Jeff Breidenbach

Elizabeth Hafner

Human Evolution

Final Project Paper

Aggression In Males

We decided to do our study on aggression in males. We looked at the level of aggressiveness in males when females were present and when they were not.

To give you a little background information on aggression in males, we will refer to slide # 2 of our power point presentation. Why did males become aggressive? It is thought that our culture is the number one cause for this. Through out the humans evolutionary process, males and female have had to struggle in order to survive. Due to natural selection the stronger survived. In order for one to be strong his abilities to hunt, explore, and to defend his homestead had to extremely refined. Aggression improves each of these.

In todays society hunting, exploring and defending the homestead have been made easier and almost obsolete, but aggressiveness is still present in males. Due to the evolutionary process, it is thought that aggression became a prominent part of the human males genetic makeup. Aggression is also a useful tool when trying to find a mate. It is thought that females look for a strong aggressive mate, because he will be a good protector and provider. Males try to show off around members of the opposite sex, in a way to sub-consciencely showcase their aggressiveness. We wanted to test this theory of sub-consciencely showcasing, and showing off.

Our study was to observe the aggressiveness in males when females were present and when they were not. We believed that the overall aggressiveness in males would increase when females were present. I did my observations at McMahan Fire & Rescue and Elizabeth did hers at the Mall in St. Matthews. We each did a total of 1 hour of observation. We looked specificly for two different types of aggression, verbal and physical. We considered verbal aggression to be any type of verbal slander, to threaten the power of another… profanity, jokes, name calling, etc. We considered physical aggression to be any type of physical act to show of physical ability, stamina, or to bring out the weaknesses of another… wrestling, punching, arm wrestling, etc. We then looked at another category, called "Overall Aggressiveness", which was simply the average of the combined physical and verbal acts.

We found that when females are not present, males still enjoy being aggressive. When females were not present we counted a combined total of 4 physical acts, 19 verbal acts, for an average of 11.5 overall aggressive acts. Although some aggressive acts did occur when females were not present, do not discredit our hypothesis just yet. We then looked at our data when females were present and found that the level of aggressiveness did go up. We counted a combined 22 physical acts, and 32 verbal acts of

aggression when females were present, for an overall average of 29.5 aggressive acts.

In conclusion you can see on the graph above, that the aggression level in males does increase when females are present. Our hypothesis was correct and our study is complete.

William A. Spriggs, An Open Letter to My Gender.

http://www.evoyage.com/male.html, 4/19/99

William A. Spriggs, Evolutionary Psychology and The Male "Criminal " Mind.

http://www.evoyage.com/criminal.html, 4/19/99