Synonyms
Definition
Conflict among human groups or populations, usually of different cultural backgrounds, involves violent interactions. The aggression usually leads to death of part of group members of both sides and to advantages (material or social) to surviving victors.
Introduction
The central aim of evolutionary approaches to the study of intergroup violence is to examine whether between-group violent conflicts and killings are in any way adaptive, and to investigate their evolutionary history. Lethal intergroup conflict among humans during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene is still a controversial subject, with little agreement on its extent (Bowles 2009). It is important to turn to prestate societies, as these are thought to typify the kinds of aggregations that humans belonged to for the great majority of human history. Their study facilitates our understanding of the contexts from...
References
Bowles, S. (2009). Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors? Science, 324, 1293–1298.
Fernandes, H. B. F., Kura, K., & Figueredo, A. J. (2015). The double-edged sword of warfare: Opposing historical and recent effects of armed conflicts upon collectivism, life history, human capital, and intelligence in Japan. Oral presentation. Columbia: Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
Gat, A. (2010). Why war? Motivations for fighting in the human state of nature. In P. M. Kappeler & J. B. Silk (Eds.), Mind the gap: Tracing the origins of human universals (pp. 197–220). Berlin: Springer.
Glowacki, L., & Wrangham, R. W. (2013). The role of rewards in motivating participation in simple warfare. Human Nature, 24, 444–460.
Guilaine, J., & Zammit, J. (2008). The origins of war: Violence in prehistory. Oxford, UK: Wiley.
Heider, K. G. (1997). Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful warriors. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
Keeley, L. H. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Lahr, M. M., Rivera, F., Power, R. K., Mounier, A., Copsey, B., Crivellaro, F., …, & Leakey, A. (2016). Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 529, 394–398.
Walker, R. S., & Bailey, D. H. (2013). Body counts in lowland south American violence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34, 29–34.
Zhang, D. D., Zhang, J., Lee, H. F., & He, Y. Q. (2007). Climate change and war frequency in eastern China over the last millennium. Human Ecology, 35, 403–414.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Fernandes, H.B.F., Zerbe, J., Peñaherrera-Aguirre, M., Figueredo, A.J. (2018). Humans: Between-Group Conflicts. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_619-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_619-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences