Friendships and Firearms - Kyle Barrentine

Bobby Doyle 0:00

Welcome to solving gun violence. A student led podcast from the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions project that tackles one of America's most urgent issues preventing gun violence. Each episode will feature experts sharing actionable solutions to improve community safety while upholding individual rights. Tday, we are joined by Kyle Barrentine. He is a rising sixth year social psych PhD student at the University of Virginia, where he studies how personality and social networks influence each other. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kyle Barrentine 0:43

Howdy, Bobby, thank you so much for having me here.

Bobby Doyle 0:46

Of course. Today I want to focus on a research project where you examined how the attitudes of people's peers related to their opinion on firearm regulation. Could you explain a little bit about where this idea came from and how you went about researching it,

Kyle Barrentine 1:01

Bobby, that's such a great question. And so I started off just to, like, set the stage. During my undergrad, I went to a historically black college, North Carolina A&T State University, and there I sort of got an interest in psychology broadly. So how does depression shape how we make friends. How does depression shape how we network with other people? And while I was there, I did some summer research internship at the University of Notre Dame for two years. And there I worked under a sociologist, and his name was David Aiken, and he sort of taught me the power of social networks. And so when I came into my PhD program, I was really interested in that interplay between sort of individual differences. So how do, how does depression shape how we how we make friendships? How does personality shape how we make friendships? And I've sort of had this connection, this sort of interest, in that interplay throughout my graduate school career. And so once I got to UVA, I started working with a lot of different people, and one of them's name was Gerald Higginbotham, one of my advisors, and he does a lot of work on gun violence, particularly within the black community, and how attitudes are shaped by policy, or how policy shapes our attitudes, and vice versa. And so Gerald talked to me. We had many, many, many conversations, and they're sort of sparked my research interest in how I can apply my work. How can I, how can I apply sort of my interest in sort of social networks to this pressing issue of gun violence, and so through so, through these sort of conversations, I began to become interested in gun violence broadly, and how our attitudes are shaped by the company that we keep, how our attitudes are shaped by the friends that we hang out around. And so that's sort of where this project came about, broadly, was just through conversations with really great people.

Bobby Doyle 2:58

Which is how so many projects come together. Now it's, I feel like it's a fairly intuitive idea, right, that we're in some way affected by the people around us, and we affect the people around us. But how do you actually study that? How do you understand what that looks like in practice, rather than just how it feels to me as someone with friends?

Kyle Barrentine 3:17

Peer influence shapes our beliefs in a lot of ways. And so when I'm thinking about sort of peer influence broadly, I was first interested in sort of how attitudes, how our attitudes around firearms, are shaped by our friends, firstly, through, again, through these like conversations that I had with again my advisor, one of my advisors, Joe Higginbotham. And I'll say that, like when you go to study social networks, I first wanted to look at, sort of, what are the attitudes of our friends, what are the attitudes of the company that we keep? And one way you can do that is this tool called a name generator. And a name generator is just a fancy way of saying or a fancy way of measuring, sort of who your friends are. And also you can ask attitudes about your friends. And so I wanted to ask people, sort of how pro gun their friends were. And when I say pro gun, you know, did their friends essentially like guns? Yes or no. Did their friends not like guns? Were they neutral towards guns, or were they unsure? And so I asked people to name up to 15 close friends, and they didn't just name their friends, they also named their friends attitudes. Again, was their friend pro gun? Anti gun, neutral or unsure? And so after assessing people's friends, people, on average, listed around five friends, we came to find that peer influence. So the number of peers who held pro gun beliefs shaped a person, a person's own attitudes around firearms. And so if you had a lot of friends who were pro gun, who supported or who held who just enjoyed guns, you yourself were also more pro gun in your attitudes and beliefs. And so this sort of, it's sort of intuitive. There's a large, large history within sociology specifically on how peer influence shapes behavior. There's work that suggests that peer influence, you know, if you have friends who are obese, yourself are more likely to be obese. If you have friends who are losing weight, you yourself are more likely to lose weight. If you have friends who are alcoholics, you yourself are also more likely to be an alcoholic. And so peer influence is a really important mechanism through which people form beliefs and where our behaviors are influenced. And so I wanted to apply this, this idea, this lens of peer influence, to that problem, or really the idea of gun attitudes. And so this project wanted to sort of open up more, sort of to look through to find, how does peer influence shape, how we form attitudes around firearms, broadly. And so, yeah, I hope that answers your question, Bobby,

Bobby Doyle 5:54

No, that's a great answer. And I mean the I've also heard the phrase homophily used quite a bit in the sort of literature, the idea of like we are very similar to the friends we have around us, and so it's, it's, it's a powerful force, and it's interesting to see it show up here. But I also, when I looked at this paper, and one reason I want to talk to you is there's some really interesting things that are maybe not even as intuitive as the big finding that you've already highlighted. For example, I'm going to try to say this in a way that makes sense for people who are listening. You found that less experience with gun violence, so having less experience and exposure to gun violence itself is associated with opposition to gun regulation. When I read that, in some ways, it felt counterintuitive, because some might expect that a higher level exposure to gun violence seeing more violence seeing more violence in the community around you or just in your life, would mean that someone might find it more important to have easy access to a firearm for personal safety. Do you have any way that you make sense of this, or were you surprised by that data?

Kyle Barrentine 6:53

Yeah, and so, you know, there's some unpublished work from my advisor, Joe Higginbotham, that suggests that really experience what gun violence shapes our attitudes, but it really depends on also your political orientation. And so what he found was that when we were looking at political ideology, how political ideology shapes gun attitudes, white Americans with more experience with gun violence, and so whether that's homicide or suicide, political ideology specifically was less predictive of gun violence or gun attitudes when they experienced gun violence. And so exposure to gun violence, then, if you're exposed to it, this can provide some hesitancy regarding firearm ownership. There's some work by Tanya Sharp that looks at homicide grief. And when one black American is killed from a firearm, there are six to seven people who are influenced by that through, through grief. And so this grief, sort of this understanding of firearm, or that harm that firearms do, can make people hesitant towards owning a firearm. And so having this direct experience with gun violence may make people more hesitant to own a firearm, especially for black Americans. So I will say it's multifaceted, sort of how gun violence shapes a person's attitudes towards firearms. For instance, if someone experienced gun violence through suicide, the emphasis will be put on mental illness and not the firearm. And so hesitancy around firearms would not be as strong for someone if they've experienced gun violence through suicide. And so I think how people experience gun violence impacts their attitudes towards gun violence as well. So that's sort of how I would make sense of it. It really depends on how they've experienced gun violence and also who they are.

Bobby Doyle 8:41

Yeah, and people, when you ask them to define what gun violence is, you're going to get so many different answers the question of is suicide by firearm? Gun violence can divide a lot of people. Now we know from the data and from just the general consensus among health officials that firearms by suicide is gun violence, and it is a huge problem in this country, but many people to themselves and others won't count those and it definitely informs how they're thinking about this problem differently than if they see someone, one of their neighbors, get killed by a firearm from someone breaking in or some other community violence?

Kyle Barrentine 9:20

Yeah, Bobby, that's that's a great point. You know, I have a colleague, Zanny Brown, and she's a postdoc here at University of Virginia, and we're look together. We're looking into sort of what is our lay definitions, or how does sort of the regular person understand gun violence? When I was conducting the study, when I asked people sort of to define gun violence, we had this option called other. So people were able to select Other. For instance, if it wasn't homicide, suicide or a mass shooting, they were able to select Other. And when we looked at the qualitative responses for those who selected other, there were a lot of instances where people had firearms brandished on them. They heard a gun go off, they had been a friend had been shot, or they had been robbed. How people think about gun violence varies from person to person, and I think it's important to have this wide definition of gun violence that doesn't just focus on sort of if you've been hurt by a firearm, but whether if you've been if you've seen a firearm brandished, right, if you've heard it go off, these can also, I'd imagine these can also be traumatic. It can also shape our opinions and attitudes around firearms. But that's a great point.

Bobby Doyle 10:32

No, I completely agree. And there's plenty of great studies by economists and others about the impact of just hearing gunshots in your neighborhoods consistently, and how that can hurt economic outcomes for communities, hurt educational outcomes for kids. And so we can be as broad as we want about this, but ultimately, people want to make sure that they're safe and that they can thrive in their communities. And sometimes gun violence can really get in the way of that in a way that's can be really harmful.

Kyle Barrentine 11:04

No, yeah, I agree.

Bobby Doyle 11:06

Going back to this study itself, you talked a little bit already about how people tend to look like their friends, right? The pro gun folks are often very with the pro gun folks and the anti gun slash pro gun regulation folks are very with each other, that, for many policy makers, seems like to be one of the major challenges of our time of like, how do we take these two folks who all care about public safety and have them work together? Did you find that these two groups were very distinct, or was there any blending or overlap between these different social networks that you were able to identify?

Kyle Barrentine 11:41

Yeah, Bobby, when we looked at we broke down their social network based off of sort of the number or the proportion of friends who were pro gun, anti gun or neutral or also unsure. We had fairly even, fairly even numbers such that most people had networks. And this is also an artifact or a product of our sample size, or our sample where we got our sample from. And so we collected this data from Cloud research connect. And so it's just an online participant recruitment platform, and it tends to skew liberal. And so because it was liberal, most of our sample had friends who were anti gun or pro gun regulation. And so around like 37% of their networks were anti gun. But there was a mix between our participants on, you know, people tended to have at least, like one out of every three people that a participant named tended to be pro gun. And so around 30% of their networks were pro gun. And so it there was a mix. There was a variety between or how people categorize their friends, but when we break it down by sort of racial demographics, we see these clear, stark differences between the number of pro gun peers that white Americans and black Americans have, right? We find that around 28% of black Americans have friends who are pro gun, whereas it's around 34% for white Americans. I mean, so there's a, it's like a 6% difference between white and black Americans in terms of, like, how many pro gun friends they have. And so we do see some differences across race, but also we do see some sort of mixing between and so it doesn't seem like people have in, you know, networks that are entirely pro gun. It seems like people know at least one person in their friend group, at least one who's who's like pro gun, one friend who's anti gun, so on and so forth,

Bobby Doyle 13:32

Which that really tracks with I think most people's real life experience of this issue, right? Like we can have people in media and politics talk about these as starkly divided sides, but people in real life have friends who have all sorts of opinions and positions on gun regulation and firearms, and just because there is some sorting doesn't mean that it is a exclusive silos that are oppositional. There is a lot more mixing and conversation than may always be apparent for folks. Exactly You did speak a little bit to the demographic differences, you know, it's between white black Americans. Do you have any thoughts, or, like, additional details about where you think that might be coming from, or if there's any other demographic trends or differences you noticed in the data you pulled together?

Kyle Barrentine 14:17

Yeah. And so we find, broadly, you know, black Americans and white Americans, they have different different histories regarding guns and gun violence. Again, gun violence generally, guns have typically been used to sort of subjugate black Americans when we think about slave militias. Right in colonial America, colonists were required to own firearms, and these firearms helped to catch runaway slaves, which were thought of as property. When we fast forward a little bit to organizations, radical organizations like the KKK, black Americans have been terrified often through guns, and so guns mean something different to black Americans. My advisor Gerald Higginbotham, he has this excellent paper titled The Dark Side of gun safety, and it helps shed light on how guns can serve as a dual threat. For black Americans, having a gun in the household increases your likelihood of dying from a gun, which is intuitive, but black Americans are already seen as a threat when they have a gun, and so it it does double the harm. For black Americans. We're already perceived as a threat without holding a firearm, and once we have a firearm, we are seen as a greater threat. And so for black Americans, having a gun that doesn't produce the same amount of safety as it does for a white American, because black Americans have typically not had access to firearms. And when Black Americans have sort of sought access to firearms, and you know, when we look at movements like the Black Panther Party, they've often been met with opposition, right? And Ronald Reagan passed the Mulford act, I want to say 1967 as sort of an opposition to the Black Panther Party and sort of restricted open carry throughout the entire state of California, which has some of the most strictest laws of gun control today. And so these laws were brought up due to the presence of the Black Panther Party at the time. And so even today, black Americans and guns have always been sort of a threat, and white Americans are not looked at as a threat as much when they hold firearms, and so black Americans are acutely aware of this threat. There's a there's interesting paper by Bowden and colleagues, B, O, W, D, E N, published in 2023 and they found that black women tended to when they had a firearm, they may put it in like places that are pretty discreet, right? Like they may put a gun in the trunk of their car to prevent them from using it when it gets dangerous, or to prevent easy access to it, which is a bit counterintuitive. And so holding a gun for black Americans, it's it's more dangerous. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of work that suggests that black Americans have stronger attitudes towards gun control. And I think this is sort of an artifact of that, sort of these, having this, these stronger attitudes towards gun control, is almost recognizing the danger, sort of the dual threat that guns can pose, uniquely for black Americans. And so that's why I think I see some of these racial differences within my sample on the number of like pro gun friends and black American and a white American have. But it's it's it goes deeper, and there's a large amount of history to sort of support that conclusion.

Bobby Doyle 17:31

Yeah, and this is why studies like this are really helpful, because it's one thing to name history, to name these trends. It's another thing to be able to see them expressed in actual attitudes and data they're able to pull from folks and then use that from something that leads me into my next question, which is we are very focused here the gun violence solutions project on how do we directly tackle the daily deaths that we see from firearms? How do we get communities safer? Is there a way in which you think the findings you put together here could be applied in a way that could help people be safer? Is there a way you hope they're used to address this pressing issue?

Kyle Barrentine 18:14

Yeah, gun violence is one of the biggest issues of our time. Gun Violence is a uniquely American issue as well, right? There are over 400 million guns in America. At least. No other country comes close to the number of guns that we have here. My work focuses on peer influence and how sort of the company that we keep shapes how we form beliefs about firearms. I have some other work that I haven't talked about here. Study two of my dissertation, and it's focused on how these conversations around firearms help to influence our beliefs around firearms as well, for black and white Americans equally. And so I think that in order to reduce these, these daily, the daily deaths from firearms. Sort of getting at your question, we have to start early, right? Our beliefs around firearms are sort of, you know, they're crystallized. They're strengthened during our youth, during our sort of childhood, you know, late adolescence and so, you know, I think it's important to tackle how we think about guns, how we form attitudes early on, and so through initiating conversations with youth, with community members broadly, I think that's how we can sort of start to alleviate that's how we can start to sort of reduce the daily deaths by talking about the danger that guns pose Early on, so that children, particularly youth, are not influenced by sort of social media, by music, but so they know the danger the tool of they know that guns are a tool of mass destruction. They don't take guns. They don't take firearms lightly. And so I think starting the conversation early is important. And I think within my work, I want to help kick start that conversation within social psychology, specifically, there is a lack of work on understanding how gun violence operates, how our attitudes shape gun violence, and so I want to help build a foundation, a strong foundation for understanding how our environment, how our peers, how the company that we keep, shapes, how we form these attitudes. And then sort of using this research to help inform nonprofits, to help them inform state run policies on reducing gun violence through peer to peer influence, right by talking to people, by talking to friends, talking to family members and initiating conversations around firearms. You know, I think, I think organizations like Project Unloaded do an excellent job of initiating these conversations surrounding the danger of firearms for community members, particularly black and brown people. And so I think starting these conversations early about the danger that guns pose is a great way we can help to mitigate we can help to reduce some of these daily deaths from firearms. And again, this is the most pressing issue of our times. And so I think we have to start young. We have to start with children. We have to start with the youth in order to help reduce that.

Bobby Doyle 21:21

Yeah, and if speaking to your point that firearms are here to stay, many people talk about how important it is to have people understand how to be safe around firearms and have safe storage, but also that people are safe in handling and understanding what they're doing when they have one around them, like, if we know that everyone, most everyone in this country, is going to be around firearms in some way, it also feels very dangerous for many people to not understand actually how to handle themselves and have any training on it. And there's plenty of folks who are trying to prioritize that as a totally different approach then people will like, Project unloaded to make sure that, if we know this is a core fabric of our country, like, how do we make sure that everyone is safer? Because a lot of firearm deaths are from brash decisions and easy access and any friction and any education and responsibility we can insert into that process, we'll just be saving lives and lives and lives. So I cannot agree more that we need to make sure that people, early on, are informed and safe when they have firearms around them, if they choose to do so. I'd be curious if there's anything else that came up in your paper or in your research that you would like to talk about that we did not get to the end of our time here?

Kyle Barrentine 22:42

Yeah, so I'm interested in looking at how our conversations around firearms shape, how we form beliefs about firearms, and so how often you discuss gun violence, how often you discuss gun safety, how does that shape into your beliefs surrounding firearms, and beyond just your friend's attitudes, how does peer gun ownership so how many close friends you have that own firearms? How does that also shape your beliefs surrounding guns, surrounding firearms broadly within the within my dissertation work, I'm really interested in unpacking these conversations and packing peer influence more more and more.

Bobby Doyle 23:22

Well, it's been wonderful to have you join us today. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about this or contact you about this work?

Kyle Barrentine 23:30

Yeah, yeah. Again. Thank you. Thank you all so much for having me. And so like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to be on the academic job market this year. I'm currently a six year and so if you're interested, feel free to message me on LinkedIn. That would be the best way to find me and to message me. Thank you.

Bobby Doyle 23:48

Great, and we'll make sure to include that in the show notes. Thank you everyone. So much for joining. We'll see you next time you.