ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Why is violence high and persistent in deprived communities? A formal model.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exposure to neighborhood concentrated poverty is associated with faster decline in episodic memory among midlife women.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2025Article
- Poverty is associated with both risk avoidance and risk taking: empirical evidence for the desperation threshold model from the UK and France.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Trauma systems in high socioeconomic index countries in 2050.Critical care (London, England) · 2024Review
- US homicide rates increase when resources are scarce and unequally distributed.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The psychology of relative state, desperation and violence: a commentary on de CoursonProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Toward an evolutionary ecology of (in)equality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Why is violence high and persistent in deprived communities? A formal model.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or 'enduring neighbourhood effects'. Here, we identify a single mechanism that can produce all three observations. We formalize it in a mathematical model, which specifies how individual-level processes generate the population-level patterns. Our model assumes that agents try to keep their level of resources above a 'desperation threshold', to reflect the intuitive notion that one of people's priorities is to always meet their basic needs. As shown in previous work, being below the threshold makes risky actions, such as property crime, beneficial. We simulate populations with heterogeneous levels of resources. When deprivation or inequality is high, there are more desperate individuals, hence a higher risk of exploitation. It then becomes advantageous to use violence, to send a 'toughness signal' to exploiters. For intermediate levels of poverty, the system is bistable and we observe
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