Dialogues on Aggression: An Urgent Interdisciplinary Forum

Dialogues on Aggression
This online series, hosted by the Neuropsychoanalysis Association, convenes experts from a number of disciplines – evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychodynamic psychiatry, developmental psychology, sociology and criminology, for a fascinating exploration of this timely topic. Aggression is a fundamental human impulse, and violence an extreme manifestation of it. While aggression is an enduring and universal phenomenon, it has taken different forms throughout history, and in different cultural and societal contexts. The unique challenges we face in the 21st century require more community and global collaboration than ever before. And yet, the stability and harmony of families, communities, and society at large are dangerously undermined by the rise of interpersonal violence, mass shootings, xenophobia, and radicalization.

Clark McCauley, Ph.D.

The Highs and Lows of Caring about Others: Love and Hate

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Humans care about others in ways that go beyond anything that rational choice theories can comprehend. We care not only about those close to us — family, friends, pets — but about strangers such as public figures and professional sports teams. It is our capacity to care about large and anonymous groups — ethnicity, nation, religion — that powers intergroup aggression and violence. At the extreme, it is love for an essentialized ingroup and hate for an essentialized outgroup that powers political mass murder in war and genocide.

This webinar will have the following learning objectives:

• Recognize how broad and deep the human capacity to care about others is.
  
• Consider the possibility that love and hate are not emotions but extreme forms of positive and negative identification — the occasions of experiencing many emotions, depending on what is happening to those loved or hated.
  
• Consider the possibility that mass political murder is made possible by attributing positive essence to the ingroup (love) and a negative essence to the outgroup (hate).

Bio
Clark McCauley is Research Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College. He is a consultant for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and was a lead investigator with the National Consortium for Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START). With Dan Chirot he is author of Why not kill them all? The logic of mass political murder and finding ways of avoiding it (Princeton University Press, 2006).  With Sophia Moskalenko he is author of Friction: How conflict radicalizes them and us (Oxford, 2017) and Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2020). He is Emeritus Founding Editor of Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict and a member of the Editorial Boards of Peace and Conflict: The Journal of Peace Psychology and Terrorism and Political Violence.

CPD credits: 2
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