afro american
Adaptive Problems as the Root Cause of Aggression In the article “Human Aggression and in Evolutionary Psychological Perspective,” David M. Buss and Todd K. Shackelford explain the root cause of aggression. Today, many people believe that aggression is caused by social learning. At a young age people are introduced to violent television shows, video games, movies, etc. Some would say that because of these violent video games and television shows, aggression is learned at a young age and therefore social learning is the root cause of aggression. Buss and Shackelford don’t want to discount social learning for contributing to some aggression, but because aggression was present before the use of violent video games and television shows, they take an evolutionary psychological approach in detecting the root cause of aggression. Buss and Shackelford make it clear in their article that aggression has been occurring for thousands of years, far before the invention of video games and television, which is why they take an evolutionary psychological approach to aggression. According to evolutionary psychology “All human behavior is a product of mechanisms internal to the person, in conjunction with inputs that trigger the activation of those mechanisms” (Buss and Shackelford pg. 607). This means that aggression is a behavior that is triggered by some sort of emotion, problem and or threat. According to Buss and Shackelford, the type of emotions or threats that triggers aggression is co-opting the resources of others, defending against attack, intrasexual competition, negotiating status and power hierarchies, deterring rivals from future aggression, deterring long-term mates from sexual infidelity and reducing resources expended on unrelated children. Buss and Shackelford suggest that aggression can only be triggered in certain social contexts and aggression is the coping mechanism used to overcome the seven adaptive problems. A problem I have found in this article is