Homicide

Front Cover
Transaction Publishers, Jan 1, 1988 - Psychology - 328 pages

The human race spends a disproportionate amount of attention, money, and expertise in solving, trying, and reporting homicides, as compared to other social problems. The public avidly consumes accounts of real-life homicide cases, and murder fiction is more popular still. Nevertheless, we have only the most rudimentary scientific understanding of who is likely to kill whom and why. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson apply contemporary evolutionary theory to analysis of human motives and perceptions of self-interest, considering where and why individual interests conflict, using well-documented murder cases.

This book attempts to understand normal social motives in murder as products of the process of evolution by natural selection. They note that the implications for psychology are many and profound, touching on such matters as parental affection and rejection, sibling rivalry, sex differences in interests and inclinations, social comparison and achievement motives, our sense of justice, lifespan developmental changes in attitudes, and the phenomenology of the self.

This is the first volume of its kind to analyze homicides in the light of a theory of interpersonal conflict. Before this study, no one had compared an observed distribution of victim-killer relationships to "expected" distribution, nor asked about the patterns of killer-victim age disparities in familial killings. This evolutionary psychological approach affords a deeper view and understanding of homicidal violence.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

Selfinterest and conflict
10
2 Killing Kinfolks
17
Kinship and collaborative homicide revisited
34
Femaleselective infanticide
53
II Parental Homicide in the Modern
61
Stepparents and offspring
90
Oedipal conflict and the primal parricide
107
Conflict over what?
114
7 Why Men and Not Women?
137
8 The Logic of SameSex Conflict
163
9 Till Death Us Do Part
187
10 Retaliation and Revenge
221
11 Calling the Killers to Account
253
12 On Cultural Variation
275
Summary and Concluding Comments
293
References
299

6
120
Index
323

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information