Abstract
According to anthropological philosopher René Girard (1923–2015), an important human adaptation is our propensity to victimize or scapegoat. He argued that other traits upon which human sociality depends would have destabilized primate dominance-based social hierarchies, making conspecific conflict a limiting factor in hominin evolution. He surmised that a novel mechanism for inhibiting intragroup conflict must have emerged contemporaneously with our social traits, and speculated that this was the tendency to spontaneously unite around the victimization of single individuals. He described an unconscious tendency to both ascribe blame and to imbue the accused with a sacred mystique. This emotionally cathartic scapegoat mechanism, he claimed, enhanced social cohesion, and was the origin of religion, mythology, sacrifice, ritual, cultural institutions, and social norms. It would have functioned by modifying the beliefs and behaviors of the group, rather than of the accused, making the act of accusation more important than the substance. This article aims to examine the empirical evidence for Girard’s claims, and argues that the scapegoat hypothesis has commonalities with several other evolutionary hypotheses, including Wrangham’s execution hypothesis on self-domestication, Dunbar’s hypothesis on the role of storytelling in maintaining group stability, and DeScioli and Kurzban’s hypothesis on the role of non-consequentialist morality in curtailing conflict. Potential implications of the scapegoat hypothesis for evolutionary psychology and psychiatry are discussed.
Highlights
Humans live in a complex social environment characterized by large group sizes and cooperation between relative strangers
This was the view proposed by the French anthropological philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) who posited that a propensity to internecine violence was an inevitable consequence of some of the otherwise fitness-enhancing human social traits (Girard et al 1978; Girard 1986)
The consensus amongst evolutionary theorists would seem to agree with Girard in considering that some aspects of human sociality would have been incompatible with animallike dominance hierarchies
Summary
Humans live in a complex social environment characterized by large group sizes and cooperation between relative strangers. Human traits that have been suggested as being of importance to this include our abilities to mentalize (have a theory of mind) (Premack and Woodruff 1978), a related tendency to create a shared attentional framework or a shared intentionality (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007), a relative inhibition of reactive aggression (Wrangham 2019a), and the emergence of behavioral norms with an associated propensity to punish transgressors (Tomasello 2016) Some of these traits have, variously, been linked to the emergence of relatively large human group sizes (Dunbar 1998),. This article aims to examine the evidence for Girard’s claim that scapegoating was an adaptation of critical importance to the process of hominization by comparing it with other approaches to human evolution, and explores some potential implications for evolutionary psychology and evolutionary psychiatry
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
