94 An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective on the Modulation of Competitive Confrontation and Risk-Taking

This chapter discusses the variations in homicide as indicative of variations in competitive risk taking, interpreting prevalent conflict typologies and demographic patterns as reflections of evolved motivational and information processing mechanisms that function to regulate competitive inclinations and actions. Connections are then drawn to research on future discounting and impulsivity, on the effects of inequity on violence, and on the bidirectional influences between circulating testosterone levels and social experience. It argues that the Darwinian Theory, especially sexual selection theory, provides a framework that can both synthesize existing knowledge in these disparate domains and facilitate future discovery. Evolutionary psychology is the pursuit of psychological science with explicit consideration of the fact that the psyche is, like the body, a product of evolutionary processes.