Appeasement and reconciliation: Introduction to an Aggressive Behavior special issue

✍ Scribed by Dacher Keltner; Michael Potegal

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 23 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0096-140X
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-2337(1997)23:5<309::aid-ab1>3.0.co;2-d

✦ Synopsis

Introduction

Living in social groups has well-known benefits, including improved defense against predators, more proficient food gathering, and highly structured contexts for successful mating and the raising of offspring [Krebs and Davies, 1972]. Every benefit of social living presents the opportunity for conflicts over food, mates, social attention, territory, and status, however. The potential and actual conflicts that punctuate social living, we believe, have acted as selection pressures that have led humans and other social species to develop in the course of evolution a family of appeasement and reconciliation processes that allow individuals in groups to develop and maintain social relations that are conducive to the survival of individual and offspring. This special issue is devoted to the study of these peace-making tendencies.

Although early ethologists described in rich detail the appeasement displays of different species [e.g., Tinbergen, 1972], the systematic study of appeasement and reconciliation is relatively recent, in part due to the natural tendency to focus on the facilitating causes of aggression and conflict, rather than on the restraining influences. However, ground-breaking work by the students of animal and human ethology has prompted a contemporary interest in appeasement and reconciliation [e.g., de Waal, 1986;Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989]. In particular, de Waal's striking demonstration that, following conflicts, primate antagonists actually increased their contact with one another compared to baseline levels of interaction rather than dispersing as prevailing hypotheses and conventional wisdom would predict had a major impact [de Waal and Roosmalen, 1979]. This finding pointed to a family of related social processes that allow individuals in