PATHWAYS TO ETHNIC CONFLICT*

David Goetze Utah State University

Abstract

In recent years, the tidy framework of rational choice models and the untethered plasticity of culture models have come under challenge as approaches to explaining human social behaviors. Chief among scientifically-oriented competitors are biologic, evolutionary, and cognitive science approaches. This new work is helping to fill in the notorious “black box” that, in an earlier era, characterized human brain function. Reasoning in cognitive science and evolutionary theory is expanding our conceptual understanding of how the human brain really works and how it generates behaviors while a growing body of empirical work is enabling us to begin the testing of derived hypotheses. Even before the recent explosion of life science research, the modern synthesis of genetics and Darwinian natural selection solidified the underpinnings of evolutionary theory and paved the way for its use as a framework or paradigm for studying human social behaviors.

This article asks what the evolutionary paradigm and life sciences can contribute to explaining one of the more important broad-scale behavior sets of the human species – those pertaining to warfare and, especially, to ethnic war, often cast as a primordial and seemingly ineradicable form of human conflict. The quick answer is that these modes of thought and research draw on evolutionary reasoning to formulate and constrain hypotheses about the causes and consequences of war; dispense with arbitrary and unduly limiting conceptions of human nature that stymied the search for genuine sources of warfare; and explore research areas, for example, human neurology and genetics, that were utterly untapped a few decades ago and are now offering a cornucopia of scientific evidence relevant to all types of human social behaviors. Here, we make no attempt to cover the gamut of topics unleashed by these new perspectives, but merely to trace broad outlines of these developments and to mention how some areas are progressing and might be mined for more knowledge about human warfare.

*Presented at the conference on Evolutionary Theory and Political Science, 4-5 June 2010, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy 2

PATHWAYS TO ETHNIC CONFLICT

The phrase, “ethnic war,” conjures up visions of deeply bonded tribes fighting it out across ancient landscapes over grudges that have recurring qualities – blood feuds, battles for territory, raids over resources and women. In the 21 st century, however, ethnicity is hardly a relic of the past despite the predictions of Marxist and “modernization” theorists about its imminent demise. In contemporary times ethnicity seems to be the focal point for conflicts as destructive and lethal as any that played out in historical or prehistorical contexts. One only needs to witness the carnage of recent or ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, and Tibet to be persuaded. Even the state-inspired wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to have an ethnic subtext. A common fear expressed about Iraq, for example, is that it will degenerate into a full-blown ethnic war when the Americans finally withdraw. Indeed, ethnic warfare and related forms of ethnic group violence have been the scourge of the last half century accounting for upwards of some 20 million unnatural deaths, untold injuries, tens of millions of displaced refugees, economic destruction and unfathomable psychological anguish. Any improvement in our understanding of the sources of ethnic war has to be welcome.

The claim here is that advances in the depth of understanding and expansion of the scope of application of evolutionary theory along with the explosion in the methods and quantity of life sciences research on human social behavior are offering new opportunities for expanding our understanding of human warfare. Of course, this work is not likely to result in critical and sudden revelations of the causes of ethnic war. Any progress is likely to be drawn out as with most scientific endeavors. In the short term, however, we can hope that some fresh approaches will be added to explanations of war, that new and interesting hypotheses will be formulated, and that novel sets of data will be generated that bear on these hypotheses. For that matter, even improved understanding of the multiple causes of ethnic war will not necessarily lead us to the steps needed for their prevention or resolution. Rather, we might expect that some expansion will take place in the tools employed to resolve and prevent warfare. Overall, these claims are modest but they do involve tapping pools of research resources that are fairly unexploited and may one day may yield important results.

Past Approaches to the Study of Social Behaviors One way to put developments in the biologic, evolutionary, and cognitive sciences into context is to trace the emergence of novel approaches to the study of human behavior over the last half century. Every academic generation seems to tout at least one new approach and over the last fifty years several have taken shape that differ fairly drastically in their premises about the internal workings of the human animal and about how they translate environmental inputs into behavioral outputs. 3

Behavioral Revolution Sometime in the middle of the last century a new “revolutionary” approach to the study of human psychology and social life emerged. It was dubbed the “behavioral revolution” and took as its central premise that what goes on inside humans was largely unknown and unobservable. Since our knowledge about human internal functioning was speculative at best, we should worry about it less, treat it as a black, empty box (John Locke’s tabula rasa, recently and artfully examined by Stephen Pinker, 2002) and focus not on the internal workings of humans, but instead on the observable “inputs” to human life, that is, the stimuli that emanate from our external environments and impinge on our lives and, secondly and most importantly, the observable “outputs” of human functioning – human behaviors.

This new approach was a Godsend and a field day for those who wanted to push the study of human activity into the realm of science. They could devise measurements of observable inputs and outputs and assess correlations among them. A parallel revolution in quantitative analysis began and lent a veneer, perhaps even the substance, of true science to the analysis of human behaviors. In the study of warfare, researchers could search for factors that had some plausible connection to the onset of war, measure these factors for a multitude of war contexts, and assess their correlation with the observation of actual wars. J. David Singer’s Correlates of War project (Singer and Small; Geller and Singer, 1998; Singer, 2010), Ted Robert Gurr’s (1970, 1996) research on ethnic conflicts and rebellions, and Rummel’s (1975, 1976) quantitative analyses are noteworthy examples of the genre and continue to shape contemporary research on warfare especially in the field of Political Science. The Correlates of War project has been especially influential spawning hundreds of studies ( www.correlatesofwar.org ) that utilize the extensive database amassed by Singer and his colleagues on the various features and hypothesized correlates of mostly interstate, modern wars. Through its use, researchers have thoroughly examined features of national capability, geography, structure of alliances and the international system, military buildups, trade, regime type, and culture.

The fruitfulness of the behavioral approach in the general study of social behaviors was soon challenged, however, by the realization that there must be something of import going on inside the human brain moderating environment-behavior relationships and that those correlations would never be adequately understood without a grasp of the interceding human material. The problem was complicated even further in the case of war studies by the focus on structured collectivities, such as states, that were presumed somehow to be the primary actors in initiating and conducting wars. The building blocks of collectivities are people and if individuals are themselves little more than empty vessels, their aggregations must be tantamount to the outcome of multiplying by zero. In an article written more than a quarter century after the initiation of the Correlates of War project, Singer (2000) himself seemed to comprehend the nature of the problem, lamenting about the limitations of what had been accomplished through behavioral research on warfare and noting that the causes of war had still to be definitively identified. Initially, he blamed the problem on the complexities of social phenomena and the complexities of causality even wondering if causality itself was not a “chimera.” But 4 echoing a theme of the present article, Singer concluded that the way out of these perplexities was to focus the study of warfare on the construction of decision-making models, that is, articulation of how human brains operate to produce social behaviors and especially decisions about mobilizing for warfare. Those decisions, he surmised, would take into account the environmental variations that had been the target of so much prior study.

Of course, a model of how humans made decisions and how the brain functioned was absent by design from the behavioral perspective. Long before Singer arrived at his own conclusions about the crucial role of human decision making, different approaches were being launched to fill in the void; to paint something into the black box of mental function. One approach, not far removed from the behavioral perspective, was pejoratively immortalized by Tooby and Cosmides (1994) as the “Standard Social Science Model.“ It treated brain function as infinitely malleable. Culture could simply be poured into the cranial void through a basic and general learning process -- whatever the brain learned to do was indistinguishable from how it functioned. While gaining some knowledge about general learning processes, adherents to this model still had little to say about the specific functions performed by the brain, the particular and varied processes that operate within it, and how brain functions might constrain the relationships among environmental stimuli and social behaviors. Its use in the study of warfare was miniscule, but it did exert considerable influence in the study of human psychology including the study of aggressive behaviors which were presumed to be the mere product of cultural learning and little else.

Rational Choice Theory A second approach, labeled “rational choice,” became very influential in Economics and Political Science and penetrated other social science disciplines as well. Rational choice approaches posit that the brain is a rational calculator of benefits and costs to the individual. Its practitioners deduce social behaviors from the interactions of individuals who all make choices through the assessment of the net value of alternative courses of action. Humans were presumed to have an ordered hierarchy of preferences over states of the world and the resources available in them and sought to acquire their preferred bundle of alternatives. The formality of the rational choice approach yielded additional advantages to those who pushed the science side of the study of social behavior. Mathematics, the language of science, could now be employed to deduce and erect theories of social behavior, some of them most impressive even without the underpinnings of empirical testing.

Rational choice models had a long history of use in Economics but branched out to other disciplines in the late 50’s and 60’s, especially with Mancur Olsen’s (1965) publication of “The Logic of Collective Action” in which the author attempted to account for general group action through use of rational actor models. Likewise, the field of Political Science was forever transformed by Anthony Downs’ (1957) attempt to explain voting behaviors and outcomes with models that presumed that individuals in the electorate made political decisions through the rational assessment of costs and benefits of alternative political options. 5

Even earlier applications can be found in the study of warfare, especially in the area of arms races (Ashford, et al, 2009. The Collected Works of Lewis Fry Richardson ). Sometime between the two World Wars, Lewis Richardson began investigating the prospects for war by positing that societies could make rational choices about arms buildups. He assumed that the paramount preferences or values held by societies in any potential war context were (1) protection against threats posed by external societies and (2) minimization of the costs of their own defenses. Because achieving one of these values tended to be contrary to the achievement of the other value, arms races and war prospects could be deduced from their specific manifestations. As with any rational choice analysis, Richardson’s predictions about the prospects for war depended mightily on state actors consistently making “rational” decisions and maintaining the values posed by Richardson at the top of their preference hierarchies. It should come as no surprise that empirical researchers have struggled to validate the predictions of Richardson’s models.

Presumptions about the rationality of actors also provided Game Theory with its most common predictive standard. Based on expectations of rational behavior, game theorists were able to devise equilibrium solutions to games whose players were portrayed as having both competing and complementary interests. Thomas Schelling (1963) pioneered the application of game theory to warfare or at least to strategies that involved pre-war negotiation and deterrence and the prospects for surprise attacks. He understood contestants in pre-war circumstances to have interests that were neither purely competitive nor purely cooperative and demonstrated that bargaining and negotiation were behaviors that depended on these mixed motives. The emphasis in Schelling’s work was on the interaction of actors (albeit only two) and how goal achievement is dependent not only on one’s own rational choices but also the choices of others and the perceptions of what others may do. For example, rational actors might have no interest in launching surprise attacks against one another, but through consideration of the possible intentions of others, find themselves compelled to launch preemptive strikes. In addition to the values of obtainable resources, Schelling introduced the actions and potential actions of others as inputs to choice processes. However elegant and novel, his analyses remained confined to circumstances involving only two actors who, by virtues of the model, were confined in their behavioral repertoires to rational actions as Schelling understood them.

As Thayer (2004, chapter 2) relates in Darwin and International Relations , rational choice theory may have penetrated the study of war most meaningfully in its influence on international relations theory and the development of realist theory. In realist theories, actors in the international system are presumed to be maximizers of power and dominance (Niebuhr, 1940; Morgenthau, 1985) or security (Waltz, 1979; Mearsheimer, 2001) in a world of anarchic state actors. Given those goals, realists derive behaviors from egoist assumptions about humans and states, the rational calculations of states, and features of the systems in which they operate such as balances or imbalances of power. Realists perceive wars as attempts by decision makers to maximize power and dominance when alternatives would yield lower expected returns. Thayer accepts that the pursuit of these goals by state actors are often the proximate causes of warfare but makes the point 6 that their origins as motivators of state action are either unexplored or based on unscientific narratives about human nature. Evolutionary theory comes to the rescue by providing a scientific basis for a more nuanced and supportable egoist assumption and for the derivation of specific goals.

Evolutionary and Life Science Approaches Evolutionary and Life Science approaches appear to offer some advantages over traditional approaches to the study of war in a number of specific areas:

Preference Hierarchies One of the major shortcomings of rational choice theory is that the source of human preferences are unspecified and undeciphered. Specification of or even hypotheses about the relative value of goods and resources to the individual or about environmental sources that set off processes of choice were considered beyond the scope of most rational choice models. An even more complex challenge that went unmet by rational choice theory is the construction of a hierarchy of preferences. Without knowledge of the trade-offs humans are willing to make among competing goals, predictions of behavior have to be of the most contingent sort. If an individual could be assumed to be pursing such and such a goal, then his or her behavior might be expected to follow a particular pattern. The most useful mid-range theories that came out of the rational choice tradition were, indeed, those that assumed a type of goal to be maximized, for example, power in realist theories, protection in arms race theories, or large budgets in theories about bureaucracies. Since budget maximization is the presumed goal of bureaucrats, for example, one could predict that bureaucratic behaviors would be focused on adding functions to a person’s resident bureau as a justification for seeking ever more public funds (Niskanen, 1971). The logic behind the predictions in these models often made them attractive but, typically, little was said about where the goals and preferences came from, why particular goals were prominent in particular contexts, and how they might be related to one another more generally. The sources of goals were undetermined or, at best, derived from ad hoc explanations.

In a departure from the mere postulation of goals, Thayer (2004) demonstrated how egoism and goals could be extracted through application of evolutionary theory. A key element of the evolutionary paradigm is that humans, not to mention other species, are engaged in a competition for resources in order to survive and promote the persistence of their genes. The resources most efficient in promoting survival and genetic advancement are presumed to be the ones most highly sought. Hence, the presumption of human competition engendered at least a basis for understanding human preferences and a hierarchy of preferences. How far can evolutionary theory be taken in providing a meaningful basis for constructing preference hierarchies and thus a basis for explaining and predicting social behaviors? Most likely, preference hierarchies are domain specific. One set of preferences will be ranked in such a way as to facilitate resolution of problems unique to that domain, while a different set may facilitate problem resolution in a different domain. What can evolutionary theory tell us about preference hierarchies most germane to the onset of wars or subsets of behaviors that pertain to warfare?

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Mental Processes Hierarchies of preferences or goals specify what humans pursue in a given context or domain. How they pursue those goals is another matter and requires elucidation of processes. Perhaps the most direct challenge to the black box or blank slate approach to studying human behavior is the establishment of the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists posit that the human brain is rife with processes or mechanisms that evolved for the purpose of resolving or addressing special types of problems that humans encountered repeatedly in ancestral environments and that characterized much of human existence. A common problem that might have arisen in times of scarcity, for example, was to learn about previously unknown food resources. In the view of evolutionary psychologists, mental algorithms or psychological mechanisms evolved in the human brain that facilitated resolution of one or more of these survival- level problems. Environmental stimuli of a particular type (perhaps visible decline in wild grain stocks) signals that a particular problem is at hand and activates an appropriate mechanism in the brain which, in turn, generates behaviors that address the problem (a speech mechanism perhaps that enabled individuals to exchange information about the location of additional food resources). The mechanism connecting environmental stimuli with behaviors evolved and took hold as part of our mental architecture precisely because it generated behaviors that were useful in promoting survival and the propagation of genes that gave life to it. Tooby and Cosmides (1994) argue that the environments facing humans in ancestral times were common enough and enduring enough to generate mechanisms that were universal in the basics of their operation across members of our species. A principal task of social science, then, ought to be identification of these mechanisms and how they relate environmental stimuli to behavior. To the extent that mechanisms of the brain evolved to solve repeatedly encountered problems, speculation about what purposes mechanisms would have served and what goals they would have facilitated in ancestral environments are important questions to pose.

Of course, mobilization for warfare and warfare itself are behaviors that have unique purposes undoubtedly reflective of challenges encountered in ancestral environments. Individual, family, and group survival were frequently at stake. Hunter-gatherer bands needed alarm mechanisms to enable the group to learn rapidly about the approach of potentially predatory enemies. They also needed mechanisms to ascertain the intentions of approaching groups. Were these groups deadly enemies in search of resources to steal or were they friendly groups seeking cooperative neighbors to trade with or achieve some large-scale task? Can evolutionary theory help us identify the markers, behaviors, environmental stimuli that set in motion this evaluative process? From time to time, evaluative processes are likely to result in judgments that advancing groups are, indeed, deadly enemies. What precise stimuli activate processes that mobilize behaviors (flee, freeze, or fight) in the face of such enemies?

Emotions I sometimes ask my students whether their choices about mates (boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses) were made primarily on rational criteria or as a result of emotions elicited in their interactions with a prospective mate. Most of them have little difficulty identifying emotions as paramount. On some level, they seem to grasp the importance of emotions at 8 least in this one domain of human decision making. In more systematic fashion, LeDoux (1996) explores the adaptive role of emotions and unmasks many of the processes utilized by the brain in producing them. He makes an especially strong case for the adaptive significance of emotions in facilitating decision making where humans have to make choices rapidly (perhaps in the face of mortal threats) without the time needed to make rational, deliberative assessments of alternatives. He also emphasizes that emotions play key roles in regulating memories of past events – suppressing dysfunctional memories and conjuring up ones useful for current decision making. Clearly, emotions play a huge role in decision making that affects individual and social behaviors and their neglect in rational choice models seems all the more debilitating.

In War and Human Nature , Steven Rosen (2005) examines the role of emotions in decision making about warfare. He notes that rational, conscious calculation is itself likely to be activated only for particular domains of choice and that decisions based on subconscious, emotional processes are ubiquitous and especially prominent in specific domains of behavior – including war contexts. Apparently, different mental mechanisms have evolved that operate for rational, conscious deliberations than for subconscious, emotional triggers of behavior.

Rosen uses this emerging knowledge base to hypothesize about the psychology of people involved in making decisions about war. He argues that leaders are frequently confronted with important decisions about warfare but with very little time to assess alternatives. Suddenly confronting a mobilized enemy force, for example, a leader would typically need to make immediate decisions that might be crucial for the survival of his/her group. Under these circumstances, mental mechanisms that require very little processing time and that enable rapid decision making can be expected to kick in. Rosen identifies one such process as “emotion based pattern recognition.” The crux of the process is that an individual draws on memories invoked by circumstances in the present that resemble events that have occurred in that individual’s past. Memories most likely to be recalled are those that were associated with emotional arousal at the time they were encoded. In the face of a mobilized enemy, one might want to know what strategies the enemy group is likely to employ as an invading force. Leaders can hardly expect to make detailed assessments of the current orientations of the enemy force in the time frame likely to be available and instead might look for similarities, perhaps even superficial ones, between the features of the force currently on the move and enemy groups that might have been confronted in the leader’s past. Past wars can be expected to generate powerful emotions (fear, intense bonding with one’s one group, exhaltation, to mention only a few) and an emotion based pattern recognition mechanism would seem likely to recognize or pull up images of groups encountered by leaders in their experience of past wars to enable rapid- fire comparisons and decisions based on them.

Rosen confined his examination of an emotion based pattern recognition mechanism to the psychology of individuals in the forefront of decision making about war. Can these same constructs be usefully applied to the sociology of war? Perhaps we can predict the direction and movement of war orientations of large-scale groups (ethnies and nations) through examination of the interactions of individuals behaving not as rational, utility 9 maximizers but as beings driven to similar behaviors through environmentally-triggered emotions.

In studies of the causes of war and, especially ethnic war, considerable attention is typical devoted to analysis of past events as carrying the seeds of current conflicts. Debates rage about the extent to which “ancient hatreds” influence contemporary ones (International Commission, 1996: Introduction; Kaufman, 2001: chapter 1). Are “ancient hatreds” the critical influence on current mass orientations or are they mere froth on the beer of the true causes of contemporary conflicts? In Modern Hatreds , Stuart Kaufman (2001) attempts to reconcile these divergent views by arguing that myths and symbols become the intermediary devices through which past conflicts bear on the present. Stories are created about past conflicts that are passed from generation to generation as relatively benign understandings of the past or they are disseminated under political and government auspices to promote nationalism or orientations in support of war mobilization. Myths need not be accurate portrayals of past events and are necessarily condensed accounts. Still, their credibility and resonance surely depend on their consistency with the memories held by those who experienced them or with the messages acquired by those who see themselves as the purveyors of myths across the generations.

What past events are most likely to serve as the content of myths? A couple of crude answers come to mind: (1) consistent with emotion based pattern recognition, events are most likely remembered and transmitted if they aroused powerful emotions at the time of their occurrence (and affected large groups of people) and (2) the understanding of these events pertain to group survival in the present. Myths that describe epic past conflicts may hold clues about who most to fear in contemporary contexts and what strategies enemy groups might attempt to employ to subdue your own group. These observations inspire a plethora of questions foremost among them -- how are those myths conceived and then utilized in current circumstances? As Rosen notes, considerable research in cognitive psychology supports the notion that emotions activated at the time of memory encoding are crucial to understanding the degree and scope of retention of events that comprise the stuff of current myths. For better or worse, they are shorthand messages designed to enable rapid response or uniform responses across members of a group when rational deliberation is not viable, available, or wanted. Even if these conjectures are accurate, they still are crude in their conception and leave open questions about the details of their operation. How exactly do events become encoded as the content of myths? What types of emotions produce what types of myths? How are these emotions triggered? What stimuli evoke activation of myths? With respect to mass phenomena we might ask: what are the events or social phenomena responsible for relatively uniform myth retention and activation across large populations and how does myth activation inspire behaviors that are relevant to war mobilization? These are all phenomena that involve mental mechanisms of the brain that surely have evolved through time. How can evolutionary theory help inform us about the nature and specifics of these mechanisms?

Polarization Polarization refers to a process in which one group or each group in a dyad begins to treat members of the other group as less human and having lower status and worth. For the 10 most part, polarization processes appear to take hold without rational deliberation. A large body of research (Rothbart and Lewis, 1988; Rothbart and Taylor, 1992; Saideman and Ayres, 2008; Sherif et al. ,1961; Sherif and Sherif, 1953; Tajfel et al., 1971; Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Taylor, 1981) has demonstrated that group differentiation takes place rapidly among humans over the most minimal of group distinctions. From casual observation polarization also appears to be a process frought with emotions rather than being deliberative. In a more elaborate version, polarization is sometimes referred to as ingroup favoritism/outgroup hostility – hinting at some of the emotions associated with the process.

Polarization is deeply implicated in the dynamics of war. It may facilitate the outbreak of war and may even lie at the core of proximate causes of war mobilization. Launching deadly assaults against a people who are held in extremely low regard is much easier than against a people perceived as very much like one’s own group. Preparation for war seems to go hand in hand with group polarization. Elites typically attempt to portray prospective war opponents as inhuman demons so as to mobilize their own populations for the upcoming war effort.

Warfare behaviors may actually activate polarization processes. A little known but highly disturbing episode of polarization occurred during World War II in the United States. As Daniels (1971) and Murray and Daniels (2000) recount, once war broke out between Japan and the United States, Japanese-Americans were increasingly treated as potentially dangerous spies who could easily betray their home country to the devil Japanese. They were rounded up and confined to camps some of which were used as animal pens and stalls just prior to the arrival of their human guests. High-level politicians and military leaders and even the American President made extremely disparaging characterizations of people of Japanese ancestry. Some even hinted at genocidal options despite repeated assessments by the military and intelligence communities that Japanese-Americans posed no plausible security risks to the country. Japanese-Americans suffered discrimination before the war, but one it broke out, polarization accelerated and imposed severe outcomes on Japanese-American targets.

Polarization processes appear to lie at the heart of mass preparation for war and maintenance of the war effort yet they are poorly understood. Group polarization is a complex phenomenon that surely involves an array of evolved mental mechanisms. Discussions of ethnocentrism and ingroup favoritism/outgroup hostility (Somner, 1911; Wilson, 1978; Dunbar, 1986; van der Dennen, 1986; Reynolds, et al, 1986) tend to resemble discussions of polarization but extend the details of the process. Ingroups are viewed as extremely cohesive and cooperative, and its members consider themselves and their group to be superior to outgroups and their members. Outgroups are viewed as less human, inferior, and less moral. Because they are less moral, the actions of outgroups can easily produce emotions of deep fear in the face of perceived threats. Behaviors, such as discrimination and defensive preparations appear connected to these attitudes and their attendant emotions. Moreover, the solidarity of the ingroup and its hostility towards the outgroup is often attributed to the perceived degree of threat posed by the outgroup. Xenophobia, fear of strangers, and dehumanization are distinct mechanisms or processes 11 that produce attitude sets that are key components of the broader polarization process (Wilson, 1978: 111; van der Dennen, 1986). Dehumanization is an especially important bridge between negative attitudes and warfare-type behaviors. Wilson (1978: 111) observes:

This elemental topography [the near environment of friends and kin versus the distant world of neighbors and enemies] makes easier the distinction between enemies who can be attacked and killed and friends who cannot. The contrast is heightened by reducing enemies to frightful and even subhuman status.

Wilson goes on to describe how Brazilian headhunters turned their enemies into virtual game animals, but dehumanization is hardly a specialty of primitive tribes. The British hunted Australian aboriginals for sport in the 19 th century and killing Tutsis in the 1994 Rwandan genocide was likened by Hutu elites to “clearing brush.”

Clearly, polarization processes are serious elements of the warfare scene but where do they originate? The most compelling explanation of origins of a group polarization process is drawn from evolutionary theory. Alexander (1979), Dunbar (1986), and Wilson (1978) all attribute its emergence to the fitness advantages conferred on those groups who practiced it across the long landscape of natural selection. Groups competed for survival resources from the dawn of human existence and the only ones to survive, prosper, and propagate their genes were those who adopted the various attributes of the group polarization process. Those who failed to appreciate the deadly menace posed by external groups, for example, would find themselves weakened by surprise raids or they would become easy targets for massacres. As a result, the gene pool that was inclined to ignore deadly menaces went into precipitous decline.

The evolutionary argument in support of the adaptiveness of polarization processes is a compelling one, but a number of important questions remain: What environmental conditions provoke the onset of polarization processes in their more extreme forms? What role do myths and collective memories play in the onset of polarization processes and in their acceleration to the most severe outcomes? How do emotions interact with the attitude sets involved? What factors constrain or release movement in the direction of extreme polarization? Can reasoning about human biology and the circumstances that gave rise to our evolved mental architecture help us design plausible and testable hypotheses about these matters?

Hormones and Genes Our emphasis, so far, has been on mental mechanisms of the brain that might contribute to our understanding of warfare and especially ethnic warfare. This emphasis makes sense given the brain’s role as the headquarters of human decision making. However, the brain utilizes materials from other parts of the body as inputs to brain-located mechanisms. Recent attention has been given to the role of hormones in activating behaviors related to warfare. For example, testosterone appears to be related to “aggression” and “dominance” behaviors (Mazur, Allen and Alan Booth, 1998; Johnson, et al, 2006; McDermott, et al, 2007; Rosen, 2005, chapter 3; Maner, et al, 2008) . Other 12 hormones besides testosterone (serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, acetylcholine) have been implicated in aggression (Valzelli, 1981, Shaw and Wong, 1989: 8). In any case, identification of relevant hormones, their production processes, and their role in spurring mental mechanisms are all tasks that lie ahead for full-scale explanations of human warfare.

Of course, the origins of the biologic sources of human behaviors can be found at the cellular level. Our genetic codes have instructed the formation of the processes of the brain. Moreover, the blossoming field of epigenetics is revealing that the formative function of genes is far from over at birth. Genes operate in developmental sequences and whether they activate at all in the course of a human’s lifetime depends on interactions with the unique environments experienced by individuals (Waddington, 1957, 1975; Staddon, 1985). Undoubtedly, genes shape how we respond to our physical and social environments and their roles are clearly dynamic ones that exceed the static formative imprint associated with birth. Identifying the role of genes in shaping warfare behaviors should be an exciting growth field in the years ahead as our research techniques and conceptualizations improve. At least one book, Shaw and Wong’s (1989) Genetic Seeds of Warfare has enshrined the connection between genes and warfare in its title, but the identification of actual pathways among gene complexes and warfare behaviors still lies ahead of us.

In sum, the old black box that represented the brain is turning out to be multi-colored, complex, and far from insignificant as an influence interceding between environmental stimuli and human behaviors. Most likely, it will be the pivotal point for expanding our understanding of social behaviors like warfare.

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