Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive Aspects - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 81

social costs of revenge, we will see how disruptive it can be in any society in which,
without regulation, revenge inevitably leads to an escalation into feuds, mayhem,
and destruction. The Yanomamo tribe offers an interesting example, but there are
several kinds of societies and hierarchic structures in which revenge can be less
positive at the group level. This is especially true when conflicts of interest arise
also outside the group and there is intergroup competition. A group weakened by
feuds will be more prone to appropriation by a stronger group with more resources
in terms of men and power.

4.4.2 The Culture of Honor

Another interesting example of an environment in which revenge is quite common
is offered by southern United States, where the so-called culture of honor is
still present (Nisbett and Cohen 1996 ). Although far and characterized by really
different historical, economic, and social circumstances, revenge seems to play the
same role in the southern United States and in the Amazonas region where the
Yanomamo live. In the southern United States, herding was the prevailing activity,
introduced by herdsmen from Scotland and Ireland. Herding, more than farming,
places an individual at risk for losing his entire resource base to theft. Moreover,
the southern United States was a frontier region where the state was almost absent
and inhabitants had to create and enforce their own system of order. According
to Nisbett and colleagues (e.g., Nisbett and Cohen 1996 ), such an environment
led to the development of an enforcement system in which minor transgressions,
intended as personal aggressions, were severely punished. Shackelford ( 2005 )
provides an evolutionary explanation for this behavior, claiming that the inputs
provided by the environment (herding and lack of state rules) were processed by
psychological mechanisms that may have evolved, however, as solutions to a related
adaptive problem that likely was recurrently confronted by ancestral men: theft of
a reproductively valuable wife. Theft of a wife might have amounted not to physical
theft, per se , but to theft of her reproductive capacity, as in the form of courting her
for an extra-pair copulation or raping her (p. 390).
A set of behaviors defined as warfare among the Yanomamo or as indicators
of a culture of honor in southern United States might be the output of the same
psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to the adaptive problem of
mate retention (see, e.g., Buss 1988 ; Buss and Shackelford 1997 ; Flinn 1988 ). The
problem of partner retention and infidelity is universal; thus, the same psychological
mechanisms and different environment could have produced the same behavior, i.e.,
revenge.