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Variability of Aggression

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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

Synonyms

Individual differences in violence

Definition

Variability of aggression: human aggressive behavior varies on a number of dimensions. This variability is best understood through an interdisciplinary evolutionary approach.

Introduction

In one of the first assessments of the potential contributions of evolutionary psychology to the study of aggression, David Buss and Todd Shackelford (1997) propose an account of human aggression arising as the result of adaptive mechanisms that evolved in response to various challenges of social living. Buss and Shackelford point out that the perspective of evolutionary psychology reveals aggression to be multifaceted and to involve several underlying mechanisms responsive in varying contexts. As they say, their account predicts variability in aggression. There are several dimensions to this predicted variability. There is sexual dimorphism in human aggression, some populations are more aggressive than others, and there is variation in types of...

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Correspondence to Stephen M. Downes .

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Downes, S.M., Tabery, J. (2017). Variability of Aggression. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1668-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1668-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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