John Tooby: UCSB

Don’t shoot! Rodney King. Remember the Maine. The Reichstag Fire. Guernica. The War of Jenkins Ear. The murder of Emmet Till. Events in which one or more members of one group injure the welfare of one or more members of another group (“outrages”) typically provoke extraordinarily strong and frequently violent responses directed more or less indiscriminately at members of the group from which the offender or offenders came. Such events are treated entirely differently than parallel harms performed by individuals within groups. They unleash cultural processes in which accounts of harms rapidly spread through the group the victims came from. Generally, as news of the (sometimes fabricated) harm is transmitted from person to person, details are added to representations of the event so that the actions depicted seem harsher, more intentional, and more group-targeted. Many group members treat inflammatory portrayals of interactions and the rage they generate as a kind of precious group resource, becoming very resistant to contrary evidence, and passing these stylized narratives down generations. News of outrages strongly motivate the desire to join with others to act in a coordinated and aggressive fashion “against” the other group. A review of the historical and ethnographic record suggests that outrages play a central role in starting wars, provoking ethnic violence, and in mobilizing social movements and revolutions. The cross-culturally and cross-historically recurrent structure of these cultural and social phenomena can be understood by seeing how they naturally emerge from interactions between the evolved psychology of welfare tradeoffs, groups, adaptations for group coordination, and common knowledge. The key is that cross-group harms, if uncontested, are implicitly seen as proposing a common knowledge precedent for the degree of social domination or subordination. The psychology of outrages can be seen as a parallel and complementary adaptation to leadership—one way of solving the coordination problem of mobilizing group members to effectively act or bargain in conflicts with outgroups. Because it is normally difficult to get individuals to set aside competing agendas within groups, yet group power increases with coordination, outrages (real or fabricated) become a resource ingroup individuals strategically deploy to mobilize joint action they (as individuals) expect to benefit from.