Murder

[psiji]

Murder is a concept that has always intrigued me. I've spent allot of time pondering when murder is justified or worth the cost it necessarily entails.

 

Let's begin with a definition. A murder is any act in which a human being, or group of humans beings, kill another human (or group of humans) regardless of their own reasons (the pre-emptive killing your opponent, or killing someone in war is still murder in this case). Despite your ideas of what murder entails (i.e. unlawful, premeditated, etc.) we will use this definition throughout this thread since it provides a consistent account of the behavior actually occurring (Stimulus X --> Response murder).

 

Now, an organism will generally behave in ways that increase its fitness. Today (in the U.S.A. at least) the potential cost of murdering someone seems to nearly always entail costs that greatly exceed any apparent benefits. For example, a 22 year old SUNY student from the Bronx was recently charged with stabbing a bouncer to death over a dispute regarding a female (remember, most instances of murder involve some form of male jealousy. This is well-documented). This student was considered a great student by the school and his peers, was reasonable intelligent, extraverted, and good looking. So why would he take the risk of throwing away his whole life for a single female when he is in a position to find other (and probably better) lovers? This is only one example, but others are abound.

 

We have yet to come up with a good reason for why this behavior still occurs. Perhaps its roots lie in a vestigial behavior that dates back to a time murder would often go unpunished, or where the dominant male could easily murder a rival without backlash. Yet why does this behavior continue to occur when the cost nearly always greatly exceeds the benefit?

 

Also, when is murder justifiable? In the case of an opponent who is on an imminent offensive I'm sure we can all agree a defensive pre-emptive death-blow is well justified. However, in most cases murder probably does not occur under such circumstance. In most cases (I'm speaking anecdotally, however, if you can find relevant statistics please share), it seems male jealousy, pride, robbery (the acquisition of another's resources for personal gain) or revenge are the primary causal factors - none of which provide justifiable rationales for murder. So I ask, why do we continue to kill each other?

[Diana]

Murderers who premeditate them don't believe they will be caught. There's a certain arrogance to that.

 

Murderers who kill out of rage lack conflict resolution skills, therefore likely find no other way to express their extreme anger at the time of the killing.

 

Murder is considered by many to be justifiable when the life of something deemed more worthy of life (child, person, animal, whatever) is the victim. Some people value the life of a police officer over a criminal, so it's okay, in most peoples' opinion, to shoot a criminal who has killed or is attempting to kill a police officer. It's all subjective in that case.

 

Just my unprofessional opinions.

[jackson33]

the killing of one person by another, group or not, is not always murder. in fact its the exception;

 

accidental taking of another life, probably the most common. auto the obvious majority, however there are many accidental deaths every year.

 

man slaughter the next, when a killing happens but never intended. often this happens in protective mode, but just as often in performance of another criminal act. justifiable the term to clean up many such acts.

 

second degree murder; generally one which was not premeditated or expected by the person accused. most murders are in this act.

 

first degree or pre-meditated (planned) killing of another is very rare. its also the least accepted and most solved crime in the US.

 

the military, under its own laws define killing as self defense. this include, in theory anyway, both sides in an action. after the completion all prisoners of war, although having killed are returned to there nation or ours.

 

the direct question "why", is we simply do not intend the results and are for reasons oblivious to the possibility. temper, rage or what have you is instinctive, not taught or normally instilled in the mind. since so much is currently in the news on child predators killing their young victims, some people are just bad, sick people.

[Diana]

there would be no discussions about anything.

 

In this case, I believe the 'why' is about what makes a person's brain make them want to kill someone, or make them capable of it. It may boil down to chemicals in the brain, diet, experiences stored in memory, or all of the above...it's a combination of factors meeting at the moment of the crime.

 

My thought is that if you want a rational answer, you will not always find one and that's the frustrating part about this type of discussion.

 

Accidental killing, like running someone over in the street, is simply bad luck.

 

I find that the legal definitions can actually hinder the discussions on 'why' they occur...but, to each his own.

[MolotovCocktail]

Well, there are a wide variety of reasons why someone would kill, ranging from necessity to just sheer pleasure.

 

You should take a look at some criminal profiles of serial killers. As creepy as it is, most of those people kill because they either derive some sort of sexual pleasure from it (as did BTK), and/or because they liked the attention they got from it (e.g. watching their crimes on the news). Also, many serial killers are very dedicated to their killing sprees, and some consider their victims as "projects".

[SkepticLance]

Since this is the science forum, we should avoid legalistic or pop psychology responses. I am going to attempt a reply based on evolutionary behaviour ideas.

 

Our behaviour, at the level of inbuilt instinct (as opposed to learned) evolved during the time of our hunter-gatherer tribal forebears. After all, this period, including Homo erectus, was over several million years giving time for behvioural evolution, while the period since agriculture was only 10,000 years - hardly enough for much behavioural evolution.

 

So the ability and propensity to kill other humans, at the instinctive level, evolved while we lived in tribes. Clearly, killing a member of your own tribe would carry a major penalty, and reduce your chances of survival in the Darwinian sense. However, killing a member of another tribe would not carry that penalty, and might even assist in your reproductive sense. eg. an inter-tribal battle that goes well leads to capture of females as slaves, who are reproductively available. The male that most successfully kills the 'enemy' might gain status and reproductive opportunities.

 

Thus, killing a stranger becomes a type of killing that our instincts do not prevent us from doing. If a stranger behaves in such a way as to identify himself as a member of a hostile tribe, then the killing follows. I am sure we can all think of lots of examples.

 

This still does not explain the other common type of killing, which is a member of the killers own family. I suspect that this falls into the category of either calculated killing for personal gain, or temporary madness, otherwise called a crime of passion??? Any other ideas?

[jackson33]

Skeptic; you might google *human instincts* and find many now feel there are very few or none. the word emotion has replaced this notion to some degree and pleasure you made referance to very common.

 

little kids, say 1 to 10 have no desire to hurt anything. not long ago i would have said to 15 or 16, but i something is changing. this tells me emotions are learned, if not all and the ones manifesting violence are known to be progressive. that is a boy may lightly pop a girl on the head and feel an emotion, which over time moves up to real harm. perceived rejection is another problem, which until recently merely resulted in attempted or real suicide. this form also has also gained attention in the developing, bad persons mind. some now have some desire to take others w/o the maturity to understand either their problems or the problems created from actions.

 

i have read many many articles on the ideas of man and the aggressive natures being inherent genetic trait from the past. generally along the sexual attitude and the submissive attitudes of many women. unfortunately there is evidence that societies create their own problems. Societies which do not tolerate any form of womens rights and those that do seem to say the less rights the less killing. this too, tells me its learned via emotions. by the way much of that theory was originally used to explain mans need to hunt, which has since been thrown out...

[SkepticLance]

Jackson

 

I disagree totally with your statement that human instincts are few or none. You probably are not aware of this, but that is a horribly arrogant idea. It says that humans alone, of all life on Earth, have risen above their basic nature and do not have instincts. Sorry, we are animals too. And like other animals, we have instincts.

 

The easiest way to distinguish between learned behaviour and instinct is to see how universal a behaviour is. If something is learned, it will vary from culture to culture. If instinctive, it will be pretty much universal.

 

As an example, take sign language. If I hold up my thumb and first finger in a circle, in my culture it means 'OK'. In certain mediterranean cultures it represents a female sexual organ, and tells the person being indicated to, to undergo a sexual act. A major insult! This piece of sign language is learned.

 

However, if you smile at someone, that gesture carries pretty much the same meaning in any human culture. A smile as a gesture of good will is universal, and is based on an instinct.

 

Of course, humans do undergo massive learning. This means that any instinctive behaviour may be modified by learning. Thus, the natural antipathy to a stranger is modified by the teaching of courtesy and diplomacy. You will still see that antipathy rearing its ugly head in those people whose learning of courtesy has not been strong.

 

I could give lots of examples. Let me just say that the influence of instincts is still powerful, despite learning, in many humans.

[Wormwood]

^^^ How are you making the distinction between instinct and reflex on the smiling example? Wouldn't a smile be a response to a certain stimuli? It's not that you willfully create the gesture of the smile, it is reflexive when you are happy.

[MolotovCocktail]

Since this is the science forum, we should avoid legalistic or pop psychology responses. I am going to attempt a reply based on evolutionary behaviour ideas.

 

Well, before you dismiss my last response as "pop psychology", the reason I brought up serial killers is because they are one group of people who kill because of their abnormal psychology. It is one of the biggest areas of research and it has helped us better understand the relationship between environmental and physiological influences on human behavior.

 

Our behaviour, at the level of inbuilt instinct (as opposed to learned) evolved during the time of our hunter-gatherer tribal forebears. After all, this period, including Homo erectus, was over several million years giving time for behvioural evolution, while the period since agriculture was only 10,000 years - hardly enough for much behavioural evolution.

 

Well, it depends what you mean by inbuilt instinct, because human beings have some instincts that evolved independently over tens of millions of years, such as the sex drive. And there is evidence that our behavior is evolving even now. An example of behavioral (and physiological) evolution since the agricultural revolution is the number of meals and food we now eat and when we do, compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors:

 

"In contrast, most of us are descendants of people who survived the agricultural revolution. We have adapted to abundant food, large amounts of sugar, and regular mealtimes by increasing the number of active insulin receptors on our cells. As a result, most of us do not develop diabetes. But if we were ever forced to go back to hunting and gathering, most of us would probably do very badly--only consider the agonies that we go through when we skip a meal."

SOURCE: Willis, 1992, Discover Magazine (http://discovermagazine.com/1992/aug/hashumanevolutio95)

 

So the ability and propensity to kill other humans, at the instinctive level, evolved while we lived in tribes. Clearly, killing a member of your own tribe would carry a major penalty, and reduce your chances of survival in the Darwinian sense. However, killing a member of another tribe would not carry that penalty, and might even assist in your reproductive sense. eg. an inter-tribal battle that goes well leads to capture of females as slaves, who are reproductively available. The male that most successfully kills the 'enemy' might gain status and reproductive opportunities.

 

Not sure if I completely agree with you here. First of all, people may murder within a tribe as a way to eliminate rivals or kill a traitor, which could be good or bad for survival depending on the circumstances. Also, there is the possibility that this sort of behavior may have been around even before humans existed. Chimpanzees and Gorillas, both of which are primates like humans, are also known to commit murder. Also, many species of ants also exhibit the tendency to go to war and commit murder.

 

 

This still does not explain the other common type of killing, which is a member of the killers own family. I suspect that this falls into the category of either calculated killing for personal gain, or temporary madness, otherwise called a crime of passion??? Any other ideas?

 

Well, there could be a number of reasons for this, but I think in the case of murder within a family, that is probably because of the will to survive or because of mental illness. Abused women have been documented to kill their abusive husbands, and its the same with abused children of parents. Many children and other people who have been abused develop personality disorders and this probably plays a part in their motivation for murder.

[MolotovCocktail]

Skeptic; you might google *human instincts* and find many now feel there are very few or none....

 

Can't say that I agree with you there. As SkepticLance pointed out, humans do have instincts and they are a powerful influence on human behavior (e.g. the sex drive).

 

little kids, say 1 to 10 have no desire to hurt anything. not long ago i would have said to 15 or 16, but i something is changing. this tells me emotions are learned, if not all and the ones manifesting violence are known to be progressive.

 

i have read many many articles on the ideas of man and the aggressive natures being inherent genetic trait from the past. generally along the sexual attitude and the submissive attitudes of many women. unfortunately there is evidence that societies create their own problems. Societies which do not tolerate any form of womens rights and those that do seem to say the less rights the less killing. this too, tells me its learned via emotions. by the way much of that theory was originally used to explain mans need to hunt, which has since been thrown out...

 

This I agree with. Society does have a big impact on how humans behave (e.g. middle school cliques).

 

However, there is an idea that is going around that the drive to learn, gain knowledge, and reason could also be instinctual because it is inherent in all humans. It is the same with the need to "fit in" in social situations, so while society does influence what behavior is learned, humans do that out of the need to socialize and cooperate with one another.

[SkepticLance]

To wormood, re the smile.

 

Humans smile at each other as a form of non verbal communication. The use of a smile in that way to pass on the information that you feel good will towards them is not a reflex. However, it is an instinct, as shown by the fact that it is universally used with that meaning.

 

Molotovcocktail said :

 

Chimpanzees and Gorillas, both of which are primates like humans, are also known to commit murder

 

Yes, and the commonest killing within chimp tribes is during battle with another tribe. I may be wrong, but I do not believe gorillas killing other gorillas is something that happens much.

[SkepticLance]

Another couple of instincts.

 

The male of our species has an instinctive drive to achieve status. He will play sport, climb mountains, strive in business, and enter assorted status games with other males. Many status behaviours are called 'showing off'. Young male children will behave in ways to achieve a position as centre of attention. This is the direct equivalent of a chimp striving to become the alpha male. The reason for this drive is clear - females are attracted to high status males.

 

The female of our species has an instinctive drive to look good. She will spend enormous time, money and effort on shopping for clothes etc, time in beauty parlours and hairdressers, and in making herself up on a regular basis. This drive is so basic that we see it in female children who play 'dress up'. The reason for this drive is clear - males are attracted to good looking females.

 

Both these behaviours can be seen across most, if not all, human societies. This is clear evidence that they are instincts.

 

There is a little cross over between the genders, with a few women striving for status and some men trying to improve their appearance. This is understandable since these behaviours are mediated by sex hormones, and both genders have both testosterone and oestrogen. However, as a generalisation, men who have more testosterone are primarily motivated by the achieving of status, and women, with oestrogen, by achieving beauty.

[dolly]

I find that murder is usually derived from power either lack of or too much of. The more a person has to lose the more they are willing to fight for. Then there are the sociological, psychiatric and neurologial reasons.

[Space Babe]

I've often thought about how evolution explains the fact that humans kill, not other beings, but his own kind - homo sapiens.

"It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors ... that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature ... [and] that humans have a" violent brain. " - Dan Jones

Although it may sound pessimistic, I think that war and violence are the inevitable features of human life - in the old fashioned but also in a modern form that can still be seen today. There are many aspects of antisocial behavior, including violence and murder, and of course, and in order to understand them, studies of the brain, genes, and the evolution of society is required.

When we look at our past, it is already familiar that people behaved really violently, and those behaviors most likely ended with murder. However, it is important to note that this was, logically, a more dominant trait in history, than in the present.

The time period when violence among people has fallen, is too short to convince that appealing to natural selection is convincing. If people have evolved to kill, then it seems to me that they would also have developed to live without killing, given the real circumstances surrounding them.

From the aspect of psychology and psychiatry, by my opinion,  the human instinct for killing can be activated, that is, the urge to come to the surface because of the following important factors:

• the principle of pleasure;
• "shadow" or ID;
• self-preservation (survival instinct);
• mental illness;
•  Indiscretions;

- The pleasure principle is an instinct that requires satisfaction and avoidance of pain in order to satisfy its biological and psychological needs. Thus, if someone has an emotional pain, which in most cases is irrational (jealousy, greed, revenge) the murder may occur in order for the psychological pain and discomfort to stop, and pleasure to take over instead, with the fact that a certain person is no longer among the living.

- The shadow is known as the dark side of a person, a part of his character which focuses mainly on those drives that do not recognize any morality but appear to satisfy all our instincts, including hunger, thirst, relationships, etc.
The shadow is the cause of all those acts in which we have acted badly or maliciously, actions that our conscious mind would not have done, that is, we would not have acted in such a cruel way - so murder may be one of these evil actions.

- Self-preservation or known as the survival instinct is often the cause of murder when we try to defend ourselves against someone. This is a human behavior that provides the survival of an organism and is universal among living things, including homo sapiens. Thus, in certain circumstances, a man is forced to kill to save his life.

- Mental illnesses such psychopathy, sociopathy are also ways that cause people to have certain characteristics or lack of them, to become completely immune to guilt or to give them some bizarre reason why they would like to commit murder.

- Indiscretions, that often lead to a semi-conscious or unconscious state, such as alcoholism, a condition under narcotic drugs, may also lead to committing murder However, I believe that a certain person who intends to kill someone is deliberately brought in a drugged or drunken state in some occasions, in order to gain more courage to perform the deed.

When it comes to the origin of the instinct of people killing each other, I remember a classmate that asked me this question. According to my opinion, from the very beginning of human existence - mainly because of the behavior known today as self-preservation, and in the conditions of the early past of man, such as "survival instinct". It was clear that humans were not at the top of the food chain, so many wildlife endangered their survival. Thus, in order to survive, he had to kill (and feed himself). In fact, self-preservation is the universal behavior among all living things on this planet, and pain and fear are the integral parts of this mechanism. 

The fact that man began to kill his own kind merely signified that according to the cognations that developed in him, he began to make a distinction between people, comparing them and deciding which people are dangerous to him and endangering his life, and which people do not. In other words, through the evolution of instinct and the development of the brain, a situation where a wild animal was once a danger and a man kills it, a similar simulation of the same situation has been created only where in this case another person poses a danger to a predisposing and potential killer.

This is, in fact, a very rational and logical way of thinking - in reality, unless if the person suffers from severe depression, finds himself in a situation where there is no way out, or if he has mental problems, he would literally not allow himself to die of he has the chance to fight and possibly save his own life, even of that means to kill another human being. Because, in the end, It's every man for himself.

This may be perceived from the aspect of self-defense, but humans have also found a way to make murder seem justified, at least from a psychological point of view - and that method is through war;

War is an acceptable way of killing, because, by modern psychology, the civilized and sophisticated man is lying and self-assuring himself that it is a justified murder because it is allowed in those circumstances, only to express the urges that have dwindled for centuries because of the changed (safer) way of life. Because the human realizes that other people support killing in the state of war, he is also encouraged to realize his instincts in practice, but also because of the real danger that threatens his life. 

There is a certain feeling that humans today are "torn apart" between a safer and non-violent way of life and refraining to remove people he thinks is his thorn in his eye, mainly because of the punishments of the law (because murder is considered a crime). The fact is that modern life, besides offering security, comfort and ease, according to a large number of people, also offers great annoyance - shortening the drives that are deeply moved by our shadow and the principle of satisfaction.

 

Edited January 13, 2019 by Space Babe