How do you explain mass shooters in terms of evolutionary psychology? What is its stone-age equivalent?
Why are most mass-shooters described as “quiet”, “depressed”, “socially withdrawn” etc. ? There must be an explanation for this. According to evolutionary psychology, rapes (during non-war period) are desperate attempts by socially-marginal males to spread their genes. What can be the benefits of mass shooting, though?
The explanation is that these are mentally ill people. Their inability to integrate into the “herd” (AKA “society”) would normally have resulted in these people being oastracised, where they would have probably died in isolation. But since they live in a civilized society where they can, if not function, at least not starve to death or get eaten by a predator, they manage to fester long enough to blow up and act in a non-evolutionarily productive manner.
This is really an “egg or chicken first” question. In a more traditional society, they might not be ostracised in the first place, they might get more connected to other people. Modern society tend to make people more distant to each other, resulting in greater isolation.
In addition, modern western society has become more “left-wing” in the sense of social expectation. Being kept to oneself wasn’t a big deal in the old times, but now it is like every decent job requires the applicant to be a so-called “team-player” , having so-called “excellent communication skills” and “inter-personal skills”. It used to be finding someone who can get the job done, now it is like finding someone who can get along with existing workers. The priority has changed.
Therefore, people who are not very social are much more discriminated against nowadays than in the past, resulting in frustration and desperation.
Your problem is that you think that every human behavior must have some evolutionary benefit to it.
But that’s nonsensical. When a moth flies into a flame, it’s not because moths evolved to fly into flames to have more offspring. When a fish tries to bite a wiggling turtle tongue, it’s not because biting turtle tongues is a successful reproductive strategy.
These things are mistakes. Animal and human brains don’t work perfectly, they operate according to certain rules, and sometimes the rules don’t make sense giving the context the organism finds itself in. And sometimes the brain itself is just broken. You wouldn’t think a horse that fell into a ditch and broke its leg did it on purpose as some sort of strategy, would you?
Humans have very complicated brains compared to other animals, and our brains make mistakes all the time. Sometimes they get garbage in and spit garbage out. And sometimes they get good data in but there’s some broken algorithm somewhere and they spit garbage out anyway.
So, you’ve made the observation that people who go on mass shooting sprees are deeply unhappy. What makes you think this requires explanation?
You want an explanation using those parameters? Fine: it prevents those other people from passing on their genes.
Except in most cases, the vast majority of these people are not directly connected to the shooter or his circumstences.
What does that have to do with anything? Less competition from ANYONE else’s reproduction means a greater chance of YOUR genes surviving into the next generation.
However, not every bulshyte pop-science explanation fits every situation.
They are acting out of a angry need for revenge.
The need to assert yourself, to defend and fight back, well, the evolutionary advantages of that is clear.
What goes wrong is:
The shooters are overly angry about imagined slights. Just because they feel insulted and excluded and inferior does not mean that someone or some group actually WAS excluding and insulting them to a degree that merits revenge.
The shooters displace their anger at, for instance, their classmates or the girls who slighted them, to a general They. They even includes random passers by of in the case of Sandy Hook, preschool kids. At least the Columbine kids targeted their own school.
The shooters are armed with guns that can do lethal damage. In cavemen days, the slighted and the (imagined) slighters would be equally armed (both Physical strenght and some short range weapons). That would level the field, and might keep the slightees from escalating.
IMHO, anyway.
Right, and if you’re not killing your own kin, then indirectly the shooter can help his own genes go forward by allowing theirs to, even if he never reproduces.
Of course, this question makes you wonder about the parents who kill their own kids and then themselves, because that’s an evolutionary fail right there.
Or maybe just being insane is a way better explanation for all of those than attempting to fit just-so stories to every action.
Based on what evidence? Do you think a depressed loner who wanted to march to the beat of his own drum would have done well in a hunter/gatherer society?
If anything, the concept of “just being left alone to get your job done” is a result of the industrial age. Automation turned people into biological cogs in a much larger assembly machine. No one cared about being a “team player” as long as your widget count met quota. As more mundane processes continue to be automated as we transition to a service economy, more ephasis is placed on the creation and sharing of ideas. Soft skills like teamwork, networking and communication take on a greater importance because more and more hard skills can be performed by a machine.
I’m not sure what this has to do with your question though. Except that societal evolution is much faster than biological evolution. So people who find themselves unable to adapt to societies needs often find themselves unemployed, oastracised and isolated. So maybe they turn to the old evolutionary solution of “smash all who threaten me and my seed!”
No. It is far easier for a loner in the modern industrialized world than in a primitive hunter-gatherer band. A person with a severely impaired ability to conform to social norms can still be gainfully employed and/or access all the necessities of life. Not every job requires teamwork, and the information revolution has increased the viability of isolated work.
Back in the olden days hunting, building, and later farming had significant group work components. The guy who defies social convention by yelling loudly while everyone is sneaking up on a bison or harvesting the barley before it’s ready puts the entire community, in danger of starvation. After a couple days with no dinner, most people would ostracize the individualist, or kill him outright.
No. You are wrong about the about the significance of conformity in traditional socities. Shunning was a very real and serious punishment/inducement to conform.
Speaking as a biologist, the impact of mass shootings on the human population as a whole is so miniscule as to be totally negligible from an evolutionary perspective. The OP seems to be asking what evolutionary drive is causing people to be unhappy. I would argue that happiness is influenced by genes far FAR less than it is by environment - culture, society, whatever you want to call it. Evolution is not the be all and end all of behavior, even in nonhuman species.
I have an interest in psychology, but this is taking it too far. Some people just end up wired incorrectly.
About 85-90%* of evolutionary psychology explanations are total bollocks. That will improve with time, no doubt. There are also lots of things about human behavior that it can’t, and lots of things that it should not even try to explain, for which it is a completely inappropriate (and severely misleading) explanatory framework.
*I admit that this is a rough estimate, and these actual figures are pulled out of my ass, just as about 70% or so of purported evo psych explanations are pulled out of someone’s ass.
I agree.
Probably the reason is that most people don’t like to spend time around others with violent tendencies. Do you? If other people don’t want to spend time with you, you would appear quiet and socially withdrawn, and might be depressed. The “quiet, depressed, socially withdrawn” could be an effect of the violent tendencies and not the cause.
Evolutionary biology doesn’t demand that every trait ever shown by any individual have an evolutionary purpose. If that were so, how would it explain genetic diseases that cause people to die before they can reproduce?
Mass shootings are far, far less common than rapes. Wikipedia says there were 90,000 reported rapes in the US in 2008, and that’s probably an undercount of actual rapes. There were not anywhere near that number of mass shootings.
I think that “quiet”, “depressed”, “socially withdrawn” etc… are descriptors of quite a few people with mental illness actually. Many of the mentally ill people I’ve known have fallen into that bucket.
Anyway, the question to me is how do they get so withdrawn? Is it a consequence of the mental illness, is it a symptom, or is it some sort of synergistic thing where the mental illness and withdrawal feed each other?
Then, after that’s solved, the next question is “what makes these people do this?” There are lots of mentally ill people, but an almost, but not quite zero percentage of them actually go shoot things up.
There is an example of something like mass shootings from a pre-gun culture: running amok in Malay culture.
I think it’s the last, probably. An interaction of innate personality and environment.
If everything you say elicits eye-rolls and snickers or people just flat-out ignore you, the big ole weirdo in the room, then quite quickly you will become isolated. The more isolated you are, the more likely you hold onto and develop idiosyncratic (i.e., “weird”) habits. Which will promote further marginalization and isolation. And then you become weirder. It’s a circle of madness.
“Quiet” is easy to understand, IMHO. How do you know who’s quiet and who’s not? Walk into a room and the non-quiet people are chatting with friends. If you are a social weirdo who will one day shoot up a whole room of people, chances are you aren’t going to have friends. I think the lack of friends thing is the more meaningful commonality rather than the propensity to talk.