Tag:
Aggression
May 7, 2012
Pinker, Politics, and the Decline of Violence: Roundtable on “The Better Angels of Our Nature”
This year's meeting of the International Studies Association featured a panel organized exclusively around Steven Pinker's book. Steven Pinker's book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," has been getting substantial media attention this year, and it makes what many see as a surprising and counterintuitive claim about the decline of violence in human evolutionary history. Now, the academics weigh in. This year's meeting of the International Studies Association featured a panel organized exclusively around Pinker's book.
Feb 11, 2012
Adaptationism and the Study of Political Behavior
For millennia, group boundaries have organized our identities, motivated allegiances, and inspired feats of coordination the likes of which are unparalleled in the animal kingdom.We hypothesize that psychological adaptations exist that structure the way we think about groups, and that regulate cooperative and competitive behavior in the context of specific coalitional dynamics; specifically, we argue that humans are endowed with an evolved “coalitional psychology.”