Societies shape human nature toward peace or violence by cultural training

Evidence

Numerous other examples can be cited of different societies that create different natures. In cultural settings where interpersonal aggression is discouraged and devalued and amicableness and cooperativeness are the functional behavior, people live peaceably (Alland, 1972; Lantis, 1959; Mead, 1935; Turnbull, 1961). In other societies that provide extensive training in aggression and invest it with functional value, people spend a great deal of time threatening, fighting, maiming, and killing each other (Bateson, 1941; Chagnon, 1968; Whiting, 1941). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 172

Categorization

• DEFINE: Bandura’s core social-cognitive claim laid bare: aggression is not a fixed instinct but a culturally constituted behavioral repertoire.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the theoretical pivot of the chapter — the claim that society literally ‘creates different natures’ overturns both fixed-instinct and universal-drive accounts and grounds moral disengagement as a socially learned capacity.
• XREF: connects to: Durable peace requires transforming mindsets, not only weapons. — Miles Hewstone and Ed Cairns and Alberto Voci and Juergen Hamberger and Ulrike Niens, Intergroup Contact, Forgiveness, and…, 6