Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 2: Biobehavioral Influences (1994)
Chapter: Potential for Harm or Damage
1986; Huntingford and Turner, 1987; Archer, 1988; Klama, 1988; Browne and Archer, 1989), have recently reexamined the nature of aggression for a general audience. In both animal and human sciences, terms such as "aggression" and "violence" are used with enormous flexibility, making it difficult to tie down firm associations with biologic factors (such as hormones).
Potential for Harm or Damage
The one attribute of aggression about which everyone agrees is that the action must, at least, have the potential for harm or damage. Yet what do we mean by harm? Does harm include only physical harm, or can it include emotional damage or reduced breeding potential? There are behavioral responses that clearly involve harm or potential harm and receive labels other than aggression. For example, harm is definitely involved in predation—an activity that is generally distinguished from aggression by ethologists (students who emphasize behavior's role within the organism's natural environment). Predation is often, but not exclusively, an activity involving members of different species and generally does not involved marked arousal (see below). Harm is also a potential consequence of defensive responses by animals. Consequently, the potential for harm is insufficient cause for an action to be labeled aggression.
Having said this, one could make a convincing case for examining the possibility that behaviors more associated with predation deserve consideration in accounts of human violence. Humans are clearly designed to be omnivorous and do (in most cultures) obtain at least part of their food by predatory behaviors. Indeed, a surprisingly large number of infrahuman primate species are also not averse to taking the occasional prey item. Although accounts of human cannibalism are often rendered rather lurid in popular writing and the activity clearly has a semireligious component in many of the cultures that practice (or used to practice) it, this kind of "predation" has been described in a range of cultures. One can also add that the behaviors of certain psychopaths (efficient killing without many visible signs of emotional arousal) seem to fit the ethological description of predation rather than that of social aggression. Perhaps the detailed studies of the biologic factors involved in activities such as mouse killing by rats (e.g., Karli, 1981) are of relevance to some types of human violence even if they are not aggression.
