically depending on where they live. In a society where sexism is the norm, those beliefs predict whether someone thinks abortion is justifiable. In a society where sexism is contested and contentious, those same beliefs predict whether someone thinks domestic violence is justifiable. Same ideology, different society, radically different consequences. I call this the ideology/violence tradeoff, and it emerged from a study I conducted across 57 nations.

It’s not enough to measure what individuals believe. We need to understand the normative context in which those beliefs are embedded. In another study, I found that anti-immigrant beliefs predict opposition to immigration only when such beliefs are widely shared and normative. When those beliefs are contested, the dynamics shift in ways that standard individual-level analyses would miss entirely.

THE NEED FOR MULTILEVEL THEORY AND METHODOLOGY

To study ideological norms properly, you need tools that match the complexity of the phenomenon. Every study I have conducted on this topic uses both social dominance theory — a genuinely multilevel theory of intergroup relations — and multilevel statistical modeling. Ideological agreement is operationalized as the variance in an ideological measure within a nation, group, or collective: low variance means people agree; high variance means they don’t. Multilevel modeling lets us examine how individual beliefs and group-level norms interact simultaneously, rather than collapsing one into the other and losing the story in the process.

The methodology isn’t just a technical choice — it’s a theoretical commitment. Understanding inequality means taking seriously the fact that people are embedded in groups, and groups are embedded in societies. Any analysis that ignores those layers is leaving the most important part of the story untold.