Discuss Group Displays as an Adaptive Response to Aggression (8 and 16 marks)

Men have adapted to survive better as a group with the larger and more aggressive groups getting the most resources. Nowadays this is most apparent in Sport and War.

Xenophobia, a fear and hatred of strangers of foreigners, is often present at sporting events with the home team showing violence, often in the form of chanting and signals, towards the away team to hold their own territory and the away team showing aggression to try and claim this.

Foldesi (1996) conducted a study to support the link between xenophobia and violent displays by looking at Hungarian football crowds. He found that racist behaviour from a small group of supporters led to an increase in aggressive, particularly xenophobic, outburst towards the opposing team. This would support xenophobia as an adaptive response to aggression as it shows that aggressive acts form a small group can lead to more violent acts from a large group, which would suggest a link to an evolutionary basis of our ancestors standing up for their own people and holding their territory and resources as a group.

Another supporting study was conducted by Evans and Rowe (2002) who looked at police reports from 40 football matches in Europe in 1999/2000 that involved at least one English team or England national team. They found more xenophobic abuse and violent displays in national games rather than club games. They said this could be due to the fact that club teams are more rationally diverse and therefore less likely to produce xenophobic responses from foreign supporters like the national games tend to.

Warfare is another aggressive group display that can be explained in evolutionary terms. In our EEA and through evolution there has been a relatively small number of women to men and therefore the aggressiveness and bravery shown in war, amongst each other and as a group, was used to attract women. However as in most societies a woman soldier is unheard of in term of evolution this is a very gender bias view of group aggression and as all research into this topic is carried out on men rather than women our understanding of it is limited to just the behaviour of men making it non-generalizable to women.

Two studies which support warfare as an adaptive response to aggression were conducted by Palmer and Tilley (1995), who found that young male street gang members have more sexual partners than other young males, and Leunissen and Van Vugt (2010) who found military men have a greater sex appeal but only if they have been observed showing bravery in combat. These studies both support warfare as an adaptive response to aggression as they both show the fact that men who show aggression and bravery are more attractive to women which comes from our ancestors wanting to mate with the male who could protect them the best and get them the best resources.    

A criticism of Group displays as an adaptive response to aggression is that it stresses evolutionary factors which determine agression. This means that it is very on the side of nature in the nature/nurture debate. This is an issue as it does not recognise the value of approaches such as the social learning theory which would explain the influence of nurture in agression. Therefore Group displays as an adaptive response to aggression can be criticized as being too simplistic an explanation and it could be argued that both nature and nurture are important in explaining agression.