14 DAY TRIAL // Cavemen fought for their food and were rather aggressive when they were close to a hunk of meat, but apparently this behavior no longer exists, found a researcher at McGill University’s Department of Psychology.
Frank Kachanoff is a researcher very interested in evolution, who was very surprised to see that the sight of meat on the table did not make men more aggressive.
He first thought that this ancestral behavior would have lingered on, just like it has in animals, but his latest research proved him wrong.
If we think about it, the idea that meat would trigger an aggressive behavior is not necessarily a crazy one, because this actually motivated our ancestors to go hunting and protect their meat, in order to sustain themselves and their families.
So it is only natural that Kachanoff thought that humans could have inherited this link between meat and aggression, and tested his theory on 82 men.
For the evaluation, he used techniques that have been long verified for causing and measuring aggression.
The researchers asked the subjects to punish a script reader every time he made a mistake, while they sorted out photos.
Some subjects had photos of meat and others more neutral pictures, and they were told that they could administer several volumes of sound – 'painful' ones included, to the script reader, that he would hear after reading.
The team of researchers thought that the subjects looking at pictures of meat would be crueler to the reader, but it turned out that the complete opposite happened.
Kachanoff said that they “used imagery of meat that was ready to eat.
“In terms of behavior, with the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time.”
When presenting the current research at a recent symposium at McGill, Kachanoff said that he had based the whole experiment on “research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively.
“I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition.
“I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior.”
Evolutionary psychologists think that reflexes are a very important part of social trends and personal behavior, and a reason for which this research is important is that Kachanoff tries to find out how could society influence environmental factors to reduce the risk of aggressive behavior.
“I would like to run this experiment again, using hunting images,” he said.
“Perhaps Thanksgiving next year will be a great opportunity for a do-over!”
This research was guided by Dr. Donald Taylor and PhD student, Ms. Julie Caouette of McGill’s Department of Psychology.