https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FjUnWvP0A2E
It’s so easy to jump over these things, even in your papers, because these ideas are revolutionary in a sense that isn’t immediately obvious in the cautious manner in which they’re couched because people do assume, for example, that children learn aggression and as you pointed out, that aggression is much more common, say, among adolescent males or young adult males, but even much to your surprise, that isn’t what you found so I would like to ask you two questions about that Why do you think you were surprised? What had you gone in there expecting? And how does this violate the assumptions that people, including scientists, generally make about aggression? Well, you cited Rousseau and Bandura The research on aggression made me realize that their perspective on we are born good and it’s your environment that makes you bad didn’t work when you were looking at one of the worst things you call bad is physical aggression because we were following children from essentially birth and the children that we were following then, they’re now in their 40s and we are still following them we showed that between birth and adulthood the time at which you use physical aggression against others most often is between two and three and the reason it’s not at one or at six months it’s because by the time you’re two and three, you’re much more able to aggress others in terms of you can run, you can hit, you can kick, well as you don’t see that at six months but these behaviors are clearly there at the start and as we followed the children over time up to adulthood we saw very clearly that the frequency of physical aggression was going on, was dropping there was less and less frequency of physical aggressions up to adulthood so the idea that we learn from our environment to aggress doesn’t fit the data at all it’s rather with time we learn not to physically aggress because everybody, even those who were physically aggressing very often with time the frequency decreases there is more damage if you get hit by an adolescence than by a two year old but in terms of frequency we learn not to use physical aggression as we get older so we might say that this constitutes a delayed victory for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes exactly and from the inventor of the original sin the idea of the original sin comes from the saint what’s his name? he lived in Rome not St Thomas Aquinas it’s ok, we’ll find out anyway, this saint describes he says I want to find when I started to commit sins and he says I went to see the children, very young children and I can see that I started to sin very early in life I beat my parents, I hit everybody and so this idea has been there for a long time but there has been this big resistance to believe that we are born to live like animals and that with time we learn to live in a civil society do you have any sense of why that resistance manifested itself and I would also say continues to because it seems to me that the default view that people are good, especially children innately and that they are corrupted by exposure to bad models and by society I would say that’s the default view and it’s certainly the default view on the left end of the political spectrum so why do you think that became so dominant if the data, even the observational data was there thousands of years ago and certainly is there in the scientific literature now yes, well I guess it’s a normal reaction of humans not to accept that from an evolutionary perspective we are animals that have sort of learned to live together in a more sophisticated way than monkeys and chimpanzees it’s very clear that if we take a Darwinian perspective to evolution it makes a lot of sense and Darwin was also one of those who said at one point I am looking at the way my children behave and it’s clear that my children are using physical aggression within the first year of life and he was a very careful observer he was and he wrote quite a lot about the behavior of his children and it inspired him in terms of understanding human development back to Hobbes, he’s sort of the antithesis of Rousseau and Hobbes believed that in the state of nature life would be nasty, brutish and short and that it was only socialization that made us civilized and your data essentially support that viewpoint except it’s more complex because Rousseau wins to some degree because you’ve tracked out three developmental pathways so although on average young children are more aggressive than older children in adolescence if you look, your research and others, indicates that if you look at the population of young children all children are not equally violent and so maybe you could walk us through that yes, there are important differences between children those who are most aggressive use physical aggression most often early in life I don’t have the data in front of me but it’s not much more than 20-25% and a lot of children are not using physical aggression and that is the difference between males and females we get similar developmental trajectories but essentially most girls do not use physical aggression the data I reviewed this morning suggested that about 30% of children use very little aggression to begin with 50% use some and about 17% are quite aggressive and they stay that way, they tend to stay that way they remain relatively eye to the others but they decrease with time the frequency decreases with time so those who are likely to be aggressive in adolescence were also likely to be aggressive as children but all children, including the aggressive children tend towards less aggression as they mature but also, again, it’s useful to repeat this so 30% show very little aggression across the board right from childhood onward 50% are in the mixed group using aggression sometimes when they’re children but that declines precipitously as they age and then there’s 17% they decline as well so the correlation of aggressive adolescence is disproportionately drawn from those children who were exceptionally aggressive in their earliest infancy