Group displays as an adaptive response.

Group displays as an adaptive response.

1. Lynch Mobs

   • Social transitions and need for conformity
     • Myrdal suggested that the fundamental cause of lynching in the S was fear of the negro, which led white mob to turn lynch law as a means of social control
     • Patterson claimed that lynch mobs were more active during this period because it was a time of a major social transition (end of slavery), where everyone felt at risk.
     • When groups feel at risk, survival of the group become more important
   • During the 19th century the lynching of black people in the southern states of USA became an institutionalised method used by white people to terrorise blacks and maintain white supremacy.
   • Power threat hypothesis
     • The racist myth that black people wanted to rape white women was frequently used in defence of the lynching practice
     • the power threat hypothesis suggests that groups who pose a threat to the majority are more likely to be discriminated against and to be the subject of violent acts
     • Lynching was an extreme form of discrimination , motivated by perceived racial threat

2. Religious rituals

   • Not all aggressive behaviour is aimed at others, some is self inflicted as part of an intiation rite or religious ritual.
   • Among native Americans they were required to lie motionless while being bitten by lots of ants and in Shiite muslims self-flagellation is still used to celebrate the day of Ashura
   • Costly signalling theory
     • Sosis believes that the inherent costs of religious rituals are the critical feature that contributes to the success of religion and that natural selection would have favoured their development.
     • By engaging in painful rituals the individual shows that they're committed to the group
     • Zahavi and Zahavi suggests that the significant costs of such acts also serve as deterrents for anyone who does not believe in the teachings of a particular group but wants to take advantages of it benefits.
     • The adaptive benefit religious rituals is unltimately to promote and maintain religious cooperation within a group.

3. Sports events and xenophobia

   • Xenophobia is the dislike or fear of people from other countries,
   • Wilson claims that xenophobia can be seen in vitrually every group of animals which displays higher forms of social organisation.
   • Shaw and Wong argue that mechanism prompt suspicious behaviour towards strangers would have been favoured by natural selection.
     • This would have enabled ancestors to avoid attack and leave behind more offspring
   • Evans and Rowe analysed data from 40 football matches played in 1999/2000 in central Europe and involved both English club sided and the English national side.
     • Post match reports and interviews with police and other officials that there was a great degree of disorder with games involving the national side.
     • A possible reason for the findings is that the english clubs sides are more ethically diverse than the national sides, which lead to the xenophobia response.

4. Commentary

   • Lynch mobs
     • Social transitions and need for conformity
       • Boyd and Richerson provided evidence
         • They discovered that groups which cooperation thrived were also those that flourished, this therefore provides an explanation of why when a majority group is more at risk due to social change , individual interest is to get in a group
     • The power threat hypothesis
       • Part of the difficulty of testing a threat model of the behaviour is lynch mobs is that the nature of social threats is vague and poorly defined.
         • In a study of lynch mobs in Brazil Clark concluded that the evidence contradicted the claim that the threat of dangerous classes in society was a major causal factor in the mobs
   • Religious rituals
     • Research support
       • Sosis found that religious groups tended to impose twice as many costly requirements on their members and lifespan of the groups was positively correlated to number of costly requirements.
   • Sports events
     • Foldesi provides evidence for a relationship between xenophobia and violent displays among hungarian football crowds.
       • He found that the racist conduct of a core extremist supports led to an increase of spectators violence in general and xenophobia outbursts.