Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 513distinguish from rape, is a ubiquitous perquisite of soldiers. Leaders maysometimes use rape as a terror tactic to attain other ends, as Henry Vobviously did, but the tactic is effective precisely because the soldiersare so eager to implement it, as Henry took pains to remind the Frenchmen.In fact it often backfires by giving the defenders an incalculableincentive to fight on, and probably for that reason, more than out of compassionfor enemy women, modern armies have outlawed rape. Evenwhen rape is not a prominent part of our warfare, we invest our war leaderswith enormous prestige, just as the Yanomamo do, and by now youknow the effects of prestige on a man's sexual attractiveness and, untilrecently, his reproductive success.War, or aggression by a coalition of individuals, is rare in the animalkingdom. You would think that the second-, third-, and fourth-strongestelephant seals would gang up, kill the strongest male, and divide hisharem among them, but they never do. Aside from the social insects,whose unusual genetic system makes them a special case, only humans,chimpanzees, dolphins, and perhaps bonobos join up in groups of four ormore to attack other males. These are some of the largest-brainedspecies, hinting that war may require sophisticated mental machinery.Tooby and Cosmides have worked out the adaptive logic of coalitionalaggression and the cognitive mechanisms necessary to support it. (Thatdoes not, of course, mean that they think war is unavoidable or "natural"in the sense of "good.")People often are conscripted into armies, but sometimes they enlistwith gusto. Jingoism is alarmingly easy to evoke, even without a scarceresource to fight over. In numerous experiments by Henri Tajfel andother social psychologists, people are divided into two groups, actually atrandom but ostensibly by some trivial criterion such as whether theyunderestimate or overestimate the number of dots on a screen orwhether they prefer the paintings of Klee or Kandinsky. The people ineach group instantly dislike and think worse of the people in the othergroup, and act to withhold rewards from them even if doing so is costlyto their own group. This instant ethnocentrism can be evoked even if theexperimenter drops the charade with the dots or paintings and dividespeople into groups by flipping a coin before their eyes! The behavioral