Evolved Psychology of Warfare
- 54 Downloads
Synonyms
Definition
Psychological processes involved in aggressive collective actions of groups toward other groups, typically characterized by high levels of destruction and mortality.
Introduction
Intergroup violence and warfare can have different forms. In raids, attackers significantly outnumber their opponents, whereas battles involve roughly equal numbers of combatants on both sides. Among traditional small-scale societies, battles occur less often than raids and are often ritualized, nonlethal encounters. In modern societies’ war history, however, there are countless examples of lethal large-scale intergroup encounters, like the Battle of Stalingrad, which caused more than two million military and civilian casualties. This battle was part of the deadliest war of human history, World War II from 1939 to 1945, with more than 60 million deaths overall. Violence between groups remains omnipresent today, causing...
Keywords
Social Dilemma Intergroup Encounter Intergroup Conflict Cultural Group Selection Aggressive IntergroupReferences
- Benard, S., & Doan, L. (2011). The conflict–cohesion hypothesis: Past, present, and possible futures. In S. R. Thye & E. Lawler (Eds.), Advances in group processes (Vol. 28, pp. 189–225). Bingley: Emerald.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Böhm, R., Rusch, H., & Gürerk, Ö. (2016). What makes people go to war? Defensive intentions motivate retaliatory and preemptive intergroup aggression. Evolution and Human Behavior, 37, 29–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Bowles, S. (2009). Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors? Science, 324, 1293–1298.CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar
- Choi, J.-K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science, 318, 636–640.CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar
- Keeley, L. H. (1997). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- McDonald, M. M., Navarrete, C. D., & Van Vugt, M. (2012). Evolution and the psychology of intergroup conflict: The male warrior hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 367, 670–679.CrossRefPubMedPubMedCentralGoogle Scholar
- Pinker, S. (2011). The better Angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
- Richerson, P., Baldini, R., Bell, A., Demps, K., Frost, K., Hillis, V., …, & Zefferman, M. (2016). Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, e30.Google Scholar
- Rusch, H. (2014). The evolutionary interplay of intergroup conflict and altruism in humans: A review of parochial altruism theory and prospects for its extension. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281, 20141539.CrossRefPubMedPubMedCentralGoogle Scholar
- van der Dennen, J. M. G. (2002). (Evolutionary) theories of warfare in preindustrial (foraging) societies. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 23, 55–65.PubMedGoogle Scholar