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Zaine comments on Why do people ____? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I suppose I also meant to ask after the proliferation of both types of abuse. Physical confrontations among men, from my schooling experience, were quite rare. I once witnessed an 'alpha' stare down someone challenging his status, while verbally asserting dominance and forcing the challenger to agree the alpha was superior, and the challenger was an idiot for thinking otherwise. From an anthropological perspective it was quite enthralling to watch.
I know that physical violence among male culture occurs more frequently in other regions, and that in Japan males employ psychological games similar to those of western women. So, to narrow down the question and assist in mitigating what ambiguity can arise from relativism:
In 'western culture', which type of abuse is most often used, and by whom? Why? Do females abuse the longest, and are their psychological games thus comparatively worse?
I guess this answer strongly depends on how exactly you define "abuse". My intuition is that generally the more intensive acts of abuse are less frequent, and the less intentive acts of abuse are more frequent; for example people more often scream at each other than hit each other. So where exactly you draw the line, the kind of abuse just above the line will probably be the most frequent. If we count only physical violence, in western culture (during peace) the most frequent would be men against women, or maybe parents against children. With psychological abuse, I am not sure.
A fair comparison would be a weighted sum: to multiply the frequency of abuse with severity of average consequences. But it is easier to evaluate physical damage from physical abuse (although this is also not simple: a small brain tissue damage from one incident may be undetected, but cumulative effects can be serious) than a damage from psychological abuse; the latter is almost impossible to evaluate.
(As a sidenote, focusing on statistics by sex is kind of privileging a hypothesis. We should start by looking at data, and draw the boundary accordingly. Sometimes the incidence will correlate with one sex very strongly: I guess criticizing not having a new dress for an event is a predominantly female behavior, just like e.g. bar fights are a predominantly male behavior. For other kinds of abuse, the incidence may be different.)
I think defining psychological abuse as that which is done passively (behind someone's back, through subtly in a conversation, etc.) and physical abuse as that which is done actively (aggressive contact, screaming, heated insults) would suffice.
I can see how asking, "... and by which sex?" can privilege the hypothesis that the most common type of abuse would be used by one sex more than the other. I think fixing it to saying, "... and by what sex?" solves it, though; what other answers could the data reflect besides male, female, DSD (intersex), or some combination of the three?
I meant something like this: Imagine that there is a thing T that you want to study. Correlation between T and X is 0.9. Correlation between T and Y is 0.6. Let's assume that there are no other known factors besides X and Y which would correlate significantly with T.
If you start your research by asking (if you are primed to ask) "is there a significant correlation between T and Y?", your research will continue like this "yes, we have measured that correlation between T and Y is 0.6, end of story" and you will publish this. There is a risk that you will miss X completely, because you will focus only on Y. But if your goal is to find a good predictor of T, it would be better to discover X.
I think there is a lot of motivated "research" about violence, where the bottom line is: men are evil, women are victims. This has some relation to the territory: certainly men commit much more violent crimes than women. Though even in this situation, why stop at the male sex? Why not also evaluate the impact of e.g. education, social class, previous criminal record, or (political correctness forbid!) ethnicity? Maybe there is some correlation here, too.
If we move from physical violence to other kinds of abuse, the results may change. Not just the correlation with male sex can be weaker, maybe even negative, but more importantly, there may be a significant correlation with something else, which we completely ignore, because we focus only on correlation with sex.
So generally, is is better to ask "what causes this kind of abuse?" than "how is this kind of abuse related to sex?". If the correlation with sex is significant (yes, sometimes it is), let it come freely as an answer to the first question, but let's not start with assumption that it is significant.
Thank you; I edited the question to eliminate the (selection bias?) privileged hypothesis.