Hi - Shane O’Mara here - neuroscientist, psychologist, and writer. Welcome to the many hundreds who have signed up over the past few weeks. You can expect two to three full length pieces every month, as well as Readings once or twice per month (short snippets/listicles/commentaries on interesting pieces of reading).
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This is part two of a two-parter - this focuses on a ‘brain’s-eye’ view of inter-group aggression (such as opposing sides in a war).
Some caveats
I have long been fascinated by intergroup conflict, having grown up on a divided island (Ireland/Northern Ireland) with a centuries-long history of conflict, and with a recent ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that regularly threatened to spill across the border, and which threatened on occasion to destabilise the whole island.
In our curiously-understated way1, this conflict was, and is, referred to as ‘The Troubles’. The Troubles ended, after thirty years and thousands of lives lost, with a negotiated peace, known variously as the ‘Good Friday Agreement’ or the ‘Belfast Agreement’ in 19982.
A cognitive perspective on war-making
Here I am going to try and take a cognitive perspective on war-making. There are, of course, other and perhaps even more appropriate levels of analysis - strategy, logistics, tactics, resource allocation, and all the rest of it. But sitting behind these other things are brains: brain that must think, deeply, about the nature of the conflict they are in, how to achieve victory, and how to best prosecute conflict to achieve victory3.
Thinking of war and conflict in cognitive terms pushes the focus away from our all-too-human tendency to think about the irrationality or psychopathy or whatever other (usually pejorative) term we apply to outgroups and their leaders during conflicts. What I am suggesting here is there is value in thinking about wars as contests of deploying cognitive capacity effectively in the service of victory during conflict.
Thus, what I do here is focus a little on what could be called the ‘cognitive neurodynamics’ of war. I don’t have a military background4, and I do not engage in political analysis per se in this newsletter - there’s enough of that available elsewhere. I will avoid the latter in what follows here entirely. I have read a lot of history of conflict though, and I have learned an enormous amount about war here on
and , especially from among others5.The rubrics I apply here draw on standard thinking in cognitive neuroscience, albeit applied to a novel domain, and in an unusual way.
Warring Brains and intergroup aggression
Intergroup conflicts are situations where groups of individuals behave in a hostile or aggressive manner towards other groups: these can be political debates; fights between football fans, or wars within or between nations. In the context of intergroup aggression and conflict, “warring brains” is my shorthand for referring to the neurological processes and cognitive mechanisms involved in how individuals and groups mentally represent and engage with their adversaries.
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