Relationship between population size and rates of violence

Does population size affect rates of violence?

In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, psychologist Steven Pinker argues that people who live in states are less violent than those who lived in nonstate "hunting, gathering, and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history."

In a new article in Current Anthropology, researchers Dean Falk and Charles Hildebolt question some of the assumptions made in Pinker's book, arguing that because rates of violence are blind to actual population sizes, it remains to be seen whether or not the apparent decrease in contemporary violence is an artifact of scaling factors.

Taking an evolutionary perspective, Falk and Hildebolt compare annual deaths from intercommunity violence ("war") for 11 chimpanzee communities, 24 human nonstates, and 19 and 22 countries that fought, respectively, in WWI and WWII. The results indicate that, rather than being more violent, people from nonstates are more vulnerable to lethal warfare compared to inhabitants of states. Read more...

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