America's Murder Rate Explained - our difference from Europe

Part of a four part series "Bi Polar Ape." YouTube Description: Frans de Waal discusses the evolutionary evidence behind crowding and it's impact on human aggression
enochsays...

i totally agree.

i live in florida now but i came from rhode island and lived in new york and chicago and i can attest to how differently these regions deal with conflict.

in new england and new york things are dealt with pretty directly..and quickly..which is viewed by those from the south as being "rude and opinionated" but in actuality is just dealing with a possible conflict directly and getting it out of the way.
there is nothing wrong with being direct and honest if you do it with respect.

so when i moved to florida (first miami,then ft lauderdale and now tampa)i found many of the people here to be two faced and a bunch of shit-talkers but what i didnt realize is that is how the south deals with possible conflict.they can do this due to the fact that they are not living on top of each other and can allow space to let the conflict die down.

i do not agree with that philosophy and still deal with people with the direct and honest approach but having gained this newfound understanding i deal with southerners with a much more gentle touch and it has done wonders to clear up any misunderstandings.

an interesting side note:i took my buddy from the rural country of pasco county to brooklyn with me to visit family and he was amazed at how very cool and awesome the people were there.as if somehow all new yorkers were douchebags.
i had to remind him that when you have millions of people living on top of one another you better learn to get along or its gonna be a bumpy ride.

legacy0100says...

I would have to partly disagree on this one. I believe high density does attribute to more aggression. Dr. Frans de Waal points out that high density alone does not always lead to aggression, and that there are other factors that attribute to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence. This much I agree with. However, this should not be used to throw away the immense impact over population has on human aggression.

He gives several different examples, one including about the chimpanzees in tight confined space. I find his claims very hard to believe. Chimps get very frustrated and show abnormal, anti-social behavior when they are in a tight confined space for a long period of time. Their hairs fall out, they bite their own knuckles or even each other. They show aggression to inexperienced moms and to their babies. It could be that Dr. de Waal may be omitting some factors in here. The chimps he is referring to may be from a zoo where they are put in small confined space when it's time to goto sleep, but then are let out to a bigger enclosure where they can run and play. This may be a bad example, but we don't really know because he doesn't reveal the source of his data. Perhaps his research did confine the chimps to a tight space all throughout the experiment. If so, then the duration of dwelling in tight enclosure is a big factor, but he didn't cite anything about that either.

I also would like to point out that there's generally a lot less food intake and physical activity in urban Japanese society. Your typical Japanese sushi portions can testify for that, as well as various hikikomori symptoms people suffer in overly populated Japanese cities.

Dr. de Waal says there's less crime in Japan, but this simply isn't true. He is overly reliant on only the statistics reported by the government, and he isn't are of the deep rooted cultural practices that mask these aggressions to the outside world. Dr. De Waal never mentions about the various odd symptoms and personal sacrifice everyone must make in order to maintain the order there. Violence is everyday life in Japanese society, including the fairly well known presence of Yakuza. Japanese people often get bullied by the Yakuza, but they do not report these events because for one, they are afraid of retaliation, and two, Yakuza has deep rooted connections with the government. Yakuza usually do not engage anyone foreign simply because it would get the embassies involved, and they do cannot exert any influence in foreign lands. So they only stick to bullying Japanese people, and stay clear of foreigners. Even in high school physical violence is rampant. Students fight or bully each other all the time, but it is not seen as a crime, but merely 'part of growing up'. Nobody reports anything, so the crime data remains low.

Compare this with cities in Netherlands. It is highly populated, but enjoys abundance of resources thanks to laxed attitude toward drugs and sex, which are themselves ways to alleviate aggression. People in Netherlands are also very mobile because of their well developed transportation infrastructure including extensive bike lanes, roads and trains. They are also in close proximity to larger open areas in Germany or France where they regularly escape to thanks to their abundance in resource, while in Japan people are very much confined to their own living quarters and their workplace, who usually cannot afford to take frequent vacations due to high expectation from bosses as well as fierce competition towards promotion. Imagine regular US/UK office space antics times ten.

Overall I find Dr. de Waal's argument only partially credible and would like to look into his experiments and his citations before acknowledging this as fact.

I remember Dag and his wife saying they used to live in Japan. I would like to hear their opinion about this issue and Japanese society being used as proof to this theory.

dagsays...

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Very interesting, *quality video and discussion. I would say there is probably some under-reported aggression and violence in Japan- but in general a whole hell of a lot less than anywhere else I have lived. In 3.5 years there- never saw a fight, never saw any violence that I remember - there was one crazy guy who was running around yelling at people - but that's it. Violence by Yakuza does happen, but it seems aggrandised from films. I think Yakuza are mainly loan sharks, brothel owners and black marketeers.

For whatever reason, violence is baked into the US culture - tied in maybe with a rugged frontier individualist spirit. Americans love their guns. My family too. My dad always carried a nickel-plated '38 under his car seat, which he called his "merging assistance device".

>> ^legacy0100:

I would have to partly disagree on this one. I believe high density does attribute to more aggression. Dr. Frans de Waal points out that high density alone does not always lead to aggression, and that there are other factors that attribute to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence. This much I agree with. However, this should not be used to throw away the immense impact over population has on human aggression.
He gives several different examples, one including about the chimpanzees in tight confined space. I find his claims very hard to believe. Chimps get very frustrated and show abnormal, anti-social behavior when they are in a tight confined space for a long period of time. Their hairs fall out, they bite their own knuckles or even each other. They show aggression to inexperienced moms and to their babies. It could be that Dr. de Waal may be omitting some factors in here. The chimps he is referring to may be from a zoo where they are put in small confined space when it's time to goto sleep, but then are let out to a bigger enclosure where they can run and play. This may be a bad example, but we don't really know because he doesn't reveal the source of his data. Perhaps his research did confine the chimps to a tight space all throughout the experiment. If so, then the duration of dwelling in tight enclosure is a big factor, but he didn't cite anything about that either.
I also would like to point out that there's generally a lot less food intake and physical activity in urban Japanese society. Your typical Japanese sushi portions can testify for that, as well as various hikikomori symptoms people suffer in overly populated Japanese cities.
Dr. de Waal says there's less crime in Japan, but this simply isn't true. He is overly reliant on only the statistics reported by the government, and he isn't are of the deep rooted cultural practices that mask these aggressions to the outside world. Dr. De Waal never mentions about the various odd symptoms and personal sacrifice everyone must make in order to maintain the order there. Violence is everyday life in Japanese society, including the fairly well known presence of Yakuza. Japanese people often get bullied by the Yakuza, but they do not report these events because for one, they are afraid of retaliation, and two, Yakuza has deep rooted connections with the government. Yakuza usually do not engage anyone foreign simply because it would get the embassies involved, and they do cannot exert any influence in foreign lands. So they only stick to bullying Japanese people, and stay clear of foreigners. Even in high school physical violence is rampant. Students fight or bully each other all the time, but it is not seen as a crime, but merely 'part of growing up'. Nobody reports anything, so the crime data remains low.
Compare this with cities in Netherlands. It is highly populated, but enjoys abundance of resources thanks to laxed attitude toward drugs and sex, which are themselves ways to alleviate aggression. People in Netherlands are also very mobile because of their well developed transportation infrastructure including extensive bike lanes, roads and trains. They are also in close proximity to larger open areas in Germany or France where they regularly escape to thanks to their abundance in resource, while in Japan people are very much confined to their own living quarters and their workplace, who usually cannot afford to take frequent vacations due to high expectation from bosses as well as fierce competition towards promotion. Imagine regular US/UK office space antics times ten.
Overall I find Dr. de Waal's argument only partially credible and would like to look into his experiments and his citations before acknowledging this as fact.
I remember Dag and his wife saying they used to live in Japan. I would like to hear their opinion about this issue and Japanese society being used as proof to this theory.

GeeSussFreeKsays...

I remember a little trivia thing from this brain teaser site. The salt and pepper shakers in a restaurant are usually in the middle. If you take one, use it, and place it more on the other person "side" of the table rather than the middle, they will start to get irritated...they might not even know why. So while we might "behave" more in crowds, that doesn't mean it is good for us. Violence is a good measure to take into account, but so is total happiness and suicide. Perhaps living in a city with access to medicine, cars, and wealth can't make you as happy as marring the girl next door you grew up with your whole live. I can't say, but it is food for thought.

dagsays...

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Someone puts the salt shaker over to my area of the table - sh*t's gonna get real.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I remember a little trivia thing from this brain teaser site. The salt and pepper shakers in a restaurant are usually in the middle. If you take one, use it, and place it more on the other person "side" of the table rather than the middle, they will start to get irritated...they might not even know why. So while we might "behave" more in crowds, that doesn't mean it is good for us. Violence is a good measure to take into account, but so is total happiness and suicide. Perhaps living in a city with access to medicine, cars, and wealth can't make you as happy as marring the girl next door you grew up with your whole live. I can't say, but it is food for thought.

Boise_Libsays...

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I remember a little trivia thing from this brain teaser site. The salt and pepper shakers in a restaurant are usually in the middle. If you take one, use it, and place it more on the other person "side" of the table rather than the middle, they will start to get irritated...they might not even know why. So while we might "behave" more in crowds, that doesn't mean it is good for us. Violence is a good measure to take into account, but so is total happiness and suicide. Perhaps living in a city with access to medicine, cars, and wealth can't make you as happy as marring the girl next door you grew up with your whole live. I can't say, but it is food for thought.


I always put the salt and pepper on the other side of the table so that my friends don't have to reach for it. This might explain some confrontations we've had.

criticalthudsays...

how about, the world is a mind bogglingly complex set of inter-relationships, of which we are part.
because of this, there is rarely ONE thing we can point to in order to explain a tendency (such as aggression), through a particular density.

criticalthudsays...

now if you are looking from a paleontologists point of view, the most aggressive section of the world in terms of active worldwide dominance and aggressive economic systems, has been europe/eurasia and it's offspring (the united states).

Hence in Europe, you have a place where prehistorically, the less advanced, less rational and more aggressive neanderthal inter-bred with the more advanced cro-magnon to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world.

direpicklesays...

>> ^criticalthud:

now if you are looking from a paleontologists point of view, the most aggressive section of the world in terms of active worldwide dominance and aggressive economic systems, has been europe/eurasia and it's offspring (the united states).

Citation needed.
>> ^criticalthud:

Hence in Europe, you have a place where prehistorically, the less advanced, less rational and more aggressive neanderthal inter-bred with the more advanced cro-magnon to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world.


Oh my god citation needed!

Paybacksays...

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I remember a little trivia thing from this brain teaser site. The salt and pepper shakers in a restaurant are usually in the middle. If you take one, use it, and place it more on the other person "side" of the table rather than the middle, they will start to get irritated...they might not even know why. So while we might "behave" more in crowds, that doesn't mean it is good for us. Violence is a good measure to take into account, but so is total happiness and suicide. Perhaps living in a city with access to medicine, cars, and wealth can't make you as happy as marring the girl next door you grew up with your whole live. I can't say, but it is food for thought.


I move the shakers, sugar, ketchup and vinegar to my EDGE of the table. Then glare at everyone until they pay up.

criticalthudsays...

>> ^direpickle:

>> ^criticalthud:
now if you are looking from a paleontologists point of view, the most aggressive section of the world in terms of active worldwide dominance and aggressive economic systems, has been europe/eurasia and it's offspring (the united states).

Citation needed.
>> ^criticalthud:
Hence in Europe, you have a place where prehistorically, the less advanced, less rational and more aggressive neanderthal inter-bred with the more advanced cro-magnon to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world.

Oh my god citation needed!


given man's propensity to stick his dick in whatever hole would have it, the burden is really on you to disprove the assertion.

Bidoulerouxsays...

>> ^legacy0100:

He gives several different examples, one including about the chimpanzees in tight confined space. I find his claims very hard to believe. Chimps get very frustrated and show abnormal, anti-social behavior when they are in a tight confined space for a long period of time. Their hairs fall out, they bite their own knuckles or even each other. They show aggression to inexperienced moms and to their babies. It could be that Dr. de Waal may be omitting some factors in here. The chimps he is referring to may be from a zoo where they are put in small confined space when it's time to goto sleep, but then are let out to a bigger enclosure where they can run and play. This may be a bad example, but we don't really know because he doesn't reveal the source of his data. Perhaps his research did confine the chimps to a tight space all throughout the experiment. If so, then the duration of dwelling in tight enclosure is a big factor, but he didn't cite anything about that either.

Dude, the guy is a primatologist. He studies primates for a living. I think he knows more about primates than you do.


Also, he's talking about "crowded spaces", not solitary confinement.

legacy0100says...

^You're right. But I still have a hard time believing his claim. Population density not being a major factor of violence seems to go against every grain on my body for some reason lol.

I would have to seek out this documentary and watch it ASAP, it's driving me nuts!

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