“Tower of Babel”: A Theoretical Review on the Determinants Shaping Lay Perceptions of Interpersonal Violence

Abstract

Despite its high prevalence and increasing popularity, the concept of violence remains ambiguous and contested in both everyday and academic discourse. This article focuses on interpersonal violence and aims to identify the key factors that influence what people will define as violence. Based on a systematic theoretical review of existing empirical research, this paper shows how people perceive and categorize violent acts depending on the characteristics of the evaluated conflict interaction. It is demonstrated that individual characteristics of assessors have less influence on lay evaluations than factors describing the situation being assessed. Among these situational factors, the perception of the intent of the violent agent plays a crucial role: intentional acts aimed at causing harm are more likely to be classified as violent compared to unintentional acts. Another important factor is the type of violence and the harm associated with it: physical violence is rated as more severe than psychological violence. In addition, the existence of justifying reasons and the moral evaluationof the act influence the perception of violence. In lay perceptions, normalization narratives surrounding an action tend to reduce how violent it is judged to be. Furthermore, the perceived violence of an action is closely linked to its lay moral evaluation. The study highlights the differences between lay and scientific conceptualizations of violence. It shows that lay conceptualizations of violence are as multifaceted as scientific conceptualizations, yet are more robust.