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Natural Conflict Resolution
Aggression and competition are customarily presented as the natural state of affairs in both human society and the animal kingdom. Yet, as this book shows, our species relies heavily on cooperation for survival as do many others―from wolves and dolphins to monkeys and apes. A distinguished group of fifty-two authors, including many of the world's leading experts on human and animal behavior, review evidence from multiple disciplines on natural conflict resolution, making the case that reconciliation and compromise are as much a part of our heritage as is waging war.
Chimpanzees kiss and embrace after a fight. Children will appeal to fairness when fighting over a toy. Spotted hyenas, usually thought to be a particularly aggressive species, use reconciliation to restore damaged relationships. As these studies show, there are sound evolutionary reasons for these peacekeeping tendencies. This book also addresses the cultural, ecological, cognitive, emotional, and moral perspectives of conflict resolution.
Chimpanzees kiss and embrace after a fight. Children will appeal to fairness when fighting over a toy. Spotted hyenas, usually thought to be a particularly aggressive species, use reconciliation to restore damaged relationships. As these studies show, there are sound evolutionary reasons for these peacekeeping tendencies. This book also addresses the cultural, ecological, cognitive, emotional, and moral perspectives of conflict resolution.
- GenresScienceNonfiction
424 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
33 people want to read
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December 7, 2022
Now, my last book for this year, because I must learn, I must. I have to do something to myself and get myself to learn for my exams. This book was a bit of a challenge, but it was better than fine wine. Well... I still remember this interview, that I love so much – YEEEEEEY bonobos for ancestors!
INTERVIEW:
Frans de Waal: I really needed to study conflict resolution because until that time I had looked at conflict resolution and reconciliation as sort of nice behavior, but maybe not that important. But at that point, I realized that’s actually extremely important because if you don’t have the appropriate mechanisms you’ll gonna kill each other. And later I got very interested in things like bonobos, which I’ve studied in San Diego, for me the big surprise there was that… the bonobos have now been known to everybody as very sexy and very peaceful, but when I started studying them, I never thought about studying sexual behavior. My goal was to see how they are different from chimpanzees and how they compare in the way they make conflicts and resolve their conflicts and that they did it in a very sexual way, no one had told me that. Everyone had been silent about that, I think people were very shy about sex and especially in America, people are very prudish and they would never mention such a thing, so there was a big surprise to see how bonobos did these things and I wrote about much more freely than any American ever would, I think.
Lone Frank: Yeah I mean that pretty much made the bonobo a big name.
Frans de Waal: Yeah, and it’s a bit problematic because now the field workers are sometimes upset because the bonobos are depicted as angels of peace and they are not angels, Well there’s one big difference between bonobos and chimps, it is that there’s not a single report of bonobos killing each other. There’s not a single case that we know of, and we know lots of cases for chimpanzees. So there is still this one big difference, but they are not angels of peace, and if people say that they are it’s not true.
Lone Frank: Now humans, I mean, you said before that we were sort of almost in-between chimpanzees and bonobos, if we had been more like bonobos, do you think we would have developed the kind of world we have today, would we have evolved as much or would we just have, you know…
Frans de Waal: I don’t know, we certainly have been an aggressive species, but I think we have been more aggressive in the last 20 000 years, or so, than before. When we settled down and became agriculturalists, that is when we accumulated wealth and we became interested to invade a place, and raid the place, and take all their belongings, but there’s actually no good evidence for warfare in humans from before that time, there’s no evidence of armies or that large mass graves with lots of people dead as you would expect if there was warfare, so we may have lived for a very long time relatively peaceful, I think we always waged war a little bit, but more like the hunter-gatherers today, who are 90% of the time or 95% of the time, they live in peace, also with their neighbors. So I think we humans, may actually be less aggressive in our long evolutionary history than people think. People often think that we’ve always been waging war, and killing everybody around us, but I don’t think that’s true.
Lone Frank: But can we get any hint from the primates as to what is wrong with us? Why are we so aggressive or what can we do to mitigate it?
Frans de Waal: I don’t think you can get concrete lessons, all that we can do by studying the primates is sort of see where we come from and where our psychology comes from and how it may have been shaped by evolution into the direction that it is now, but if you wanna have concrete solutions to the problems today they have to come from people who are willing to take those solutions. I don’t think they can come from primate behavior.
INTERVIEW:
Frans de Waal: I really needed to study conflict resolution because until that time I had looked at conflict resolution and reconciliation as sort of nice behavior, but maybe not that important. But at that point, I realized that’s actually extremely important because if you don’t have the appropriate mechanisms you’ll gonna kill each other. And later I got very interested in things like bonobos, which I’ve studied in San Diego, for me the big surprise there was that… the bonobos have now been known to everybody as very sexy and very peaceful, but when I started studying them, I never thought about studying sexual behavior. My goal was to see how they are different from chimpanzees and how they compare in the way they make conflicts and resolve their conflicts and that they did it in a very sexual way, no one had told me that. Everyone had been silent about that, I think people were very shy about sex and especially in America, people are very prudish and they would never mention such a thing, so there was a big surprise to see how bonobos did these things and I wrote about much more freely than any American ever would, I think.
Lone Frank: Yeah I mean that pretty much made the bonobo a big name.
Frans de Waal: Yeah, and it’s a bit problematic because now the field workers are sometimes upset because the bonobos are depicted as angels of peace and they are not angels, Well there’s one big difference between bonobos and chimps, it is that there’s not a single report of bonobos killing each other. There’s not a single case that we know of, and we know lots of cases for chimpanzees. So there is still this one big difference, but they are not angels of peace, and if people say that they are it’s not true.
Lone Frank: Now humans, I mean, you said before that we were sort of almost in-between chimpanzees and bonobos, if we had been more like bonobos, do you think we would have developed the kind of world we have today, would we have evolved as much or would we just have, you know…
Frans de Waal: I don’t know, we certainly have been an aggressive species, but I think we have been more aggressive in the last 20 000 years, or so, than before. When we settled down and became agriculturalists, that is when we accumulated wealth and we became interested to invade a place, and raid the place, and take all their belongings, but there’s actually no good evidence for warfare in humans from before that time, there’s no evidence of armies or that large mass graves with lots of people dead as you would expect if there was warfare, so we may have lived for a very long time relatively peaceful, I think we always waged war a little bit, but more like the hunter-gatherers today, who are 90% of the time or 95% of the time, they live in peace, also with their neighbors. So I think we humans, may actually be less aggressive in our long evolutionary history than people think. People often think that we’ve always been waging war, and killing everybody around us, but I don’t think that’s true.
Lone Frank: But can we get any hint from the primates as to what is wrong with us? Why are we so aggressive or what can we do to mitigate it?
Frans de Waal: I don’t think you can get concrete lessons, all that we can do by studying the primates is sort of see where we come from and where our psychology comes from and how it may have been shaped by evolution into the direction that it is now, but if you wanna have concrete solutions to the problems today they have to come from people who are willing to take those solutions. I don’t think they can come from primate behavior.
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