Abstract
In contrast to traditional developmental perspectives of aggression, evolutionary perspectives examine the potential benefits as well as costs of aggression at different times in development. Following resource control theory and life history theory, children develop alternative strategies of attaining resources, some of which involve using aggression. These include coercive controllers, who use only aggressive means to attain resources, and bistrategic controllers, who use both aggressive and prosocial means. Levels of aggression decrease with age, although both the benefits (e.g., status, resources) and costs (e.g., incarceration, damage inflicted on others) of aggression in older children and adolescents are greater than earlier in life. Children are sensitive to early environmental conditions that are predictive of later environments. These early conditions entrain development, including a propensity to behave aggressively, and to be consistent with the likely future environment. Children growing up in resource-poor and unpredictable environments adopt a fast life history strategy that is marked by delinquent behavior and elevated levels of interpersonal coercion. We conclude with an evolutionary developmental look at bullying, asking “What’s in it for the bullies?,” and suggest how such a perspective may be applied to reduce the incidence of bullying.
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Notes
- 1.
Most of the published studies on the effects of parenting on aggression have not been genetically sensitive in that they do not control for shared genes. Aggression has been investigated in more than 100 behavioral genetic studies using a variety of measures (see Dodge et al. 2006; Rhee and Wildman 2002). In a meta-analysis of twin and adoption studies, Rhee and Wildman (2002) reported that approximately 41 % of individual differences in levels of aggression could be accounted for by genetic effects, 16 % by shared environmental influences, and 43 % by nonshared environmental influences. Thus, although shared genes clearly have an influence on levels of aggression, behavioral genetic studies indicate an even greater proportion of the variance can be accounted by environmental factors, which include parenting style.
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Bjorklund, D., Hawley, P. (2014). Aggression Grows Up: Looking Through an Evolutionary Developmental Lens to Understand the Causes and Consequences of Human Aggression. In: Shackelford, T., Hansen, R. (eds) The Evolution of Violence. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9314-3_9
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