Social psychologist Dane Archer and his colleague Rosemary Gartner published Archer's study as a book, 'Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective,' in 1984. Archer began to plan his international study of violence in 1972. The research was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Collecting data involved many problems. The results challenged many common assumptions. For example, Archer and Gartner found that Hong Kong is much more densely populated but much less violent than Detroit, challenging the notion that crowding causes violence. In addition, the United States and New Zealand are both multicultural, frontier-based, urban societies, but the murder rate in the United States is 50 times as high as that in New Zealand. The researchers used many sophisticated tests to examine the effects of the death penalty. They consistently found that, if anything, the homicide rates tended to decline slightly after the death penalty had been abolished. However, they expect the controversy over the death penalty to continue, because many people favor the death penalty for reasons other than deterrence. Archer believes that cross-national research holds great promise and that he can find the common causal relationships that he believes underlie violence in all societies.