From the perspective of practically every psychological
scientist, human thoughts, experiences, and behaviours derive from the human
nervous system. The structure of the human nervous system, itself, depends on
the genetics that each person acquires from their parents and the experiences
they have. Our brains consist of millions of neurons and the moment-to-moment
electrical activity of those neurons is roughly equivalent to everything we are
and controls everything that we think and do. In that way, all of psychology
adopts a biological perspective, but a researchers’ emphasis might be at a
level that is either very close or somewhat at a distance from the actual
biological processes that determine who we are and what we do. Biological
psychologists stay closely oriented to the genetic and neurological processes
that underlie human experience and behaviour, so we may as well begin there
with our series of discussions on IPV. It is also a convenient place to start,
since our PSYC 1200 course begins with an overview of the human nervous system,
after some introductory discussion about what psychology is, psychology’s
history, and the sorts of research methods that psychologists rely upon.
A common approach to violence, whether intimate partner
violence or otherwise, is to conceive of a tendency to engage in violent
behaviour as reflecting a neurological defect. For instance, many psychological
problems, such as depression and anxiety, can be understood as emerging from
imbalances in the chemical composition of the brain. A neuron may stimulate the
firing of another neuron (or it may inhibit the firing of another neuron) by
releasing chemicals, called neurotransmitters, into the gap between the axon of
one neuron and the dendrite of another. That way, the availability of one or
more neurotransmitters determines how the brain functions. Too little or too
much of a certain neurotransmitter in a person’s brain may disrupt that
person’s mental processes and their behaviour. Consuming drugs, like cocaine,
marijuana or Prozac, influence experience and behaviour by changing the amount
of neurotransmitters that are available to stimulate neural impulses in a
person’s brain. Perhaps IPV could be explained by structural defects or
chemical imbalances in a person’s brain? Unfortunately, this approach has led
to some overly aggressive treatments to control the behaviour of people who are
prone to violent outbursts. Several decades ago, efforts to “cure” people with
violent tendencies included electroconvulsive shock therapy (sessions in which
a person has an electric current passed through their brain, Eller, 2006).
The rather simplistic (and incorrect) theory that motivated
electroconvulsive shock therapy was that problems with the functioning of the
brain could be fixed by the ordered electrical impulses provided by a
community’s electrical power grid. Another approach was to sever certain parts
of the brain from other parts or cut out other parts of the brain entirely. For
example, a common treatment for those prone to violence and other erratic
behaviour was to sever the frontal lobes of the brain from the rest of the
brain. This procedure was called a “frontal lobotomy”. The procedure succeeded
in eliminating violent behaviours, but mainly because it reduced a person’s
tendency to engage in any behaviour at all (Eller, 2006).
The early days of psychology are filled with very stupid
ideas and the reckless application of unverified theories, which often caused
much more severe problems for people than they fixed. Unfortunately, in the
name of psychology, there are people who still apply idiotic theories that have
no scientific merit, causing a great deal of harm to people in the process. One
of the biggest problems humans face, including some scientists who are meant to
know better, is that we can develop strong beliefs in the absence of any
scientific evidence and then act as though those beliefs are absolutely true.
Acting as though false things are true, even when a person has the best of
intentions, can be an extraordinary waste of time, money, and human lives. As
just one example, quite a few depressed stay-at-home mothers and even some highly
energetic children were given frontal lobotomies as a supposed cure, but the main
outcome for them was permanently disabling brain damage.
There are people who do appear to have such dysfunctional
brains that it makes them violent and neurological defects may explain some of
the instances of IPV that occur. At the moment, treatment for people who are
prone to violent outbursts involves prescription of medications, such as
antipsychotics, that block receptors in the brain that receive the
neurotransmitter, Dopamine. To make a long story short, dopamine pathways in
the brain play an important role in mental stimulation and aggressive
behaviours, such as violent actions. However, antipsychotics are mainly used to
treat people with a severe mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, for which
violent actions are quite indiscriminate. Intimate partner violence, most
often, is not indiscriminate. The violence is focused on one individual, and
it’s quite personal. People who engage in IPV are frequently not violent toward
people, in general. Their violence tends to be aimed primarily at the people
closest to them, which will naturally include their intimate partner. Although
all of human psychology originates from the activity of the brain, in most
cases it is not sensible to seek a neurological defect for the cause of IPV.
Instead, it is more likely that IPV emerges from neurological processes that
are, sadly, quite normal in humans. From that point of view, the evolution of
humans as a species may have incorporated a natural tendency toward IPV,
supposing that there exists a certain combination of environmental conditions.
Those who are most likely to adopt that kind of perspective call themselves
Evolutionary Psychologists, which is actually a sub-category of biological
psychologists, who emphasize the role of inherited, genetic influences on human
psychology (Eller, 2006).
Evolutionary psychologists may address the question of IPV
by pointing out that violence is a prominent component of the behaviour of many
species, and humans are just another species that has a tendency to engage in
violence. The prevalence of violence throughout nature suggests that the
tendency to be violent is something that we have inherited from our ancestors
because it must have served them some useful purpose. Many thousands of years
ago, the capacity to engage in violence must have made our ancestors more
successful at surviving and reproducing, thereby allowing them to ensure that
their genes would get transmitted inside of all of us, all the way into 2012. Hunting
is a form of violence and that capacity has had obvious benefits for us and our
ancestors, not to mention all of the other species that rely on hunting. Being
able to fight when threatened is a form of violence and one that is quite
useful for members of a species who would prefer to survive an encounter with a
predator or an assailant. When a person wants something that some other person
has, there is always the option of taking it by force, which is clearly
something that would have provided our ancestors with a competitive advantage.
Murder has been observed in many nonhuman species from insects to birds to
nonhuman primates, like macaques (Eller, 2006). A capacity for violence should
probably be thought of as something that exists within each of us as biological
organisms, rather than as something that could only emerge from a diseased
mind. All of us can quite naturally be violent and simply await the conditions
that stimulate that kind of reaction from us. But, why is violence against
intimate partners such a common form of violence in humans and why are men so
much more likely engage in that kind of violence?
In response to those questions, someone could argue that a
tendency to be aggressive depends on the amount of testosterone in a person’s
system and, in humans, men have higher levels of testosterone than females. The
problem with that response is that it doesn’t explain WHY men almost always
tend to have more testosterone than women. The source of that difference in
hormone level is ultimately genetic, which means that human males evolved to
have more testosterone than human women for some reason having to do with it
being more important for males’ success at reproducing than it is for females’
success at reproducing. The driving force behind human biological traits and
those of all other species on the planet is “reproductive fitness”. The more
offspring that a member of a species can produce that are in good enough shape
to survive and reproduce on their own, the more likely it is that the genes
possessed by that member will be represented in future generations of the
species.
(To anticipate that
certain folks will have a pre-existing, strong dislike for the “Evolution by
Natural Selection” approach to biology, the reader might expect us to say
something as a hedge, like, “from the evolutionary perspective, reproductive
fitness is what matters”. We won’t be doing that because our course is about a
science and the science of psychology presumes that humans and all other
species on Earth appeared on the scene gradually over the course of millions of
years, with the traits of species determined by their capacity to allow members
of the species to reproduce more than other members of the same species. These
are the guiding principles that nearly all scientists have used for many
decades to understand the biological species that exist on Earth. To entertain
any alternatives would be intellectually dishonest of us and would be nothing
more than cheap pandering. Traits inherited genetically through the process of
evolution may only get us so far in understanding humans. There's also experiences and a person's environment to consider. However, there is, by now,
no doubt in the minds of scientists that understanding humans requires understanding the evolutionary processes that gave us the DNA that we all have in common.)
An evolutionary psychologist would explain gender
differences in violent behaviour with reference to how the capacity to be
violent provides greater reproductive benefits for male than for female humans.
The idea is that the reproductive success of females is more or less the same,
whether or not they engage in violent behaviour. Female humans can only have so
many children, anyway, since it demands so much time and energy for women to
develop children inside of them and then take care of them after they are born.
In the environment we all evolved from, if a woman was physically capable of
reproducing, securing enough mating partners to achieve success at reproduction
is very easy. By contrast, for male humans, there is virtually no limit to the
number of children they could (theoretically) father. The only required cost of
producing a child, from a males’ perspective, is one tiny sperm and
contributing that doesn’t really take very long. For a woman, the required cost
of producing a child is an egg, sustaining the developing baby for many months,
facing the health risks associated with giving birth to a child, nursing,
ensuring her infant’s and her own survival needs during those very vulnerable
years as the child grows and slowly becomes able to be more independent, and so
on.
In the primitive world we evolved in, although the sky was
the limit for males, as far as reproduction went, the downside was that it was
quite possible for only a few males to monopolize all of the females, leaving
the rest of the males with no mating and reproduction opportunities. This
situation is common in primate species, such as gorillas, in which one alpha
male can dominate all of the other males and serve as the primary mate for all
of the females in the group. An alpha gorilla doesn’t get to mate with all of
the female gorillas by being polite. He earns that right by being the strongest
and most viciously frightening gorilla. Violence maintains his high status and
this kind of desperate competition for women to mate with was also the context
in which human males evolved. Among humans, males tend to be more violent than
females because being violent provided men with a major reproductive advantage
over other men. It is understandable why men are so much more likely to fight and
kill one another than women are. Historically, about two-thirds of all murders
in the United States are committed by men against other men (Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 2012). Even now, competition is fierce and, from the evolutionary
psychology perspective, the ultimate goal for men, generally speaking, is to
defeat other men for access to female mates. Evolutionarily speaking, women
represent the reproductive resources that males need to transmit their genes.
Once a man has attracted a woman to mate with, control over that resource is a
priority and violence is one tool that a man may use to maintain that control.
There is an unease that naturally emerges when describing
this evolutionary approach to understanding IPV. If such a proneness to
violence embedded within the male DNA, what can we do about it? Fortunately,
humans are much too sophisticated to be ruled completely by these inherited
traits. Our evolutionary past means that men face a challenge that women do not
face to the same degree and they must deliberately work to overcome it. Failure
to overcome it risks their causing physical harm or even death to the people
closest to them. The challenge for men is to overcome the tendency that
evolution has instilled in them to treat women as property and to conceive of a
woman’s role as to serve merely as receptacles for reproduction. A person’s
experiences and social context can either facilitate the worst and most
destructive parts of us humans that we have inherited from our ancestors or it
can cause those traits to remain dark, primitive parts of us that we never
express. A place like Canada has many mechanisms that tend to discourage IPV,
relative to what humans would be likely to experience in the ancient world in
which we evolved. We have a list of official crimes and punishments for those
crimes that make it risky for people to violently attack their intimate
partners. There are less formal risks involved, as well. We are a society that
generally (or should we say “kind of”) abhors violence and many of us would
shun a person for engaging in IPV.
In part, these restraints emerge from historically quite
novel cultural values that favour gender equality over the more traditional
view of women as property and as inherently inferior. (As one of hundreds of
historical examples we may have chosen, the North Carolina Supreme Court
dismissed a complaint against a certain Mr. Black for assaulting his wife in
1964 even though they were separated at the time, on grounds that “a husband is
responsible for the acts of the wife, and he is required to govern his
household, and for that purpose the law permits him to use towards his wife
such a degree of force as necessary…” (Klein, 2004). Note that the amount of
force deemed necessary tended to be left entirely up to the husband, making
every male head of household his own sort of totalitarian dictator. We should
be grateful to some of our most recent ancestors for dismissing these ideas and
pulling us all out of the mud. The problem is that the genes remain and they
support a persistence of gender discrimination and a persistent willingness by
a fair number of men (not the majority, but a sizeable minority) to use
violence to control “their woman”. To be fair, there is some much smaller group
of women who have the same notions about “their men”. An interest in having
power over others, and a willingness to use violence to maintain that power, is
not exclusive to men.
Neither biological nor evolutionary psychology can provide much
guidance in addressing this social problem, because they merely explain why
humans are capable of violence and why some men (and even some women) will be
violent toward their intimate partners. It is clear that most people can be
encouraged to suppress whatever violent urges they might experience. Luckily,
most people don’t assault their intimate partners, despite what their genes
might encourage. That’s encouraging and suggests that a person’s experiences
can be constructed in a way that will make them very unlikely to act violently
toward their loved ones. Perhaps there are experiences that a person can have
that would override the tendency to think about the world in a way that
encourages violent action toward an intimate partner, such as viewing an
intimate partner as property to be controlled by any means necessary? How experiences
determine an individual’s behaviour is the primary emphasis of the Behaviorist
approach to psychology, whereas the investigation of mental processes and how
they guide human behaviour is the main focus of the Cognitive Psychology
perspective. Those two approaches will provide the basis for our next two posts
on IPV.
References:
Klein, A. R. (2004). The
criminal justice response to domestic violence. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth/Thomson.
Eller, J. D. (2006). Violence and culture: a cross-cultural
and interdisciplinary approach. Southbank, Victoria, Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth.
