I'm looking for any resources arguing aggression is not
evolutionarily adaptive anymore and theoretical proposals of
what to do about it. I understand there is no "fixer" and
that is fine but certainly philosophy can address this
subject. My theory is man, despite his cognitive
superiority, shares much in common with other animals in
aggression. It is further my theory that science and
technology has threatened and indeed is unraveling what "it
is" to be a human being. Most people have a set of views of
what "human nature" is and science and technology challenge
that. Our "human nature" as it is constituted is too simple
to digest the changes brought about by science and
technology. We can't assimilate these changes. As a result a
growing percentage of people become desperate and the
ultimate reaction is catastrophic.
Aggression in some ways is adaptive but in other ways it is
not. Clearly, some aspects of aggression will have to be
genetically engineered and this will most likely effect many
other areas, including those areas of aggression which have
been adaptive. But I don't forsee an organism with its
gonads in a bucket and a brain on a platform.
Continuity vs. (Political) Correctness: Animal Models and
Human Aggression
D. Caroline Blanchard, Mark Hebert, and Robert J. Blanchard
E. Blanchard is Research Professor at the Pacific Biomedical
Research Center and Professor of Genetics and Molecular
Biology at the John A. Burns School of Medicine of the
University of Hawaii. Hebert is Assistant Professor of
Psychology at the University of Hawaii. R. Blanchard is
Professor of Psychology and Neurosciences, University of
Hawaii. With HFG support, D. Blanchard and R. Blanchard
are writing a book on the biology of aggression.
One of the sadly enduring themes in aggression research is
the inability of scientists researching humans and animals
to make meaningful impressions on each other's understanding
of the behaviors on which they focus. This problem is not
restricted to aggression research, but it appears to be more
strongly expressed in this area than in the study of most
other behavioral phenomena. Researchers on animal or human
aggression have tended to remain separate from and
disdainful of each other, even while attending and
participating in the meetings of a single dedicated society,
the International Society for Research on Aggression.
Needless to say, this situation has impeded the development
of any sort of unified view of aggression that applies to
both humans and nonhuman animals. It has thus been one of
several major problems that have hindered progress in
aggression research during a period in which many other
somewhat similar areas, for example the neurobiology of
defense and its relationship to human emotionality, have
made considerable advances.
Aggression research does have some distinctive problems in
bridging the gap between animal and human behavior. One is
that the concept of aggression as a phenomenon with
substantial biological underpinnings is widely perceived as
running counter to many worthy social and political views.
The assumption underlying the distancing of many of the
proponents of such views from too close contact with animal
aggression research is correct: Animal work often suggests
that aggressive behavior has extensive roots in biology, and
it is quite likely that such research may raise questions
about the modulation of human aggression that are difficult
to answer from the perspective that there is no direct
biological influence on this behavior.
These antibiological views encompass a range of concepts,
from the position that war, specifically, has no biological
underpinnings, through denial of any direct involvement of
biology in the substantial interindividual (socioeconomic,
ethnic, subcultural, gender, age) variation in violence and
violent crime. But since individual differences in human as
well as animal aggression are undeniable on a
phenomenological level, and since these so often seem to be
associated with factors that clearly relate to biology,
such as gender and age, the possibility of interactions
between biology and experience may be admitted. Gender
differences may be interpreted as reflecting greater
opportunity for aggression or greater reinforcement of
aggressive behaviors for boys/men as opposed to
girls/women. Eiither source, in turn, may derive from
cultural norms (a relatively "biology-free" explanation) or
from differences in gender-typical group composition or
social activities (an account that suggests, but does not
dwell on, a biological origin for these differences).
Similarly, while accounts focusing on self-esteem and
social skills as modulators of aggression may acknowledge
that these reflect an interaction of personality factors
such as behavioral inhibition with experience, the
existence of biological differences directly relating to
aggression is often denied, minimized, or ignored.
A second problem in acknowledging a relationship between
human and animal aggression involves the cognitive distance
between humans and other animals. There appears to be a
relatively well-developed consensus that no known nonhuman
species has cognitive or linguistic capabilities that are
close to those of humans. The difference is highly relevant
to the study of aggression because many instances of human
aggression are clearly accompanied by complex cognitions, or
expressed in terms of mechanisms that rely on cognitive and
technological achievements, which may have no direct
parallels in nonhuman species' behavior. Also, the use of
technology can ensure that a human act of aggression causes
an immense amount of damage impossible for animals to
achieve. Both factors may be involved in some discrepancies
between human and animal findings. For example, in nonhuman
mammals, alcohol sometimes increases aggression at low to
moderate dose levels but almost always reduces it at higher
doses (see Berry and Smoothy, 1986 for review). The human
literature on alcohol and aggression provides little
evidence of such a nonparallel relationship. A strongly alcohol-
impaired human can inflict damage both verbally and with a
weapon, whereas an equally impaired animal cannot, no matter
how high its motivation to attack may be. Perhaps the most
important consequence of the cognitive and technological gap
between man and nonhuman animals relates to war. War is
defined both in terms of aggressive action and in terms of
the social organization and tactical capabilities of the
opponent groups involved in this action. If these
organizational and tactical capabilities are inadequate,
then the aggressive behavior does not represent "war," no
matter how focused or how damaging, or how clearly it
involves groups rather than individuals. Such a
conceptualization enables a statement that war is a uniquely
human phenomenon, with no direct parallels in nonhuman
animals, but it does so only on the basis of
cognitive/technological differences. Regardless of what
intellectual or emotional comforts may ensue from treating
animal and human aggression as fundamentally different and
unrelated phenomena, unless they genuinely have no
significant connections, the tactic is scientifically
counterproductive. It removes the possibility of comparative
analysis and cross-fertilization of hypotheses between the
two realms. It deprives human-focused researchers of an
extensive literature using experimental methodologies to
investigate aggression phenomena, while those animal
researchers who ignore the human literature inevitably fail
to learn of findings that could open up new and fruitful
areas of investigation using nonhuman animals. Is there any
way that this segregation can be bridged and common ground
found for serious consideration of phenomena with which both
human and animal researchers are deeply involved?
Varieties of Animal Aggression | While the term
"aggression" can often be used without misunderstanding in
ordinary conversation, it has proved to have so many
different meanings, and to be so difficult to
conceptualize, that Benjamin (1985) selected it (along with
"intelligence" and "self-esteem"😉 as a particularly
egregious example with which to demonstrate the
difficulties of concept analysis. Analyses from the animal
literature suggest one important reason that a single, and
universally accepted, scientific definition of aggression
has been difficult: Several different phenomena are
encompassed by the term. Offensive Attack | The distinction
between "offensive" and "defensive" forms of adult
aggression has received a good deal of systematic attention
(e.g. Blanchard and Blanchard, 1977; Blanchard et al.,
1984), with both of these typically being differentiated
from play fighting (Pellis, 1988) and from predation.
Offensive aggression occurs in the context of a resource
(including territory) or dominance dispute and its
successful outcome is the termination of the dispute
through "victory," manifested as flight or defeat-related
behaviors by the opponent. Dominants (consistent victors)
gain resources, including access to females (a particularly
important "resource" from an evolutionary perspective) and
food (Flannelly and Lore, 1977; Blanchard et al., 1984).
Offensive attack involves a set of species-typical
behaviors that enable the aggressive animal to contact
particular body sites on the opponent where bites or blows
are delivered. Offensive attack can thus be differentiated
from other forms of aggression on the basis of the specific
target sites for attack, as well as the behaviors by which
these sites are reached.
Defensive Attack | Defensive attack is seen only when the
subject is defending its own body, not when it is attacking
another animal to "defend" a disputed resource. It includes
a salient threat component not seen in offensive attack,
with loud vocalizations and display of weapons such as teeth
or claws. The bites or blows delivered tend to be made on
different body sites on the opponent than those contacted in
offensive aggression. The successful outcome of defensive
aggression is discouragement of the body-threatening
conspecific or predator and discontinuation of its attack.
This can occur prior to the defensive attack, as the result
of defensive threat, or following the delivery of a bite or
blow, particularly to the sensitive eye/snout sites that are
the targets of defensive attack. While relatively little
field research has been done on the effectiveness of
defensive threat and attack, the strong inhibitory effect of
fear on predation suggests that defensive threat may serve
as a considerable deterrent (Pellis et al., 1988).
Play Fighting | Play fighting is common among the young of
many mammal
(Pellis and Pellis, 1991b). The behaviors involved in play
fighting have considerable structural similarity to those of
adult attack and defense, in that a species-typical attack
pattern is used to approach and make contact with a specific
site on the body of the opponent, while the defender
utilizes species-typical behaviors to make that body site
unavailable to the attacker. In addition, across-species
studies suggest that, as in adult fighting, attack and
defense in play fighting are motivationally distinct
behavior patterns (Pellis and Pellis, 1991a). However, the
transition from juvenile play fights to adult fighting does
not appear to involve a continuity in individual levels of
attack tendency from one to the other: Males that show the
highest attack rates during play fighting tend to become
subordinates rather than dominants (Pellis and Pellis,
1992a; Smith et al., 1996). Also, play fighting, at
adult fighting, as the play fighting attack target in a spar
between males may correspond to an important contact target
on the female,
finding that deprivation of play fighting has more of a
deleterious
In addition, play fighting defenses in juvenile females may
involve some
advances of males.
Predation | Phenomena related to predation are also often
subsumed under the rubric of aggression. In the laboratory,
many rats kill and eat mice, a behavior that, due in part to
the similarities of rats and mice, suggests conspecific
aggression. In fact, predatory (as opposed to conspecific)
attack can occur in species even more closely related and
more similar than rats and mice: Grasshopper mice kill and
eat laboratory mice. However, both the target sites for
attack and the behaviors typical of the attack pattern are
different from conspecific attacks by grasshopper mice
(Pellis and Pellis, 1992b). These findings indicate that
predatory attack can and should be differentiated from
conspecific attack, even when the combatants involved are
closely related animals. In addition to differences in
stimuli, response patterns, target sites for contact, and
outcome of these various behavior patterns, recent work on
the anatomic and neurochemical systems associated with some
of these strongly suggests that the physiology of these
systems is also different (e.g. Bandler and Shipley, 1994).
Most of the work on the neurobiology of "aggressive"
behaviors has actually involved defensive threat and attack,
with a relatively substantial literature also on "quiet
biting attack," which likely corresponds to predation. The
pharmacology of offensive and defensive aggression appear to
be different, with the former (Olivier, et al., 1991) but
not the latter (Blanchard et al., 1985) responding
dramatically to a class of "serenics" with effects at
various serotonin receptor subtypes. Motivational variables
also produce different effects on these behaviors, with fear
reducing offensive attack (Blanchard et al., 1988) and
predation (Pellis et al., 1988) but not altering defensive
attack (Blanchard et al., 1980).
Varieties of Human Aggression
Offensive Attack | If the function of offensive aggression
in animals is to obtain and hold some sequestrable resource,
how does this relate to more complicated human emotions and
impulses? We have argued (Blanchard and Blanchard 1984) that
"anger" is the emotional response to a challenge to some
resource for which the angry individual has a claim. For
example, data on violence resulting from "love triangles,"
(Wilson and Daly, 1992) suggest that these reflect attempts
to discourage challenges to the perpetrator's relationship
to and control over the love-object, regardless of whether
the latter, or a third-party challenger, serves as victim.
Similarly, Katz's (1988) descriptions of the subjective
rewards of criminal and violent behavior suggest that the
"resources" gained by violence often involve status and
access to particularly valued women and other status symbols
rather than money or goods. For many habitually violent
individuals, a challenge successfully overcome is associated
with strongly positive emotions; the more able the
challenger, the sweeter the victory. This analysis is
couched in terms that may seem inappropriate when applied to
animals, but it might be considered that for violent
offenders and, for example, male rats responding to an
intruding challenger, the stimuli and situations eliciting
aggression, and the consequences of successful and
unsuccessful aggression, are very similar.
These considerations also suggest why a "challenge" is so
frequent and potent a stimulus to elicit human aggression.
As Daly and Wilson (1988) have pointed out, in populations
of young men (who notoriously account for a disproportionate
share of crimes of violence, e.g. Blanchard and Blanchard,
1983; Campbell, 1995), failures to respond to challenge
jeopardize the status of the individual in the group and
limit his ability to command important resources. A simple
paradigm—"challenge elicits aggressive response"—emerges as
a common feature of mammals, particularly young postpubertal
male mammals. The specific challenge involved is typically
either to the status of the individual within the group, to
his access to females or other important resources, or to
both. Higher primates complicate this paradigm in that other
group members may get involved, either as seconds (Pereira,
1989; Silk, 1992) or in an attempt to control and defuse the
situation (Reinhardt et al., 1986). Humans have contributed
the factor that challenges may be purely verbal (and often
quite inventive). They have also created a very encompassing
form of sequestrable resource—money. The paradigm, however,
remains, and it is a mammalian pattern, not one found only
in dysfunctional human social groups.
Defensive Attack | If offensive aggression has some close
animal-human parallels, what about defensive attack?
Although defensive attack is easy to define, it is hard to
observe in people, for both ethical and practical reasons.
Polarized hypothetical scenarios, however, elicit consistent
differences for defensive vs. offensive attack situations.
[censored]-Stinson (reported in Blanchard and Blanchard, 1983)
asked male and female students to respond to scenarios
involving either a physical threat (attack by a stranger in
an isolated spot) or a resource dispute by indicating the
likelihood of specific actions or feelings. With reference
to emotional response, fear dominated in the former, and
anger in the latter. Physical and physiological responses to
the two situations also differed, with "freezing" and
becoming "stiff" or showing "nervous breath" describing the
fear situation, while becoming "hot" or "burning" was
associated with the resource dispute situation, as were
"clinching fist," "staring at," and "adrenalin surge."The
first choice action for the fear situation was to leave as
soon as possible, followed by (for women) looking around for
something to hit the attacker
Neither of these hitting-related choices was among those
selected as likely in the resource dispute situation,
although a strong desire to attack the challenger was often
cited. What is important is not just that these two
scenarios elicited a variety of strongly differentiated
physiological responses and subjective feelings, but that
they were both associated with a perceived tendency to
either attack, or to want to attack, the opponent.
Play Fighting | Play fighting obviously occurs in children
as well as in the young of most other mammal species.
Prepubertal boys (Boulton, 1993; Honig et al., 1992; Maccoby
and Jacklin, 1980), like prepubertal rats (Pellis and
Pellis, 1990), participate more often in fights than do
comparable females. Also as in other mammals, play fighting
and serious fighting in children are different, and this
difference reflects the actions involved as well as factors
such as facial expression and the apparent intent of the
participants (Boulton, 1991a). However, the literature does
contain suggestions of potential differences between the
play fighting of prepubertal children and that of rats. In
rats, the animal that proves to be subordinate in adulthood
initiates most of the play attacks (vide Pellis and Pellis,
1992a; Smith et al., 1996), whereas play fighting in middle
school children tends to involve partners that like each
other and are closely matched in strength, with both weaker
and stronger children initiating bouts (Boulton, 1991a,b).
Another difference is that serious fighting is common enough
in prepubertal children to be of concern to parents
(Boulton, 1996), whereas serious fighting is seldom observed
in prepubertal rats (Smith et al., 1996). Some component of
this difference may reflect specific learning: In a study of
middle school English children, many of the behaviors (e.g.,
karate chop, back kick, scissor kick) seen in play fighting
but not in serious fighting represent actions that are
likely to have been learned through observation/imitation,
perhaps of television programs. The latter two did not occur
in play fighting among Zapotec children, who did, however,
show some distinctive behaviors of their own, such as burro
kick and knuckle rap (Fry, 1987), suggesting that the form
of playfighting in 8-12 year olds already may have been
greatly altered by culture-differentiated practices.
Predation | The view that human predation has a biological
link to that of closely related mammals is supported by
findings that a variety of primates predate other
vertebrates, including mammals (e.g. Anderson, 1986; Kudo
and Mitani, 1985). In addition, primates appear to be among
the few mammals that also seek out and kill animals of
species that predate them, or that serve as major
competitors for prey (Hiraiwa Hasegawa et al., 1986),
suggesting that primate hunting is by no means limited to
animals that are to be consumed. Thus the hunting of large
and dangerous animals not meant for food, a feature of
virtually every society that has lived in proximity to such
animals, also has a clear parallel in nonhuman mammalian
behavior. Animal and Human Aggressions: Parallel
Neurobehavioral Systems? We are suggesting that, rather than
try to establish a basic parallel between animal and human
"aggression," it might be advantageous to look at the
concept of aggression as consisting of a number of different
neurobehavioral systems, at least some of which show
considerable evidence of continuity between nonhuman mammals
and people.
This is not to say that everything included under the human
aggression rubric will have a direct counterpart in other
mammals. Obviously, the "aggressive" investor or lawyer or
businessman has no direct correspondent in infrahuman
mammals, but this may be because the nouns are
inappropriate, not the adjective (if the noun were
"politician" the phrase might have an enhanced
correspondence). All of these designations reflect a common
theme, of actions and attitudes that seek to expand claims
to resources, rights, or influence, in a variety of relevant
arenas. When particular aggression paradigms are
individually examined there may be either parallels that
might be overlooked when an undifferentiated "aggression"
concept is employed or transformations in the organization
of that specific aggression paradigm as larger-brained
mammals with more complex social organizations and technical
capabilities are examined. This offers the possibility of
real breakthroughs in relating specific human aggression
phenomena to their nonhuman mammalian parallels.
What is likely to continue to be a stumbling block is the
one that has been there all along, that "aggression" is one
of the most value-laden terms in any language, and probably
will continue to be. Thus, while aggression can be a "good"
thing in the context of pursuit of a valued goal, even here
it carries the baggage of an implication of activity
encroaching on the rights of others; the tendency is for the
protagonist to label precisely the same actions as "defense"
of the desired goal, making the other guy the aggressor. As
the old saw goes, virtually every country in the world has a
ministry, bureau, or department of "Defense" while not one
has a bureau of "Aggression."