The researchers report that, throughout history, men have been the primary aggressors against different groups as well as the primary victims of group-based aggression and discrimination.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is evidence going back thousands of years of bands of men getting together and attacking other bands of men, eliminating them and keeping the women as the spoils of war,\u201d said Carlos David Navarrete, evolutionary psychologist at MSU.<\/p>\n As modern examples, Navarrete noted the wars in Central Africa and the Balkans that were marred by rape and genocide.<\/p>\n Navarrete co-authored the study with MSU researcher Melissa McDonald and Mark Van Vugt of the University of Amsterdam and the University of Oxford. The research appears in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a London-based research journal.<\/p>\n The researchers analyzed current academic literature on war and conflict and found that the standard social science theory did not explain the sex differences in aggressive or discriminatory behavior between groups. They offered a novel theory that integrates psychology with ecology and evolutionary biology. Their \u201cmale warrior hypothesis\u201d explains how a deep evolutionary history of group conflict may have provided the backdrop for natural selection to shape the social psychologies and behaviors of men and women in fundamentally distinct ways<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Essentially, men are more likely to start wars and to defend their own group, sometimes in very risky and self-sacrificial ways. Attacking other groups represents an opportunity to offset these costs by gaining access to mates, territory, resources and increased status.<\/p>\n The authors complement these findings with results from lab experiments showing that men are more prejudiced toward other groups.<\/p>\n Women, meanwhile, live under the threat of sexual coercion by foreign aggressors, and are apt to display a \u201ctend-and-befriend response\u201d toward members of their own group, while maintaining a fear of strangers in order to protect themselves and their offspring.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough these sex-specific responses may have been adaptive in ancestral times,\u201d said McDonald, the lead author of the study, \u201cthey have likely lost this adaptive value in our modern society, and now act only to needlessly perpetuate discrimination and conflict among groups<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n Navarrete added that the behavior is seen in humans\u2019 closest relative, the chimpanzee. \u201cJust like humans, they\u2019ll attack and kill the males of other groups. They\u2019ll also attack females \u2013 not to the point of killing them, but more to get them to join their group,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Since the behaviors are common among both humans and chimps, they are likely to have existed in our common ancestor millions of years ago, Navarrete said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis would have provided eons of time for the deepest workings of our minds to have been fundamentally shaped by these cruel realities,\u201d he said. \u201cComing to grips with this history and how it still affects us in modern times may be an important step into improving the problems caused by our darker predispositions<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Michigan State University press release: Prejudice against people from groups different than their own is linked to aggression for men and fear for women, suggests new research led… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[184,154,46,81,12,98],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":907,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions\/907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Prejudice.jpg\" "\\"prejudice\\"")
Prejudice against people from groups different than their own is linked to aggression for men and fear for women, suggests new research led by Michigan State University scholars.<\/strong><\/p>\n