With the emergence of cultural and ecological perspectives on aggression, violence, conflict management and peace, we see within (and beyond) psychology a greater attention for local and global phenomena. For example, there is now a greater attention for scientific understanding of trust and distrust within societies, corruption and norm violations at national levels, as well as cooperation within and between societies. There is also greater attention for ecological variables, such as climate, especially thermal demands, and threats such as pathogen prevalence, or political-economic variables such as wealth and income inequality. This is timely, because most of us would agree that war and peace are local and global phenomena.
What is lacking at present is an understanding of how the ecological variables, alone and in combination, might help us explain aggression and violence, as well as conflict management, communication and peace-making, around the world. This new global direction to war and peace holds promise because there are massive differences within and between countries in aggression and violence, as well as in variables such as trust and religiosity.
There have been some efforts to “connecting the dots” around the world – seeking to explain aggression and violence in terms of climate and other variables. One case in point is a model of Climate, Aggression, and Self-Control in Humans (CLASH). The model adopts a global perspective to aggression and violence by emphasizing the role of climate and other ecological variables in shaping culture and human behavior. Colder temperatures, and especially larger degrees of seasonal variation in climate, call for individuals and groups to adopt a slower life history strategy, revealed in a greater focus on the future (vs. present) and a stronger focus on self-control—variables that are known to inhibit aggression and violence. Other variables (e.g., wealth, income inequality, pathogen prevalence) are also linked to both climate differences and to aggression and violence differences.
The purpose of the present proposal is to examine the independent and interactive influences of climate (especially thermal demands), wealth, income inequality, pathogen prevalence, religiosity and other variables (e.g., migration patterns) on aggression and violence between groups around the world. A central question is how we can understand the immense variation in aggression and violence, especially between groups, around the world. In addition to the ecological variables listed above, we also seek to explore historical variables such as degree of colonialism, as well as more recent differences in climate change.
Research team: Prof.Dr. Paul van Lange, Prof.Dr. Hein Daanen & Prof.Dr. Wouter Botzen