School of Applied Psychology, UCC, Cork, Ireland.
Hum Nat. 2019 Sep;30(3):272-298. doi: 10.1007/s12110-019-09351-7.
Irish Travellers constitute a pre-demographic-shift population living among a post-demographic-shift one. Their socio-medico profile identifies them as largely on fast life-history trajectories. In addition, they are strongly religious (typically using no contraception), highly sexually behaviorally dimorphic, with strong traditions of male-male competition (bare-knuckle fighting) and quasi-symbolic bride capture ("grabbing"). Their male-male competitions thus allow for the comparative testing of a number of interesting theories pertaining to the nature and function of types of violence in society. As a pilot study, we used expert raters (some naive to the hypotheses) to analyze a number of real-life bare-knuckle competitions in terms of the support said spectacles offered to theories of this sort of violence as reinforcing ideas of antisociality, hierarchical promotion, intersexual signaling, or maintenance of within-group equality. We found good evidence to support theories of within-group, prosocial hierarchical functions for these contests. Limitations and implications for future research, such as direct measurement of fitness, are discussed.
爱尔兰旅行者构成了一个在人口转变后仍生活在人口转变前的群体。他们的社会医学特征表明，他们大多处于快速的生活史轨迹上。此外，他们强烈信奉宗教（通常不使用避孕措施），在性行为方面存在明显的性别差异，有着强烈的男性间竞争传统（徒手格斗）和准象征性的抢婚习俗（“抢亲”）。因此，他们的男性间竞争为检验一些关于社会中暴力类型的性质和功能的有趣理论提供了比较的机会。作为一项初步研究，我们使用专家评估者（对假设不了解）根据这些徒手格斗比赛的情况，从支持这种暴力的观点出发，分析了这些比赛在强化反社会行为、等级提升、两性信号传递或维持群体内平等方面的理论。我们发现了支持这些比赛具有群体内、亲社会等级功能的理论的有力证据。本文讨论了这些研究的局限性和对未来研究的意义，例如对适应性的直接测量。
