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Evolutionary Psychology of Lethal Interpersonal Violence

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International Handbook of Violence Research

Abstract

The evolutionary psychological approach to the study of human violence is a quest to understand and predict who is likely to use violence against whom, and under what circumstances, in the light of a very general theoretical understanding of the evolutionary processes that gave form to the human psyche and the behavior that it produces. Such an approach requires a dispassionate perspective in the sense that we cannot prejudge the violence in which we are interested as pathology. It may often be so, in which case an appropriate remedial response might be therapeutic, but violence may often be better understood as the adaptive output of a healthy psyche functioning normally, in which case an appropriate remedial response must address the social and material circumstances conducive to the violence.

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  1. Martin Daly
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  2. Margo Wilson
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Wilhelm Heitmeyer John Hagan

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Daly, M., Wilson, M. (2003). Evolutionary Psychology of Lethal Interpersonal Violence. In: Heitmeyer, W., Hagan, J. (eds) International Handbook of Violence Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48039-3_29

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