BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29, 211–257. Printed in the United States of America Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators Victor Nell Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa. Correspondence to: West Hill House, 6 Swains Lane, Highgate, London N6 6QS, United Kingdom. [email protected] www.victornell.co.uk To the memory of Linda Mealey Abstract: Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but often with delight. Though cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its ubiquity and reward value. This target article attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic to the ethology of predation in canids, felids, and primates. Stage 2, through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene, its development in early hominids, and its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for the powerful emotions – high arousal and strong affect – evoked by the pain-blood- death complex. Stage 3 is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control. Effective violence prevention must begin with perpetrators, not victims. If the upstream approaches to violence prevention advocated by the public-health model are to be effective, psychologists must be able to provide violence prevention workers with a fine-grained understanding of perpetrator gratifications. This is a distasteful task that will compel researchers to interact with torturers and abusers, and to acknowledge that their gratifications are rooted in a common human past. It is nonetheless an essential step in developing effective strategies for the primary prevention of violence. Keywords: compassion; cruelty; entertainment industry; evolutionary psychology; intraspecific killing; pain; predation; punishment; torture; violence prevention 1. Introduction 3. Because cruelty presupposes the intention to inflict pain and is therefore exclusively a hominid behaviour, it Cruelty (from the Latin crudelem, “morally rough”) is the dates to no earlier than H. erectus, about 1.5 million deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on a years ago (Ma). living creature; its most repugnant and puzzling feature is 4. Cruelty has fitness benefits in solving problems of the frequently evident delight of the perpetrators. Cruelty survival and reproduction in forager, pastoral, and urban has an overwhelming presence in the world – in wars and societies. massacres, in the routine work of police and military inter- 5. The enjoyment of cruelty is a culturally elaborated rogators, in children’s play, and in the dealings of men with manifestation of the predatory adaptation. women and of adults with children. Although the ease with which situations can overwhelm values and elicit cruelty in hitherto irreproachable individuals is empirically (Haney et al. 1973; Milgram 1969/1974; Zimbardo 2003) and VICTOR NELL is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at observationally (Browning 1993; Grossman 1995; Tester the University of South Africa, where he directed the clinical neuropsychology training programme, and led 1997) well established, there is no motivational or neuro- epidemiological studies of traumatic brain injury and biological explanation for cruelty’s prevalence or the fasci- interpersonal violence in Johannesburg. He estab- nation it holds. lished the university’s Institute for Social and Health This target article argues that the reinforcement value of Sciences and headed a World Health Organisation Col- pain and bloodshed derives from the predatory adaptation laborating Centre for Injury and Violence Prevention, from the Middle Cambrian to the Pleistocene. The argu- which is now a South African Medical Research ment is therefore as follows: Council Lead Programme on Crime, Violence, and Injury. He has published books and book chapters on neuropsychology, policing and police accountability, 1. Cruelty is a behavioural by-product of predation. theoretical social psychology, and the psychological 2. Cruelty is driven by reinforcers that derive from this impact of Apartheid. adaptation. # 2006 Cambridge University Press 0140-525x/06 $12.50 211 Nell: Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators These hypotheses generate a research agenda for affective behavioural and neurobehavioural implications that may neuroscience, for social psychology, and for violence pre- have animal parallels with quiet-biting predation on the vention. They also provide a heuristic for understanding one hand and aggressive rage on the other. However, as why media violence is attractive, why men find war beau- with all behavioural states, the boundaries between instru- tiful, why homicide has been a fixed feature of human mentality and affectivity are permeable: for example, societies from prehistoric times to the present (Buss hunters may inflict pain on the prey beyond that which 2005; Daly & Wilson 1988), and why, despite the human is instrumentally necessary, and the hunt may slip into capacity for compassion, atrocities continue. surplus killing that continues beyond the satisfaction of nutritional needs (as with Actaeon in Ovid’s Metamor- phoses, c. 8 AD/1997, p. 105). Violence is a significant 1.1. Three stages in the emergence of cruelty by-product of cruelty (see sect. 6). 1.1.1. Predation. The predatory adaptation derives from Evidence for the continued salience of the predatory resource competition between and within species, which, adaptation for human behaviour is derived from palaeon- in the Cambrian, becomes predation, the killing and con- tology and taphonomy (Brain 1981); predator ethology; sumption of one living creature by another. Predation is primatology, with special reference to chimpanzee preda- hard work: the evidence reviewed in section 3 shows tion and intraspecific killing; cognitive evolution with that it is powerfully reinforced in mammalian carnivores special reference to language; the psychology of moti- and in the hunting apes by a set of linked conditioned vation and learning; the anthropology of provisioning; stimuli that are carried over to the hunting adaptation in societal evolution; cultural history; and the psychology of hominids. The stimuli driving predation and hunting are individual differences. the pain-blood-death (PBD) complex: the prey’s terror The reinforcers of cruelty feed into violence, defined by and struggles to escape as it is brought down, the shedding the World Health Organisation as the intentional use of of its blood, and its vocalisations as it is wounded and physical force or power – against oneself, another individ- eaten, often while it is still alive. A range of anticipatory ual, or a group – that causes injury, death, or psychological and consummatory reinforcers is triggered by the PBD harm (Krug et al. 2002, p. 5): one of this target article’s complex, which is also active in intraspecific killing, and purposes is to show cruelty’s relevance to the initiation strikingly so in chimpanzees. The material in section 3 and escalation of high-volume everyday violence such as on the neurobiology of predation suggests that predation drunken brawls, child beating, and sexual assault. is dopaminergic, affectively positive, and distinct from rage. The study of cruelty, which is one of the manifestations of evil, is dangerous on three counts: first, because of the 1.1.2. Hunting. Nutritional killing by hominids is also hard fear that evil is contagious, and that those who deal with work: the palaeontological and anthropological evidence it become tainted (as, for example, in “The Problem of reviewed below suggests that hunting in hominids, as Evil” in Coetzee 2003); second, because to probe the psy- with predation in canids, felids, and primates, is reinforced chology of perpetrators fails to condemn, casting a shadow by the PBD complex and that the nonnutritional “other over the researcher’s rectitude; and third, because rooting end” of hunting, for which anthropologists have sought, cruelty in the human evolutionary past appears to natura- derives from these reinforcers. lise it, absolving perpetrators and their audiences of moral responsibility. The study of cruelty neither contaminates 1.1.3. Power. Cruelty requires a sufficient cognitive basis nor condones, and the purpose of this article is compassio- for intentionality and a sufficient social basis for its disciplin- nate and preventive. Cruelty will not be contained through ary elaboration (see sect. 5). Once these foundations have obscurantism. Its reinforcers must be understood, and been laid, there are florid social and cultural elaborations if these have evolutionary origins, effective prevention of cruelty as punishment, for amusement, and for social requires that they be revealed. control. Each of these modalities affirms the power of the perpetrator – this may be an individual acting alone or as