Punching Faces and Publishing Papers: a Review of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

Abstract

We are living in a peaceful period of human history (Pinker 2011). Yet, our minds retain remnants of our violent evolutionary past. Even though violence is “unbecoming” of a refined, civilized man, many of us have a thirst for witnessing violence, as evidenced by the popularity of contact sports and, in particular, by the meteoric rise of mixed martial arts (MMA). (Jonathan Gottschall 2015), the author of The Professor in the Cage:WhyMen Fight andWhyWe Like toWatch, delivers an unapologetically honest account of his experiences as a mixed martial artist. This book is not a collection of research findings on human combat—most of which lack descriptions of the raw, human experience of violence. Nor is it a diary of one fighter’s brutish adventure into combat—which is often void of scientific analysis. Rather, it is an eloquent combination of both: Gottschall describes his first-hand experiences involving combat—inside and outside the cage—with a scientific eye. In other words, this book provides unique insights on “the other side of the table” that the scientist, the cage fighter, or the layperson would otherwise never experience. Gottschall describes the importance of the pre-fight stare down, noting that “if you lose the prefight staring duel, you are well on your way to losing the actual fight” (p. 54). To someone who has never experienced combat and who is unfamiliar with research on combat, the stare down seems like a trivial spectacle to promote a fight. But this is a naive conclusion. Among many non-human species, ritualized combat is an escalation of increasingly dangerous stages, each of which provides a combatant with information about the opponent’s “formidability”—or strength and skill. For example, there are three stages of ritualized combat between two battling sierra dome spiders Neriene litigiosa (Watson and Field 2004). The spiders will “size up” one another by spreading their front legs. Theywill pluck the spider web with their other legs to demonstrate their formidability (stage 1). If the spiders still cannot assess which of the two is more formidable, then, they proceed to wrestle each other (stage 2). If the fighters still cannot decide which combatant is more formidable, then, they will bite each other—sometimes resulting in death (stage 3). Each subsequent stage is more dangerous than the previous stage. If at any stage one spider is clearly outmatched by the other, then the weaker spider will not escalate and will forfeit the contested resources to the winner. It is not difficult to appreciate how humans might follow a similar script: One man insults another man at a pub. They turn and stare each other down. Each man spreads his arms laterally to his side while verbally provoking the other. If neither man retreats, then they shove each other. If the escalation continues, then punches are thrown. If the insult was particularly egregious, then lethal weapons may be deployed. All of this begins with the pre-fight stare down (i.e., stage 1), during which each fighter advertises his confidence in his own formidability. Indeed, among professional MMA athletes, the fighter who smiles more during a pre-fight stare down—which is an expression of reduced hostility in a fight—is more likely to lose (Kraus and Chen 2013). Gottschall notes that “beneath all the wild diversity of human sporting events, there is a shared underlying structure and purpose. Sports, just like gazelle wrestling, are always about finding reasonably safe, rule-bound ways for people to demonstrate their physical prowess and mental toughness to others” (p. 140). Here, again, Gottschall demonstrates his sophisticated understanding of the scientific literature. It is no coincidence that many MMA organizations across several cultures forbid punches to the groin or throat. Humans abide * Michael N. Pham mnpham@oakland.edu