Simon Baron-Cohen (The Essential Difference), autism and hypermale syndrome. Notion that autism is related to a hypermale type of personality. Males being more analytical, females more empathic. Spatial skills. Physical features. Drive the analytical, organization, hierarchical male personality high enough and you get behaviors similar to autism (decreased social empathy and connection). Curiously, this accounts for the prevalence of autism among higher SES parents - get yourself a brain that's better at dealing with hierarchies and organization within a Western economy and you're likely to do better financially (until you pass a social tipping point).
Genes and aggression. Formally a taboo topic. There are contributions. Tough to track - maybe the gene modulates, maybe it's about impulsivity, pain, levels of arousal. It goes right back to different versions of the genes being expressed differently depending on the environment. Genes are relevant to aggressive behavior in the same way they are relevant to other behaviors - it only makes sense to state what they do in the context of particular environments.
Richard Speck. Horrifying sociopath. Student nurse killer. Odd gene make-up? A lab tech discovered that his genotype was XYY. This extra male Y chromosome was then "responsible" for his juiced up aggressive behavior. Big foofaraw. Turned out to be a lab error.
Nomadic pastoralist. Warfare. Single god. Warrior classes. Success in war as gateway to honor and glory. And groups that stay home to protect against having the animals stolen.
The American South was disproportionately settled by sheep people from the Northern ends of the British Isles. Pastoralists.
Cultures of honor. Killing over symbolic slights. Vendettas. Samurai. Clear rules about politeness and hospitality.
Richard Nesbit of U of M did some studies on culture and aggression. He sets up the study by having volunteers come to his lab to do some random task or whatnot. But the study itself occurs in the hallway. A trained participant gets in the way of the subject, bumps into him and then makes a derogatory comment, telling the participant to "watch it asshole." People from the North were generally annoyed but got over it quickly. People from the South were seeing red. Measures of the stress response (such as blood pressure, heart rate, testosterone levels), showed that the Southerners were off the scale with rage. Culture of honor. In the South you don't disrespect people. Politeness and good manners are demanded. There is the suggestion here that these behaviors may be genetically influenced (remember the settlers) and powerfully shaped by environment.
It also highlights a theme subtly suggested by Michel Foucault - the extent to which a society emphasizes that people are a certain way suggests the extent to which they aren't that way and the amount of effort required to inculcate the behaviors (i.e. when people naturally act in a certain way there's no need for extensive socialization and normalization to create the behaviors. The louder the society screams that people are this way, the more you're looking at a shaped, learned behavior. Schools do this. Ads. TV. Workplace norms.)
All theory aside, Southerners are more polite than Northerners. Whether it's an outgrowth of colonization, socialization, cultural beliefs or parenting, the South trumps the North when it comes to manners and respecting others.
Desert dwellers vs. rainforest people. More violence in the desert folks. Pastoralists tend to be monotheistic. Rain forest folks are all about polytheism. And we have the warfare and monotheism historical association. Which continues to this day.
Altruistic punishing. Spend your resources to punish someone else for cheating. Participants across cultures were similar in willingness to punish participants for cheating. But they differed in their willingness to punish others for being too generous. Happily, the US and UK students were the least likely to do this (and, of course, the Scandanavians). In between, Slav countries, Middle East plus Turkey. Worst rates went to Greece and the Arabic Emirates. [As a side note, a theory presented in The Wisdom of Crowds is that trust is necessary to make a market economy work. Greece is having a lot of success with their market economy these days.]
They didn't want to up the ante, or so they said. The levels of trust in society were lower in the societies that were more likely to punish antisocially.
The profile of a terrorist. Isolated. Nothing to lose. Young. Male. Right?
Wrong if we're describing Muslim fundamentalist terrorists. Instead the profile turns out to be a socially connected, educated and middle classy type of person. Even worse and more confusingly, they tend to not have actually experienced the oppression. And shockingly, not very high levels of religiosity. So wtf?
Is this true?
One argument comes from Professor Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Study guy) - under the right social context, virtually anybody can be convinced to act in bizarre ways. (The Lucifer Effect details the Stanford Prison Study and goes into elaborate depth on these topics. Over elaborate actually. Basically it's 300+ pages that state the same thing as the sentence above, plus a chapter or two on how great his girlfriend is/was. Not recommended.)
Another selection element comes from the nature of international terrorism - you've got to work within the network and be able to travel, plan and execute effectively. This calls on different skills than a socially isolated loner with nothing to lose may have. So you might get a natural selection that doesn't tell us about the actual characteristics so much as it indicates a framework. To wit, relative to the population as a whole, there aren't that many terrorists. So is it possible for us to find a screwed up dude who comes from a middle class family, has a family of his own and has significant education? Is 1/1,000 possible? 1/10,000?
In many ways this makes more sense than the violence arising out of conditions of affluence and education. After all, a dominant theme throughout hum-bio is that the expression of the genes is typically based on gene-environment interaction. The profile above seems to violate that theme, but that presumes that we have a full picture and that the listed external trappings mean what we think they do. Or that the external data is real (not that a terrorist organization would ever think to dummy up a history for a bomber that would confound anyone that researched him as well as get him access to the target zone.)
Most common cause of aggression? Male versus male aggression over reproductive access to females. Second most common? Males attacking females over denial of access to reproductive activities.
In chimp societies females head out when they hit their mating years. Thus chimps have related males. And warfare, cooperation, genocidal behaviors.
Pseudo kinship. People we feel are like our relatives. Band of brothers. Special living arrangements. Special terms. Creation of pseudo kinship identities.
Pseudo speciation. Making others seem more different than you than they are. So different that killing them hardly even counts. Example, Rawanda and the Hutu war cry - kill the cockroaches.
Prior to Congressional authorization of the Gulf War, a nurse "refugee" from Kuwait city gave testimony about appalling behavior she'd witnessed at her hospital. Allegedly, Iraqi troops had raided the hospital, killing off patients, stealing equipment, so on and so forth. Allegedly they took neonates out of their incubators, set them on the counter and stole the equipment. So Congress responded to the story by authorizing the war. It was a close vote and several Senators indicated this story was a crucial factor in their decision. But it was a hoax. The nurse was not a nurse; she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and she had been trained by a US government paid PR firm to say what needed to be said.
Naturally after selling this drama to the public, the media didn't make a big to do of it when it turned out to be false.
Wikipedia's recap is here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_(testimony).
Put someone in an fMRI scanner and flash pictures quickly enough to get subconscious responses and the amygdala activates when pictures of someone from a different race are shown.
Research by Susan Fisk provided alternate findings when the studies were tweaked. Add dots to the pictures and tell the subjects to look for dots and you do not see the same activity in the amygdala. Ask them to give their opinion on whether the person is older than 35 (categorical thinking) and the amygdala gets even more activated. Finally she primes them to think of the person as an individual - would this person like coke or pepsi? Then the amygdala doesn't activate. The difference is in whether the subject is thinking of people as part of a category or as individuals.
Also depending on background people were more or less likely to have the amygdala effect. Grow up with a multi-cultural background and you'd not have the same response. Contact theory suggests that contact with other social groups reduces aggression. But mere contact isn't sufficient. Spatial characteristics matter. Get just enough of one group to battle another and instead of getting cooperation, you are more likely to get conflict.
Robert Axelrod of the U of Michigan and the importance of symbols in peacemaking. Respect others' symbols, get respect and cooperation that goes beyond expected issues (such as resources). Nelson Mandela and Invictus. Conflict in the Middle East and issues of Hamas folks that represent the Palestinians making statements along the lines of "If they'd just acknowledge we got screwed in 1948 [when the UN created Israel on top of Palestine] we could get serious about peace" and Israeli hawks saying they could consider it if the anti-semitic talk would stop in Palestinian schools - taking the emotions, symbols and feelings of the so called opponent seriously as opposed to material elements or only your own concerns.
Maybe it's not about water rights or land. Maybe it's more about respecting each other as people, as evidence through respect for valued symbols.
Reciprocal altruism, game theory and better results. Repetition (number of rounds unknown). Open book play (people know your reputation). Punishment, especially second party altruistic punishment. Opt out clauses also select for cooperation.
Trench warfare and intentional misses as a way to negotiate peace.
Genes and aggression. Formally a taboo topic. There are contributions. Tough to track - maybe the gene modulates, maybe it's about impulsivity, pain, levels of arousal. It goes right back to different versions of the genes being expressed differently depending on the environment. Genes are relevant to aggressive behavior in the same way they are relevant to other behaviors - it only makes sense to state what they do in the context of particular environments.
Richard Speck. Horrifying sociopath. Student nurse killer. Odd gene make-up? A lab tech discovered that his genotype was XYY. This extra male Y chromosome was then "responsible" for his juiced up aggressive behavior. Big foofaraw. Turned out to be a lab error.
Nomadic pastoralist. Warfare. Single god. Warrior classes. Success in war as gateway to honor and glory. And groups that stay home to protect against having the animals stolen.
The American South was disproportionately settled by sheep people from the Northern ends of the British Isles. Pastoralists.
Cultures of honor. Killing over symbolic slights. Vendettas. Samurai. Clear rules about politeness and hospitality.
Richard Nesbit of U of M did some studies on culture and aggression. He sets up the study by having volunteers come to his lab to do some random task or whatnot. But the study itself occurs in the hallway. A trained participant gets in the way of the subject, bumps into him and then makes a derogatory comment, telling the participant to "watch it asshole." People from the North were generally annoyed but got over it quickly. People from the South were seeing red. Measures of the stress response (such as blood pressure, heart rate, testosterone levels), showed that the Southerners were off the scale with rage. Culture of honor. In the South you don't disrespect people. Politeness and good manners are demanded. There is the suggestion here that these behaviors may be genetically influenced (remember the settlers) and powerfully shaped by environment.
It also highlights a theme subtly suggested by Michel Foucault - the extent to which a society emphasizes that people are a certain way suggests the extent to which they aren't that way and the amount of effort required to inculcate the behaviors (i.e. when people naturally act in a certain way there's no need for extensive socialization and normalization to create the behaviors. The louder the society screams that people are this way, the more you're looking at a shaped, learned behavior. Schools do this. Ads. TV. Workplace norms.)
All theory aside, Southerners are more polite than Northerners. Whether it's an outgrowth of colonization, socialization, cultural beliefs or parenting, the South trumps the North when it comes to manners and respecting others.
Desert dwellers vs. rainforest people. More violence in the desert folks. Pastoralists tend to be monotheistic. Rain forest folks are all about polytheism. And we have the warfare and monotheism historical association. Which continues to this day.
Altruistic punishing. Spend your resources to punish someone else for cheating. Participants across cultures were similar in willingness to punish participants for cheating. But they differed in their willingness to punish others for being too generous. Happily, the US and UK students were the least likely to do this (and, of course, the Scandanavians). In between, Slav countries, Middle East plus Turkey. Worst rates went to Greece and the Arabic Emirates. [As a side note, a theory presented in The Wisdom of Crowds is that trust is necessary to make a market economy work. Greece is having a lot of success with their market economy these days.]
They didn't want to up the ante, or so they said. The levels of trust in society were lower in the societies that were more likely to punish antisocially.
The profile of a terrorist. Isolated. Nothing to lose. Young. Male. Right?
Wrong if we're describing Muslim fundamentalist terrorists. Instead the profile turns out to be a socially connected, educated and middle classy type of person. Even worse and more confusingly, they tend to not have actually experienced the oppression. And shockingly, not very high levels of religiosity. So wtf?
Is this true?
One argument comes from Professor Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Study guy) - under the right social context, virtually anybody can be convinced to act in bizarre ways. (The Lucifer Effect details the Stanford Prison Study and goes into elaborate depth on these topics. Over elaborate actually. Basically it's 300+ pages that state the same thing as the sentence above, plus a chapter or two on how great his girlfriend is/was. Not recommended.)
Another selection element comes from the nature of international terrorism - you've got to work within the network and be able to travel, plan and execute effectively. This calls on different skills than a socially isolated loner with nothing to lose may have. So you might get a natural selection that doesn't tell us about the actual characteristics so much as it indicates a framework. To wit, relative to the population as a whole, there aren't that many terrorists. So is it possible for us to find a screwed up dude who comes from a middle class family, has a family of his own and has significant education? Is 1/1,000 possible? 1/10,000?
In many ways this makes more sense than the violence arising out of conditions of affluence and education. After all, a dominant theme throughout hum-bio is that the expression of the genes is typically based on gene-environment interaction. The profile above seems to violate that theme, but that presumes that we have a full picture and that the listed external trappings mean what we think they do. Or that the external data is real (not that a terrorist organization would ever think to dummy up a history for a bomber that would confound anyone that researched him as well as get him access to the target zone.)
Most common cause of aggression? Male versus male aggression over reproductive access to females. Second most common? Males attacking females over denial of access to reproductive activities.
In chimp societies females head out when they hit their mating years. Thus chimps have related males. And warfare, cooperation, genocidal behaviors.
Pseudo kinship. People we feel are like our relatives. Band of brothers. Special living arrangements. Special terms. Creation of pseudo kinship identities.
Pseudo speciation. Making others seem more different than you than they are. So different that killing them hardly even counts. Example, Rawanda and the Hutu war cry - kill the cockroaches.
Prior to Congressional authorization of the Gulf War, a nurse "refugee" from Kuwait city gave testimony about appalling behavior she'd witnessed at her hospital. Allegedly, Iraqi troops had raided the hospital, killing off patients, stealing equipment, so on and so forth. Allegedly they took neonates out of their incubators, set them on the counter and stole the equipment. So Congress responded to the story by authorizing the war. It was a close vote and several Senators indicated this story was a crucial factor in their decision. But it was a hoax. The nurse was not a nurse; she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and she had been trained by a US government paid PR firm to say what needed to be said.
Naturally after selling this drama to the public, the media didn't make a big to do of it when it turned out to be false.
Wikipedia's recap is here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_(testimony).
Put someone in an fMRI scanner and flash pictures quickly enough to get subconscious responses and the amygdala activates when pictures of someone from a different race are shown.
Research by Susan Fisk provided alternate findings when the studies were tweaked. Add dots to the pictures and tell the subjects to look for dots and you do not see the same activity in the amygdala. Ask them to give their opinion on whether the person is older than 35 (categorical thinking) and the amygdala gets even more activated. Finally she primes them to think of the person as an individual - would this person like coke or pepsi? Then the amygdala doesn't activate. The difference is in whether the subject is thinking of people as part of a category or as individuals.
Also depending on background people were more or less likely to have the amygdala effect. Grow up with a multi-cultural background and you'd not have the same response. Contact theory suggests that contact with other social groups reduces aggression. But mere contact isn't sufficient. Spatial characteristics matter. Get just enough of one group to battle another and instead of getting cooperation, you are more likely to get conflict.
Robert Axelrod of the U of Michigan and the importance of symbols in peacemaking. Respect others' symbols, get respect and cooperation that goes beyond expected issues (such as resources). Nelson Mandela and Invictus. Conflict in the Middle East and issues of Hamas folks that represent the Palestinians making statements along the lines of "If they'd just acknowledge we got screwed in 1948 [when the UN created Israel on top of Palestine] we could get serious about peace" and Israeli hawks saying they could consider it if the anti-semitic talk would stop in Palestinian schools - taking the emotions, symbols and feelings of the so called opponent seriously as opposed to material elements or only your own concerns.
Maybe it's not about water rights or land. Maybe it's more about respecting each other as people, as evidence through respect for valued symbols.
Reciprocal altruism, game theory and better results. Repetition (number of rounds unknown). Open book play (people know your reputation). Punishment, especially second party altruistic punishment. Opt out clauses also select for cooperation.
Trench warfare and intentional misses as a way to negotiate peace.
