Synonyms
Definition
Evolutionary explanations for war posit that coalitional aggression against external social groups resulted in higher fitness over the long duration of the Pleistocene. The essential challenge of these models is to account for the selection for such risky behavior given the potentially high costs to participants in attacks. This entry focuses on one influential hypothesis developed from this body of theory: that war is more likely with higher likelihood of success.
Introduction
The antiquity of warfare is a fundamental question for a wide variety of social science disciplines and an important factor in how conflict might be reduced in the future. Recent multidisciplinary research has provided abundant evidence that warfare has a long chronology, dating far back into the Pleistocene (Allen and Jones 2014; Bowles 2009; Gat 2017). While defensive warfare is readily understood as an adaptive behavior in...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Allen, M. W. (2008). Hillforts and the cycling of Maori chiefdoms: Do good fences make good neighbors? In J. A. Railey & R. M. Reycraft (Eds.), Global perspectives on the collapse of complex systems, Anthropological Papers No. 8 (pp. 65–81). Albuquerque: Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.
Allen, M. W., & Jones, T. L. (Eds.). (2014). Violence and warfare among hunter-gatherers. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Bowles, S. (2009). Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors? Science, 324, 1293–1298.
Gat, A. (2017). The causes of war and the spread of peace: But will war rebound? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gavrilets, S., & Fortunato, L. (2014). A solution to the collective action problem in between-group conflict with within-group inequality. Nature Communications, 5, 3526.
Johnson, D. D., McDermott, R., Barrett, E. S., Cowden, J., Wrangham, R., McIntyre, M. H., & Rosen, S. P. (2006). Overconfidence in wargames: Experimental evidence on expectations, aggression, gender, and testosterone. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 273(1600), 2513–2520.
Rusch, H. (2014). The two sides of warfare: An extended model of altruistic behavior in ancestral human intergroup conflict. Human Nature, 25(3), 359–377.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1988). The evolution of war and its cognitive foundations. Institute for Evolutionary Studies Technical Report 88-1.
Wrangham, R. W. (1999). Is military incompetence adaptive? Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 3–20.
Wrangham, R. W., & Glowacki, L. (2012). Intergroup aggression in chimpanzees and war in nomadic hunter-gatherers. Human Nature, 23(1), 5–29.
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
Allen, M.W. (2018). War More Likely with Higher Likelihood of Success. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_934-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_934-1
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