Most people are not violent people. From an evolutionary perspective, there are high costs involved for a member of a species to kill other members of it’s own species. Soldiers in war have to be trained out of their natural impulse not to fire weapons. For the vast majority of people, aggression is a last resort and I’m guessing that most readers have anecdotal evidence of this as rarely do everyday disagreements escalate into physical or even direct verbal attacks. It’s usually not worth the risk and stress to our systems.
There is lots of psychological research on how to reduce these inhibitions (e.g. dehumanization, Milgram’s obedience studies), but there is little research (feel free to let me know if I’m wrong about this and I’ll edit this) on the positive pressures towards aggression. Among the ideas I am familiar with are Sherif’s classic studies on competition for limited resources, which are echoed in Robert Wrights’s ideas about zero-sum competitions leading to conflict. However, competition itself is just a circumstance and it doesn’t necessarily get at the psychological mechanism for group level aggression. For example, people may compete because they covet a particular resource or they may compete because they need that resource to survive.
A couple years ago, I hypothesized that individuals are moved to aggression because of an excess of moral principle, rather than the absence of moral principle. In the context of the health care reform debate, this may mean harming others “for the greater good”, which could be defined as saving unborn fetuses, providing health care to the sick, defending the constitution, fighting for liberty, or an assortment of other moral principles which have been asserted by both sides as justifying actions that might normally be considered out of bounds. In the past few days, we have seen gun threats, windows broken, the elderly disrespected, and slurs and spit hurled at politicians. These incidences of crossing boundaries in the name of a cause are not limited to one party as those in favor of health care have harassed Bart Stupak and tried to have Joe Lieberman’s wife fired. No side has a monopoly on the ugliness.
I don’t have data that speaks directly to this question, but I do have this graph to consider. At the time that I started thinking about what I call ‘hypermoralism’, I created a small educational website that I thought I’d use to gather some exploratory data as I thought about these issues. The website is still in beta but the results of the initial survey are interesting. I asked people to think of a group that committed violence against civilians (e.g. 30% picked the Nazis) and think of the motivations behind that violence. I then asked people to think of reasons why, in an extreme case, they themselves might endorse violence against civilians.
Reasons to support violence against civilians
As you can see in the above graph, people believe that notorious groups that kill civilians are amoral (“They were amoral, having no moral standards.” or “They were seeking personal gain at the expense of others.”) most of all and were willing to entertain the idea that they were hypermoral (“They were killing people who belong to a specific group to avenge a past injustice committed by other members of that group.”) as that value was still close to the midpoint of the scale. Survival (“They were killing people because they themselves would be killed if they did not.”) was a distant third motivation.
In contrast, when people considered when they would potentially resort to violence against civilians, survival (of both the individual and the family, which loaded on the same factor in a factor analysis) was the prime potential motivator. Unfortunately, for my hypothesis, moral reasons were deemed no more likely than non-moral reasons for individuals, but I still think there is something to be learned.
Clearly, these scenarios are not directly comparable as the average respondent is likely actually different than the average Nazi or member of the Khmer Rouge. It’s not just a matter of perception. But if we believe in the vast amount of research on the fundamental attribution error, which shows that we underestimate situational pressure when others do bad things, there likely is some amount of attribution error occurring in this instance. It seems likely that many individuals within these notorious groups actually did feel some survival motivation that spurred their actions. For example, Hitler was quite poor, though clearly his actions went way beyond mere survival.
In the health care reform debate, it seems that a precursor to the ugliness is indeed couching the debate in terms of a life or death struggle for survival, justifying questionable behavior. Is America hanging by a thread? Then I suppose it’s worth taking extreme measures to save it. Are people dying every day that reform isn’t enacted? Then I suppose a few harassing calls to a congressman’s home are a small price to pay.
Politics in America can often be a zero-sum game and it is inevitable that passions will be inflamed on both sides. Liberals may have ‘won’ this vote, but we all lose when the debate gets too ugly and liberals are just as guilty of exaggeration when things don’t go their way. Indeed, I just received an email asking for help to “stop big corporations from taking over our democracy”, a reference to a recent Supreme Court decision which conservatives “won”. Such rhetorical devices may be useful, but we should all guard against where such exaggeration inevitably leads….ugliness.
– Ravi Iyer
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes very little sense for a species to kill members of it’s own species.
You do know that this statement is literally 50 years behind the current state of evolutionary biology? In 1963 VC Wynn-Edwards defended that proposition but his defense was promptly taken down by George Williams, Maynard Smith, and even Richard Dawkins. In fact, we now know that it works precisely the opposite way: multilevel selection teaches that cooperation between groups is only possible if it is based on aggression towards other groups. If groups are in constant competition with each other then groups with many free riders will be wiped out. Immoral genes are selected against at the group level. But this leads to the conclusion that genocide and out-group differences are, evolutionarily speaking, rational.
I edited that statement to “there are high costs involved”…I’m not an evolutionary biologist, so it’s possible I’m not current on that research and appreciate the references. I have read the Selfish Gene, and didn’t get quite the same “cooperation between groups is only possible if it is based on aggression” message. Still, I’ll admit that there probably are some ways to explain aggression as evolutionarily adaptive, though I’d still argue that it’s not common and that there is a high bar for such behavior, which was my main point. Thanks for your comments.
“liberals are just as guilty of exaggeration when things don’t go their way”
It’s true I’m a liberal, but this just doesn’t seem true. Compare John Stewart and Steven Colbert to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. No comparison.
I’d love to see you survey this: truthfulness/honesty as a moral value, by political persuasion. Very different from authenticity.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere, there’s also the issue of situation and generalizability. I wouldn’t be surprised, for instanct, to see conservatives value truthfulness higher in private (especially face-to-face) interactions, while downgrading it significantly in public (especially public debate) situations, where group competition is at play.
Thanks for your site!
I realize this is several months behind the times, but I’d like to respond to Mr. Roth.
First, I’m a libertarian, and thus neither conservative nor liberal. Most of my friends are either liberals or libertarians, and my immediate family are conservatives. As somebody that is outside of the currently dominant political trends, I don’t think that Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are the appropriate choices to serve as a liberal reflection of Limbaugh and Beck. From my view, it seems that the liberal response to Beck and Limbaugh would be Olberman and Maddow.
Also, I’d venture that on factual record in general, all sides are roughly equally honest. Since the left took charge, the right has gone particularly hysterical… however, the left went similarly hysterical when the right was in charge. Eight years ago, those that are now calling Obama a socialist were defending George W. Bush from the left’s charges that he was Nazi. W wasn’t a fascist dictator, and Obama is no Mao.
I know that libertarians such as myself engage in these rhetorical tendencies, weaving narratives about how corrupt public sector unions conspire against liberty for their own largess and how the religious right wants to use government to force its particular brand of religiosity upon those of us more religiously moderate. Neither of those narrative is wholly true, and both certainly misrepresent the motives of the opposition. The left engages in these tactics when it accuses the right of starting a war solely for the enrichment of private megacorporations, and the right engages in those tactics when it accuses the left of wanting to destroy American capitalism and crush the most innovative health care system in the world by forcing an unconstitutional law upon an opposed populace. There are facets of truth in every narrative above, but they miss the major substance and force of the arguments of their opposition.