Why Violence Has Declined
Steven Pinker
0143122010
Notes
When a tendency toward violence evolves, it is always strategic. Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.
“So that is the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.”
Thomas Hobbes
The shift exploits two features of our psychology… One is people – especially the people who are likely to get in trouble with the law – steeply discount the future, and respond more to certain and immediate punishments than to hypothetical and delayed ones. The other is that people conceive of their relationships with other people and institutions in moral terms, categorizing them either as contests of raw dominance or as contacts governed by reciprocity and fairness.
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world through that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.
The cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown that people intuitively estimate relative frequency using a shortcut called the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is… Why the gloom? Partly it’s the result of market forces in the punditry business, which favor the Cassandras over the Polyannas. Partly it arises from human temperament, and admiring the past: as David Hume observed, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endowed with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.”
…democracies are less likely to wage interest in wars, to have large-scale civil wars, and to commit genocides……many cultures maintain active networks of exchange, even when the goods exchanged are useless gifts, because they know it helps keep peace among them.
…postpartum depression is more common in women who lack social support (they are single, separated, dissatisfied with their marriage, or distant from their parents), who had a complicated delivery or an unhealthy infant, and who were unemployed or whose husbands were unemployed.
King immediately appreciated that Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance was not a moralistic affirmation of love, as nonviolence had been in teachings of Jesus. Instead it was a set of hardheaded tactics to prevail over an adversary by outwitting him rather than trying to annihilate him. A taboo on violence, King inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure and mayhem. It preserves morale and focus among followers when the movement suffers early defeats. By removing any pretext for legitimate retaliation by the enemy, it stays in the positive side of the moral ledger in the eyes of third parties, while luring the enemy into the negative side For the same reason, it divides the enemy, parking away supporters who find it increasingly uncomfortable to identify themselves with one-sided violence. All the while it can press its agenda by making a nuisance of itself with sit-ins, strikes, and demonstrations.
In the first tournament (repeated runs of Prisoner’s Dilemma), hosted by the political scientist Robert Axelrod, the winner was a simple strategy of Tit for Tat: cooperate on the first move, then continue to cooperate if your partner cooperates, but defect if he defects.
…a smarter world is a less violent world…(Dean Simonton) analyzed a dataset of 42 presidents from GW to GWB and found that both raw intelligence and openness to new ideas and values are significantly correlated with presidential performance as it has been assessed by nonpartisan historians.
Matthew Effect
“A gentle perfume of absurdity”
Prisoner’s Dilemma