There is something called the epidemiologic model of violence. Epidemiology, for those reading the nerd section from the other sections, is the study of disease transmission in populations - "epidemic" + "-ology."
yeah, we drew that all by ourself
Common studies to read include Cerda, DiGangi, Galea, and Koenen, 2012 or Sisk, Bambwine, Day, and Fefferman, 2022. Apparently, violent persons increase the propensity for violence in others.
Violence, however, can merely be thought of as a marker (and a vector) of traumatic stress. There's a bit of research to back this up - Katembu, Zahedi, and Sommer, 2023 or the we're-not-listing-all-of-you Burke, 2024 are examples. Of course, most traumatic childhood experiences involve at least exposure to violence; we know of no studies which separate emotional abuse from physical violence, though Liu, Raine, Venables, and Mednick, 2006, manage to connect the childhood stressor of food insecurity to violence, though this does not differentiate between the traumatic stress of food insecurity and the physiologic effects of malnutrition; confounded variables are a problem.
While violence can be thought of as a marker and form of traumatic stress, traumatic stress can be thought of as perfectly ordinary, mild stress which has reached a magnitude beyond what the individual can process, what psychoanalyst Carl Rogers referred to as "afterburn." Most of us have at least some small experience with a series of mild frustrations building up to a full minor breakdown, and most of the average toddler's "stop doing everything, fall down, and cry" responses are in this category (and a very good response; stop everything, let it flow, and deal with it).
As such, we have an epidemiologic model of "very, very mild stress which can build up to disturbing proportions if unaddressed." Since stress is not particularly diminished when shared (and in fact there is a thing known as "perpetuation-induced trauma;" most war criminals who escaped punishment after WWII did not actually have particularly good lives), we also have a model of "how mild frustration in tying one's shoelace can cascade into global wars and war crimes."
It only grows unless we address it.
The epidemiologic model of sub-violence stressors appears to continue to hold true. There are evidence of mirror neurons such that emotions are contagious; Bastiaansen, Thioux and Keysers, 2009 or (~sighs disappointedly~) Yang, Bayless, Wei, Landayan, Marcelo, Wang, DeNardo, Luo, Druckmann, and Shah, 2023 (really, guys? You know someone's going to have to cite this) point out, albeit more on a hardware study, that if someone around us is anxious or pissed off, we become more anxious or pissed off. Emotions are contagious.
One hope from this is that things like calm or compassion may, actually, be equally contagious.
Another aspect of transitioning from "an epidemiological model of violence" to "an epidemiological model of truly minor stress" - deescalating, if one will - is that it opens the possibility for targeted intervention long, long before it becomes an epidemic. Graph theory and network analysis could be a possibility, and interventions could target high-centrality parties to radiate calm and kindness throughout the universe... but honestly, a little common sense could replace a good chunk of this. Government-granted media monopolies can find its key members in the heirarchy flattered like hell in the quest to have less-antisocial content, while all other centralities tend to be a customer service position operating a cash register.
Give the cashier at the convenience store gift certificates to a day spa, and change the world.
Otherwise, a mass reduction in the base level of economic stress is the single largest intervention for the most people. Persons have, however, gotten through famines with far less stress, trauma, and interpersonal hostility than some of the societies-of-moderate-imitation-abundance have at times managed to create. "Everyone" does, in fact, tend to comprise most of the graph.
Identifying nodes of intervention to reduce the background level of stress before it reaches the "violence epidemic" level can be an excellent and distributed work for thinkers, amateur scientists and mathematicians, and common citizens. We basically have the background fabric of how good or bad things are going to be and a direct connection to where we are in the "hell on earth" to "good life" slider; the mild-to-traumatic average stress level and its relation to a truly senseless war of all against all in a multiparty gang-violence scenario, or a world with healthy people, possibly based on kindness and compassion.
We leave it to the masses (and their children) to design and implement modifiers and interventions... though if you click the "donate" button up there, we could probably hand it over to a public relations firm to address the media thing a bit, and maybe do some other goods. Meanwhile, targeted interventions at high-centrality points coupled with an epidemiology of calm, compassion, and joy can likely transform the substrate.
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