Resource Unpredictability, Mistrust, and War

Abstract

The results of this cross-cultural study suggest that war may be caused mostly by a fear of nature and a partially resultant fear of others. A history of unpredictable natural disasters strongly predicts more war, as does socialization for mistrust (but less strongly). It seems that people, particularly in nonstate societies, may try to protect themselves against future disasters by going to war to take resources from enemies.

Scars for war: evaluating alternative signaling explanations for cross-cultural variance in ritual costs

“…While polygynous groups exhibit costlier rites than non-polygynous groups, this relationship is not significant when subsistence type or warfare frequency are included in the model, suggesting that male rites do not vary as a function of mating competition. Ember and Ember (1992) have shown that warfare frequency is a predictor of polygyny. Nonetheless, Scars for War / Sosis, Kress, and Boster 19 among polygynous societies in our sample, warfare frequency remains a significant predictor of the costliness of male rites (F 1,47 = 5.24, p = .027).…”

“…- Figure 1 about hereStudents coded the frequencies of external and internal warfare for five levels following Ember and Ember (1992). Owing to our small sample size and our lack of confidence about the ability of HRAF materials to accurately offer fine distinctions (e.g., whether war occurred once every year or once every two years), data were collapsed to create variables for the presence and absence of internal and external warfare respectively.…”

A framework for examining leadership in extreme contexts

“…We do recognize that the two can be entrained such that a crisis leads to an extreme context or vice versa. For example, Ember and Ember (1992) note that a crisis can lead to a scarcity of resources (e.g., water) leading to social and moral breakdowns that could promote extreme contexts, such as war, famine, or civil unrest.…”

Artificial Life Meets Anthropology: A Case of Aggression in Primitive Societies

“…Embers [28][29][30] showed that resource problems, particularly those created by unpredictable weather or pest disasters strongly predict warfare frequency (for direct archaeological evidence on unpredictable resource fluctuations as a major factor of warfare frequency see, e.g., [31,32]). Multivariate analyses for nonstate societies gave standardized coefficient of r = 0,631 (p < 0.001, one tail) for natural disasters as predictor of warfare ( [29] p. 254). Furthermore, the correlation between the presence of unpredictable natural disasters destroying food supplies and warfare frequency has turned out to be stronger than the one attested for more than a dozen various warfare frequency factors tested by the Embers.…”