Cohen, D. (1996). Law, social policy, and violence: The impact of regional cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(5), 961-978.

The author believes that cultural values are reflected in social policy and investigated the relations between these two social parameters in the cultural samples of the southern states of the USA.

Social scientists theorize that the US South and West cultures favor violence for self-defense because of their former frontier background. This study confirmed these predictions for American laws dealing with guns, self-defense, home defense, and foreign policy. Furthermore, it was expected that the South’s history of slavery should lead to a greater acceptance of violence employed for coercion and punishment. The study confirmed these predictions for regulations dealing with marital abuse, corporal punishment, the capital penalty, and foreign policy. It was found that the slave South and nonslave South differed from each other solely on issues of coercion and punishment, thus confirming that slavery was a source of this ideology. Furthermore, it was discovered that, while the West and nonslave South may symbolically support violence, they rarely use it. This appears to be in parallel with (1) the distinction between symbolic and instrumental attitudes and (2) the gap between expressed attitudes and actual behavior.

Cohen, D. (1996). Law, social policy, and violence: The impact of regional cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(5), 961-978.  https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.5.961