Aggression: Evolutionary explanation Flashcards
What is the evolutionary explanation?
Focus on the adaptive nature of behaviour, i.e., modern behaviours are believed to have evolved because they have solved challenges faced by our distant ancestors and so have become more widespread in the gene pool.
How does the evolutionary explanation differ from the ethological one?
Instead of an aggressive instinct, humans have inherited psychological mechanisms from their ancestors that make it more likely for them to pass on their genes to future generations.
What is the role of sexual jealousy in aggressive behaviour?
Sexual jealousy leads to aggression as males want to protect their paternal instinct. Men can’t be sure they have fathered a child; the threat of cuckoldry means he could waste his resources raising a rival’s offspring. Psychological mechanisms have evolved to ensure men are successful in reproducing, this often involved the use of aggressive strategies to retain partners.
What is the fear of cuckoldry?
What does cuckoldry result in?
What are cuckholded men driven by?
If men in our evolutionary past could avoid cuckoldry, what did this mean for them?
Fear they may be raising another man’s offspring.
Investing resources into offspring that aren’t of their own genetic imprint.
Sexual jealousy
They were more reproductively successful.
What did Wilson and Daly (1996) investigate?
Mate Retention Strategies (MRS)
What are the mate retention strategies?
Mate retention effort often occurs in response to a perceived or actual relationship threat.
- Direct guarding: Involves male vigilance over a partner’s behaviour e.g., checking who they have been seeing, keeping tabs on them, installing a tracking app on their phone etc.
- Negative inducements: Issuing threats of dire consequences for infidelity like ‘I will kill myself if you leave me’.
What was Wilson et al. (1995) method?
Women self-reported their partner’s mate retention strategies. e.g., how far they agreed with statements such as ‘he insists on knowing where you’re and who you’re with at all times.
What did Wilson et al. (1995) find?
Such behaviours are linked to violence. Women who reported MRSs in their partners (they agreed with statements like ‘he insists on knowing where you are at all times’) were twice as likely to suffer physical violence. Of these women, 73% needs medical attention and 53% said they feared for their lives.
How is bullying adaptive?
Ensures survival and reproduction.
Female vs male bullying:
- More women, less sexual competition for men.
- Volk et al they’re more attractive than the opposite sex.
- Aggression is adaptive.
-Health benefit- dominance means others are intimidated= less aggression and less stress for the bully. - Used in a relationship to control a partner.
- This ensures fidelity and secures resources for the female and her future offspring.
- This is naturally selected because it increases the chance of reproduction (Campbell 1999).
A03:
+ Evidence support
+ Explanatory power
- Deterministic
- Methodological concerns
Evidence support:
Several studies support the evolutionary explanation of human aggression. For example: Competition for mates: Wilson and Daly (1985) looked at data from 690 murders in Detroit in 1972 and found the vast majority were committed by and perpetrated against young men – the most common reason being “status competition”. This fits with the evolutionary explanation that men evolved to be more aggressive in order to gain status and compete for females.
Explanatory power
Men are generally more aggressive than women. The evolutionary explanation can explain this in the following way:
Why males are more aggressive: Aggression means males are more likely to win competitions for female mates and/or deter partner infidelity, which makes them more likely to pass on their genes.
Why females are less aggressive: Children are highly dependent on their mothers for survival. Because of this, Campbell (1999) argues that aggression in women makes them less likely to pass on their genes because engaging in aggressive conflicts increases the likelihood that a mother will die before she can raise her child to independence.
Deterministic:
Evolutionary explanations of aggression are deterministic. If aggressive behaviour is explained solely in terms of evolution and genetics, then it leaves little room for free will and means people are not in control of their behaviour. This raises ethical issues as it means people are not morally responsible for aggressive behaviour because it is not freely chosen.
Methodological concerns:
Evolutionary hypotheses are basically impossible to test because evolution takes so long to occur. We can’t run a controlled experiment over millions of years that compares genes for aggression vs. less aggressive genes to see which ones become more widespread. Instead, the evidence for evolutionary hypotheses is usually correlational – e.g., the correlation between strategies to deter infidelity and aggression suggests aggression would be evolutionarily advantageous. However, this correlation does not prove these evolutionary factors cause aggression.
