The recalibrational theory and violent anger

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Anger is responsible for a large share of human aggressive acts, and yet most incidents of anger do not result in any aggressive behavior at all. To understand when and why an angry individual becomes violent we must understand what anger is and what function it solves. The recalibrational theory of anger is a computational-evolutionary model that maintains that the function of anger is to recalibrate individuals who place insufficient weight on the welfare of the angry individual when making decisions, i.e. anger raises the target's welfare tradeoff ratio (WTR). Features of anger that can be explained from this perspective include the major triggers of anger, the content of anger-based arguments, individual differences in anger thresholds, and the selective deployment of negotiative tactics such as the withdrawal of benefits and the infliction of costs. When certain criteria are met, cost infliction will take the form of violent aggression and can be understood as a bargaining tactic designed to recalibrate the target's WTR. Living tissue is made of dead matter (mostly hydrogen, oxygen and carbon), but is " alive " to the extent that it is functionally designed to bring about improbable outcomes. Aggression is, analyzed unemo-tionally and with the full breadth of the animal kingdom in mind, the disordering of another animal in ways that prevent its long term functioning. From the standpoint of natural selection, disordering other organisms would have been an attractive option in a wide range of circumstances (Archer, 1988; Duntley & Buss, 2004). But the targets of these attempts are, of course, designed to resist threats to their functional integrity often by disordering the " attacker. " This makes aggression a dangerous tactic. Because of this danger, the mechanisms that natural selection has designed to deploy aggression use that option only in limited circumstances and often only after less dangerous tactics have failed. To understand when aggression is deployed, we require a careful examination of the full range of conflict adaptations not just the act of aggression itself. To only study aggression per se would be rather …