Single Review on past events

What are the reasons for escalating cruelty? Why do combatants in conflict zones find it attractive to be violent, resp. why do people in civil societies like to watch other people die (on TV or accidents)? And which different types of violence exist? - These are some of many questions that Associated Fellow and psychologist Roland Weierstall tried to answer in his Jour Fixe talk on “Attraction to cruelty as an antidote to traumatization – A psychological perspective”.

To investigate the nature of violent behavior Roland Weierstall differs between field research (e.g. assessing participants that actually participated in violent behavior) vs. laboratory research (e.g. by inducing emotions related to cruelty in students). Since an interdisciplinary access to his topic is crucial he cooperates with biologists and chemists, political scientists and sociologists, but also with philosophers and historians. Because one of his focus concerns violent behavior as consequence of war experiences, he also collaborates with universities in violent-affected countries, e.g. Burundi or South Africa.

In an exemplary study he collected data from high-intensity violent conflicts and determined the intensity of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in war veterans. In defining what a trauma is he distinguishes between an objective and a subjective threat. Objective threat means: “The person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event where there was the threat of or actual death or serious injury. The event may also have involved a threat to the person's physical well-being or the physical well-being of another person.” On the other hand subjective threat is defined as: “The person responded to the event with strong feelings of fear, helplessness or horror.”

The psychologist explained different levels of how a potentially traumatic event can be processed: sensory, cognitive, emotional and physiological. They influence each other and determine the PTSD-level, when the different traumatic events a person has experienced start to form the so-called “fear-network”. However, Roland Weierstall emphasizes that not every potentially stressful event is traumatic, which is the case when the subjective fear response does not occur, but is rather replaced by a hedonic or appetitive processing.

He furthermore clarified the term “Appetitive Aggression” and the human attraction to violence which he would explain in parts with our biological roots and from an evolutionary perspective, but also on the basis of environmental influences, socialization processes and education.

In the end of his talk the question was raised whether women are as aggressive as men. Although this question might be hard to answer, Roland Weierstall reported that whenever men are aggressive you ask for their motives, whereas when women are aggressive you ask which bad experiences they had. He emphasizes that still a lot of research has to be done to understand potential gender difference as violent behavior in women has often been neglected in research on aggression.