Violence, Society and Evolution
Why do people risk their own safety to avenge grievances against total strangers? As a rule, violence is more common in groups with stronger collective identities, where an individual's fate is bound to its community's.
Psychologist Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland wonders if the tendency to risk oneself for the greater good could, over time, become embedded in biology as well as culture. In certain conditions, it could be a beneficial adaptation; to the extent it represents heritable biological traits, those should become more common.
It's a prickly line of thinking, to be sure, and utterly unproven. It might also be impossible to test, as the genetic underpinnings of behavior have proved extremely difficult to identify.
Image: Takver/Flickr
Citation: "The cultural contagion of conflict." By Michele Gelfand, Garriy Shteynberg, Tiane Lee, Janetta Lun, Sarah Lyons, Chris Bell, Joan Y. Chiao, C. Bayan Bruss, May Al Dabbagh, Zeynep Aycan, Abdel-Hamid Abdel-Latif, Munqith Dagher, Hilal Khashan and Nazar Soomro. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 367 No. 1589, March 5, 2012.