The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,310

in psychopaths, though they may show no other signs of pathology.82 In some people, signs of psychopathy develop after damage to these regions from disease or an accident, but the condition is also partly heritable. Psychopathy may have evolved as a minority strategy that exploits a large population of trusting cooperators.83 Though no society can stock its militias and armies exclusively with psychopaths, such men are bound to be disproportionately attracted to these adventures, with their prospect of plunder and rape. As we saw in chapter 6, genocides and civil wars often involve a division of labor between the ideologues or warlords who run them and the shock troops, including some number of psychopaths, who are happy to carry them out.84

The psychology of predatory violence consists in the human capacity for means-end reasoning and the fact that our faculties of moral restraint do not kick in automatically in our dealings with every living thing. But there are two psychological twists in the way that predatory violence is carried out.

Though predatory violence is purely practical, the human mind does not stick to abstract reasoning for long. It tends to backslide into evolutionarily prepared and emotionally charged categories.85 As soon as the objects being preyed upon take protective measures in response, emotions are likely to run high. The human prey may hide and regroup, or they may fight back, perhaps even threatening to destroy the predator preemptively, a kind of instrumental violence of their own that gives rise to a security dilemma or Hobbesian trap. In these cases the predator’s state of mind may shift from dispassionate means-ends analysis to disgust, hatred, and anger.86 As we have seen, perpetrators commonly analogize their victims to vermin and treat them with moralized disgust. Or they may see them as existential threats and treat them with hatred, the emotion that, as Aristotle noted, consists of a desire not to punish an adversary but to end its existence. When extermination is not feasible and perpetrators have to continue to deal with their victims, either directly or with the participation of third parties, they may treat them with anger. The predators may respond to the defensive reprisals of their prey as if they were the ones under attack, and experience a moralized wrath and a thirst for revenge. Thanks to the Moralization Gap, they will minimize their own first strike as necessary and trivial while magnifying the reprisal as unprovoked and devastating. Each side will count the wrongs differently—the perpetrator tallying an even number of strikes and the victim an odd number—and the difference in arithmetic can stoke a spiral of revenge, a dynamic we will explore in a later section.

There is a second way self-serving biases can fan a small flame of predatory violence into an inferno. People exaggerate not just their moral rectitude but their power and prospects, a subtype of self-serving bias called positive illusions. 87 Hundreds of studies have shown that people overrate their health, leadership ability, intelligence, professional competence, sporting prowess, and managerial skills. People also hold the nonsensical belief that they are inherently lucky. Most people think they are more likely than the average person to attain a good first job, to have gifted children, and to live to a ripe old age. They also think that they are less likely than the average person to be the victim of an accident, crime, disease, depression, unwanted pregnancy, or earthquake.

Why should people be so deluded? Positive illusions make people happier, more confident, and mentally healthier, but that cannot be the explanation for why they exist, because it only begs the question of why our brains should be designed so that only unrealistic assessments make us happy and confident, as opposed to calibrating our contentment against reality. The most plausible explanation is that positive illusions are a bargaining tactic, a credible bluff. In recruiting an ally to support you in a risky venture, in bargaining for the best deal, or in intimidating an adversary into backing down, you stand to gain if you credibly exaggerate your strengths. Believing your own exaggeration is better than cynically lying about it, because the arms race between lying and lie detection has equipped your audience with the means of seeing through barefaced lies.88 As long as your exaggerations are not laughable, your audience cannot afford to ignore your self-assessment altogether, because you have more information about yourself than anyone else does, and you have a built-in incentive not to distort your assessment too much or you would