Violence
A History of Violence
by Steven Pinker
In this article Steven Pinker notes that the human taste for
violence has in fact been decreasing over the centuries.
Extraordinarily cruel spectacles that were considered fine
entertainment not very long ago, are found to be completely
disgusting today by the majority of earth's inhabitants.
(Think Michael Vick)
Pinker notes that this fact is not widely appreciated, largely
because we buy into a romanticized view of natural human
beings, courtesy of philosophers like Rousseau, Ortega, etc,
as well as scientists like Gould. The common idea among
them is that human beings are naturally moral, noble, and
peace loving, and that civilization corrupts that instinct.
But Pinker observes that empirical studies tell a different
story, and that in fact a precipitous decline in the taste for
blood is observed in 17th century Europe.
Pinker notes that archaeological studies of tribal violence are
now allowing anthropologists to quantify the relationship
between ancient, midieval and modern times, and the
differences are extraordinary. Some provisional results
based on quantitative studies are:
Typical tribal societies experienced 20 times the deaths
from warfare than was experienced during the 20th
century.
The frequency of death by murder fell in England from
24/100,000 in the 1200's to .6/100,000 today.
In the 20th century, the death rate as a result of
interstate conflict has fallen sharply, and for any given
conflict the likelihood of negotiated settlements has
risen dramatically.
If these claims are really accurate, why do most people
believe otherwise? Pinker's answers are reminiscent of
Gilbert's. Specifically:
We estimate the likelihood of events by how easy it is to
recall examples, and it easy to recall examples of
violence because that is what is reported most in the
news.
The truly fascinating question, though, is why violence has
declined so much. Pinker offers four possible explanations:
Hobbesian answer: Life in the state of nature really is
nasty, brutish and short. Hobbes argued that violence
declines when people agree to give the state a
monopoly on violence.
Materialist answer: When life sucks, people are more
likely to take on the risk of violence. But when life is
basically pretty cooshy, it's not worth it.
Robert Wright's answer: The logic of
nonzerosumness means that people are generally more
valuable to you alive than dead.
Peter Singer's answer: We have always had a small
capacity for empathy, but in tribal living it was only
appropriately administered to close relations. In
complex society more people resemble family (for the
reasons given by Wright.)
Why Men Rape
by Thornhill and Palmer
In this controversial article, Thornhill and Palmer provide a
biological explanation of rape behavior. Specifically, they
claim that rape exists as a behavior today because there
was a time in the past when it a successful reproductive
strategy. This claim is, of course, empirical in nature, but the
author's have been roundly criticized on moral grounds in a
fairly predictable way. You should be able to relate this
article in interesting ways both to Gladwell and Groopman's
arguments concerning human resiliency as well as the social
significance of claims that women and men have different
cognitive capacities.
According to T&P, the common sociological claim that rape
is not about sex, not natural, and is an inherently learned
behavior just doesn't hold up to empirical inquiry. The data
they select are
Most rape victims are women of childbearing age.
In many cultures rape is treated as a crime against the
victim's husband.
Rape victims suffer less emotional distress when they
are subjected to more violence.
Rape takes place not only among human beings but
also in a variety of other animal species.
Married women and women of childbearing age
experience more psychological distress after a rape
than do girls, single women or women who are past
menopause.
Social scientists regard culture, everything from eating habits
to language as an entirely human invention, one that
develops arbitrarily. According to that view, the desires of
men and women are learned behaviors. Rape takes place
only when men learn to rape, and it can be eradicated simply
by substituting new lessons. Sociobiologists, by contrast,
emphasize that learned behavior, and indeed all culture, is
the result of psychological adaptations that have evolved
over long periods of time. Those adaptations, like all traits of
individual human beings, have both genetic and
environmental components. We fervently believe that, just as
the leopard's spots and the giraffe's elongated neck are the
result of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so also is rape.
The basic rationale for this is fairly straightforward. Under
primitive living conditions the best reproductive strategy for
human males is to inseminate as many women as possible.
Reproduction is easy for men; it's women who are
compromised by the developing fetus. Women get no
evolutionary advantage at all from having sex with multiple
men. Although a male deciding to care for one female and a
few of his offspring may increase the likelihood of their
survival, it does not seem to be the optimum strategy. This
view is now commonly used within evolutionary psychology
to explain the observed differences between male and
female sexual behavior.
It‟s important to understand that none of this has to do with
what people consciously desire. People in our society have
most of their sex with the express purpose of not
reproducing. However, it is still the case that the desire to
have sex exists because it tends to result in babies. The
authors say:
Remember, none of the foregoing behavioral manifestations
of evolution need be conscious. People do not necessarily
have sex because they want children, and they certainly do
not conduct thorough cost-benefit analyses before taking a
partner to bed. As Darwin made clear, individual organisms
merely serve as the instruments of evolution. Men today find
young women attractive because during human evolutionary
history the males who preferred prepubescent girls or
women too old to conceive were outreproduced by the males
who were drawn to females of high reproductive potential.
And women today prefer successful men because the
females who passed on the most genes, and thereby
became our ancestors, were the ones who carefully selected
partners who could best support their offspring. That is why,
as the anthropologist Donald Symons of the University of
California, Santa Barbara, has observed, people everywhere
understand sex as "something females have that males
want."
The Mating Game
The authors note that humans and animal have elaborate
mating rituals that serve evolutionary purposes. Males
expend a great deal of energy, and often risk injury with by
fighting with other males, in displaying their masculine
qualities to highly selective females. The idea behind rape,
of course, is that it allows the male to avoid all this. So if you
think of courtship rituals and normal mating practices as a
kind of cooperative relationship that benefits the species,
you can see rape as a form of cheating or defection.
But though most male animals expend a great deal of time
and energy enticing females, forced copulation. rape. also
occurs, at least occasionally, in a variety of insects, birds,
fishes, reptiles, amphibians, marine mammals and
nonhuman primates. In some animal species, moreover,
rape is commonplace. In many scorpionfly species, for
instance. insects that one of us (Thornhill) has studied in
depth. males have two well-formulated strategies for mating.
Either they offer the female a nuptial gift (a mass of
hardened saliva they have produced, or a dead insect) or
they chase a female and take her by force.
The authors note that it is possible that rape is not actually
an adaptation in humans at all- in other words that it is not
exist because it is a successful strategy, but only because it
was a side effect of other adaptations. If this is the case,
then the genes that cause men to rape do not exist because
rape contributes to fitness, but because the other things
these genes cause contribute to fitness.
Rape and Violence
The authors note that while we are inclined to think of rape
as an inherently violent behavior, the evolutionary theory
would predict that rapists should typically not try to injure
their victims, since this would diminish its effectiveness as a
reproductive strategy. They believe that this prediction is
born out by evidence that the majority of rape victims do not
experience other gratuitous forms of violence.
Psychological Pain
The authors also note that the extreme psychological pain
that rape causes in women can make sense in evolutionary
terms. Specifically, if psychological pain is an adaptation
that helps people guard against circumstances that reduce
their reproductive success, then the pain of rape should be
extraordinary. Women who conceive as a result of rape may
also be physically injured, and is unable to choose an
appropriate mate by the normal courtship rituals.
Protecting Women
T&P argue that the evolutionary perspective provides
prescriptions for avoiding rape that the sociological
perspective does not. Regarding the education of men they
suggest that:
A program might start by inducing the young men to
acknowledge the power of their sexual impulses, and then
explaining why human males have evolved in that way. The
young men should learn that past Darwinian selection is the
reason that a man can get an erection just by looking at a
photo of a naked woman, why he may be tempted to
demand sex even if he knows that his date truly doesn‟t want
it, and why he may mistake a woman's friendly comment or
tight blouse as an invitation to sex. Most of all, the program
should stress that a man‟s evolved sexual desires offer him
no excuse whatsoever for raping a woman, and that if he
understands and resists those desires, he may be able to
prevent their manifestation in sexually coercive behavior.
The criminal penalties for rape should also be discussed in
detail.
Young women also need a new kind of education. For
example, in today's rape-prevention handbooks, women are
often told that sexual attractiveness does not influence
rapists. That is emphatically not true. Because a woman is
considered most attractive when her fertility is at its peak,
from her mid-teens through her twenties, tactics that focus
on protecting women in those age groups will be most
effective in reducing the overall frequency of rape. Young
women should be informed that, during the evolution of
human sexuality, the existence of female choice has favored
men who are quickly aroused by signals of a female‟s
willingness to grant sexual access. Furthermore, women
need to realize that, because selection favored males who
had many mates, men tend to read signals of acceptance
into a woman‟s actions even when no such signals are
intended.
They go on to say that this has obvious implications for the
way women choose to dress in various situations.
Provocative dressing is primitively received as sexual
readiness.
The Evolution of Evil
by Duntley and Buss
In this article D&B provide a naturalistic account of evil as
the imposition of fitness costs on others. The basic idea is
that the vast majority of things that people call “evil” are
ways of putting other people at risk of harm so that you may
accrue some benefit. In evolutionary terms, the concept of
a fitness cost is ultimately about decreasing a person‟s
reproductive potential.
Why Humans Inflict Harm on Other Humans
According to the authors the answer to this question is that
we are all competing with each other to reproduce. Harming
our competitors in any number of ways, physical,
psychological and social, can give us an advantage in this
competition.
Killing as Prototypically Evil
Obviously there can be a huge reproductive advantage to
killing someone. Not only do you eliminate this person from
the pool of competitors, but you may substantially reduce the
fitness of those who rely on him or her as well. Of course,
there are significant risks involved in killing people as well,
so the authors emphasize that killing (like rape) is by no
means always beneficial to the killer, only that it has been
often enough to be preserved in our behavioral profile.
The Functions “Evil” and “Good” Evaluations
As they see it, the evolutionary purpose of the category of
“evil” serves to protect us from being harmed by others.
The degree of evil correlates roughly with the perceived
willingness of an individual to do harm for little personal
benefit. („Good” by contrast, identifies the willingness to
bestow benefit at an unusual risk of personal harm.) So, for
example, a person who kills people for entertainment
purposes would be expected to be regarded as far more evil
than a person who kills for money or for political reasons.
This is not because we have any respect for those motives,
but because such motives make them less likely to be a
threat to any given individual.
The intentional aspect of good and evil evaluation also
makes sense from this perspective. The formation of
intentions is causally linked to successful action. We are not
inclined to tag as „evil‟ harms that are not intended, because
they are generally unlikely to be repeated.
The Exploitation of Evil
Once we have evolved a tag that identifies other as evil, we
are susceptible to manipulation by others who use this tag to
create fear and specific behavioral responses, such as war.
The authors cite Dawkins approvingly in identifying religions
as coming to power through the process of identifying other
groups as evil.
Alternative Perspectives
Like Thornhill and Palmer, Duntley and Buss criticize
sociologists for their failure to be empirical when studying
violence. Specifically they reject the common claims that
1. Violence is never an effective way to get what one wants.
2. Evil stems from an inability to control one‟s impulses.
If either of these were really the case, then the existence of
violence would be very almost incomprehensible in
evolutionary terms.
A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of
Evil
by Philip Zimbardo
Zimbardo‟s paper raises the question whether evil is
dispositional or situational in nature. On the dispositional
view, a certain kind of person has a disposition to behave
evilly while others do not. On the situational view, everyone
has the capacity for evil if given the proper incentive.
Zimbardo is a situationalist, and he thinks that the tendency
to accept dispositional explanations of evil can be explained
by the success of dispositional explanations in more
mundane circumstances. He thinks that the dispositional
analysis also permits us to believe that we are immune from
evil behavior, which may contribute to our well-being.
Milgram‟s Experiments. (p.6)
The Effects of Deindividuation (p.7)
Dehumanization (p.9)
The Stanford Prison Experiment