The increase in aggressiveness in almost all areas of our daily lives is nothing new to anyone, how our society has been increasing the revolutions so much that speed is no longer the only result, but rather a style of response to shock, confrontational, aggressive. It is no longer enough to keep oneself safe from the consequences of breaking the rules, but one seeks to ensure this by accusing the one who breaks them. The area where this, call it, evolution is most easily observed is on the streets, where drivers no longer only respond to special situations aggressively, now basically the entire moment they are behind the wheel they express aggressiveness to their entire environment.
He tells us, in his article published in , that he has had the opportunity to see traffic congestion and aggressive drivers around the world and more than once he has warned that if two vehicles arrive at a corner at the same time, one of the drivers touches the horn trying to “gain position”, as if hoping that honking will disorient or intimidate the other driver in order to gain a couple of seconds that will allow him to reach and cross the corner before the other. If we look at it from the evolutionary point of view, honking is a selfish act because it benefits only the person who honks and harms the others. This selfish behavior is not a mystery to evolutionary biologists, since they maintain that there may be easily evolved by natural selection or by the analogous process of evolution
To stop the selfish tendencies of drivers and eliminate noise, in some countries it was decided to make honking illegal, unless this is justified by an emergency, of course this depends on the rigidity of the laws. Receiving a fine for honking turns such behavior into an expensive behavior for the little benefit it brings; in several countries, especially in Europe, it has become very rare to hear horns on the streets. But there is a more striking behavior that Maestripieri describes on the streets of California, United States, where, when a driver ignores a stop sign or a red light, he receives honks from other drivers, even when they have not been in danger due to this action. Rather, these drivers risk being fined for honking simply to increase the chances that the driver who broke the law by ignoring the stop sign will receive the corresponding larger fine. Evolutionarily, behaviors that entail a cost for the person affected and for the person who performs them are no longer selfish: they are malevolent.
Accusing someone of breaking the law even if it means breaking another law myself, as long as the other person is more harmed than I, is a malicious attitude.
Malevolent social behavior can evolve by natural selection If the cost imposed on the recipient is greater than the cost that the one who acts will suffer, for example, if my enemy and I had three children each, and to murder his three children it was necessary to sacrifice two of mine, that behavior malevolent could be saved through generations because that son who survived will pass on those genes, which allowed me to make the decision to sacrifice two of my children, to the following generations. Likewise, if the fine that the stop sign violator receives is more expensive than what other drivers could receive for honking, then the malicious behavior of honking may prosper. Of course, the story does not end here, because the drivers who honk also want to give the driver who failed to stop the sign a bad image, the image of someone who does not know how to respect the rules and, this reputation of being a cheater or transgressor. , can be much more damaging than a fine for failing to obey a stop sign.
Honking at drivers who break the rules is an example of what Robert Trives, an evolutionary biologist, calls self-righteous aggression. Respecting the rules of the road is a cooperative social contract between people, nothing different from the social contracts that make people pay their taxes, not steal from their employers or cheat on their wives, thus, adhering to these social contracts requires restraining the selfish tendencies of each, but this benefit is usually offset by the benefits gained if we all play by the rules, however, any individual who cheats and takes advantage of the system can benefit greatly while increasing the cost of sacrifices For everyone else, that is why those who cooperate are part of this social game, you must immediately expose those who take advantage of the system, giving them a bad reputation and trying to exclude them from said game.
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Destroying someone’s reputation best accomplishes the goals of malevolent behavior.
Given the magnitude of the damage that a freeloader can cause to the community of “cooperators,” people engaged in moralistic aggression are willing to do so even at a cost to themselves, so apparently malevolent behavior evolves. As an example, some wives cheated on by their husbands have paid exorbitant sums of money to put the names of their cheating husbands on boards in important urban areas with the simple intention of making their bad reputation famous and thus ensuring that no woman associates with them. in the future.
The higher the percentages of people who subscribe to a social contract in a particular community, the higher the intensity of moralistic aggression against transgressors, in fact, in places where almost everyone is “cooperators” (e.g. on the streets of California), the social contract is very valuable and must be protected at all costs. While in communities where the contract is weak, moralistic aggression is also weak, as in the streets of Rome, no one honks at someone who does not stop at a stop sign because many do, a Roman knows that the Rules exist but he believes that it is others who must comply with them, almost like in Chile and Argentina.
The streets are a good example of attitudinal changes and allow us to observe how societies evolve. They are also the “breeding ground” for new behaviors, especially aggressive, due to the large congestion that occurs today in all large and medium-sized cities around the world, but these behaviors are not exclusive to the streets and are observed in different situations becoming more common, so common that today they can be observed in schools and even in kindergartens, this raises the big question, are we satisfied with how our society is evolving? What should we do as mental health professionals to help in this regard? Is malevolent behavior a necessary evil in our society?