Otto Adang
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
and
Police Academy of The Netherlands, Research Department, The Netherlands

Saleem H. Ali
Department of Geography & Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Delaware, Newark, USA

Gabriel van den Brink
Centrum Èthos, Faculty of Philosophy, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Douglas P. Fry
Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Birmingham, USA

Ellen Furnari
Webster University, Pleasant Hill, USA

Daniel Hyslop
Institute for Economics and Peace, St. Leonards, Australia

Wiebren S. Jansen
Department of Social, Health & Organizational Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Misja van de Klomp
Applied Safety & Security Studies, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Kathleen Kostelny
Columbia Group for Children in Adversity, Beaverdam, USA

Harry Kunneman
University of Humanistic Studies Utrecht, The Netherlands

Thomas Morgan
Institute for Economics and Peace, St. Leonards, Australia

Darcia Narvaez
Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA

Sabine Otten
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Groningen University, The Netherlands

Benjamin A. Peters
Global Scholars Program, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan, USA

Joám Evans Pim
Center for Global Nonkilling, Honolulu, USA
and
Åbo Akademi University, Finland

Teresa Romero
Joseph Banks Laboratories, School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

Cary J. Roseth
Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

Robert M. Sapolsky
Departments of Biological Sciences, Neurology, and Neurosurgery, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

Juliette Schaafsma
Tilburg School of Humanities, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Nurit Shnabel
The School of Psychological Sciences, Tel‐Aviv University, Israel

Sara Stronks
University of Applied Sciences, School of Governance, Law & Urban Development, The Netherlands

Peter Verbeek
Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Birmingham, USA

Todd Walters
International Peace Park Expeditions, Takoma Park, USA

Michael Wessells
Columbia University, Beaverdam, USA

Robert M. Sapolsky

It can be awe‐inspiring, if deeply puzzling at times, to contemplate the human capacity for obsessive specialization, to consider the range of things that humans can devote their lives to in study and scholarship. You can be a coniologist or a caliologist – experts in the sciences of dust and of birds’ nests, respectively – and spend years in monastic solitude, becoming the definitive expert on some subspecialty of each. There’s batologists and brontologists, studying brambles and thunder, doing their research with manic focus that is at the cost of vacations, hobbies, or personal relationships. Or there’s vexillologists and zygologists, with their hard‐earned, dazzling knowledge of flags and of methods for fastening things together. It just goes on and on – odontology and odonatology, phenology and phonology, parapsychology and parasitology. A rhinologist and a nosologist can meet, fall in love, and perhaps have a child who becomes a rhinological nosologist, studying the classification of diseases of the nose.

In recent decades, there has been the emergence of what must seem like one of the most unlikely “‐ology”’s of all, peace ethology, an emerging behavioral science of peace that is producing robust findings. And the notion of there being such a realm of scholarship must seem quixotic to many. This is the case for at least three reasons.

The first one is mammoth, and is obvious to anyone who has noted what humans have been up to in recent millennia. The capacity of humans for violence, and for victimization of the weak by the strong, is so great that devoting one’s scholarly life to the scientific study of peace must feel like trying to document the beauty of snowflakes in the Sahara. When it comes to peace, we have a pretty dismal track record as a species, with our occasional capacity for living peaceably being barely maintained by a thin veneer of rules, laws, ethics, and morality.

But despite that, there is room for optimism. This is because, while it is initially hard to believe, we have been becoming more peaceful in recent centuries, have shown an extraordinary increase in empathy and for feeling moral imperatives to protect those in need. For the first time in recorded human history, the majority of Earth’s people vote in electoral democracies; most leaders are opposed to the likes of slavery, child labor, and domestic violence; nearly all nations are signatories to international agreements regarding the treatment of prisoners and of civilians in warfare, the banning of certain weapons, and the international criminalization of certain acts of war; and most such nations are willing to support apolitical multinational peacekeeping forces that can be sent anywhere on the globe. Sure, all of this is rife with hypocrisy, lip service, and corruption. But it is still a stunningly different world than it was a few centuries ago.

One of the main points of this volume is that there is little reason anymore to think that human prosociality, when it does flourish, is solely or even mostly the outcome of that thin veneer of culture, of each society’s equivalent of fire and brimstone. This conclusion is based on a trio of fields of study that have challenged our views of the roots of human goodness:

1. Rather than being the outcome of features of culture specific to our species, some of the best of human behaviors and our core of prosociality are shared with numerous other primates. Yes, yes, other primates kill avidly, carrying out competitive infanticide, having organized intergroup violence, and systematically eradicating all the members of another group. But humans are not alone in having the capacities for empathy, altruism, and cooperation among nonrelatives, reconciliation, a sense of justice, and third‐party peacekeeping. Humans may do all those in remarkably abstract ways – for example, we can be galvanized into prosocial activism by the plight of a fictional character in a novel (“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe). But when we do so, the roots of those impulses are not confined to our own species.
2. Developmental psychologists have shown how the rudiments of empathy and a sense of justice are there in kids, in toddlers, even in preverbal infants. Humans of astonishingly young ages can detect instances of unequal treatment, have a preference for pro‐ over antisocial individuals, and choose to mete out punishment accordingly. For example, have toddlers observe puppets interacting, some being mean to others, some being kind; afterward, given a choice, they would rather hold and play with the kind puppets, and will advocate giving a treat to a good puppet over one who is a jerk – and all before such children are old enough to comprehend their first sermon.
3. Finally, there is little reason to think that the long arc of hominid history has been filled with warfare. Instead, the behavior of the few remaining contemporary hunter‐gatherers, and the archeological and paleontological records, suggest that the vast majority of our time as a species has been spent in small hunter‐gatherer bands that are fairly egalitarian in nature, and that have various means (e.g., a fusion/fission structure) to deal with conflict without escalated violence.

Collectively, these three bodies of work suggest that the salutary trends of the last few centuries do not represent humans breaking new grounds of prosociality, but rather something resembling a recovery to our pre‐agricultural past.

Despite that, many might still view peace ethology skeptically for a second reason. This is because of a commonplace and simplistic view that “peace” merely equals the absence of conflict. Or, perhaps worse, that peace equals a level of conflict that people collectively deem to be tolerable and inevitable. When viewed this way, studying peace is somewhat akin to, say, biomedical scientists studying the absence of fever. Yet, as will be shown throughout the volume, the making and maintaining of peace is an intensely active process.

But despite that, the prospects of being a peace ethologist might still seem inauspicious, for a third reason that is closely related to the second one – the “‐ology” part of peace ethology suggests a topic that is subject to scientific exploration, that has underlying rules and patterns. And for many, the notion that there are systematic ways in which peace can be fostered, that its facilitation can be a subject of scholarship, seems foolish. Yet, the scholarship is there and is quickly growing, in all sorts of areas. At the reductive end of things, neuroscientists are learning, for example, the circumstances in which the neuromodulator oxytocin promotes prosocial behavior and when it does the opposite; brain‐imaging studies show that while the brain has an implicit, automatic tendency to make Us/Them dichotomies, it is incredibly easy to manipulate the dichotomizing process, turning Them’s into Us’s. Meanwhile, psychologists fruitfully explore how much our moral acts are the outcome of moral reasoning versus moral intuition, when one dominates the other, and with what sorts of outcomes. Game theorists and evolutionary biologists elucidate the circumstances where cooperation can be jumpstarted amid a sea of noncooperators. Sociologists, demographers, and geographers explore the time‐honored contact theory, demonstrating rules for when contact between groups worsens conflict and when it lessens it. Anthropologists identify commonalities across cultures in means of conflict resolution. And people of heroic devotion, who might be classified (to borrow a term from molecular medicine) as “translational” scientists, learn the best ways to do some of the hardest tasks on Earth – the likes of setting up Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, or reintegrating child soldiers back into their communities.

Making peace and preserving it will never have anything akin to the laws of thermodynamics. Nonetheless, as this volume demonstrates, peace ethology is indeed now a rigorous intellectual and scientific venture, one with more consequences than those of nearly all of the other ‐ologists combined.

We are grateful to the editors and staff at Wiley for their unwavering support for this project. We are indebted to the chapter contributors who entrusted us with their work. Their work is an inspiration to us, and we are privileged to be able to share it with the world through this volume. The idea for the volume goes back to the 2013 Lorentz Center workshop entitled “Obstacles and Catalysts of Peaceful Behavior” at Leiden University. One of us co‐organized the workshop with Douglas Fry, and several of the chapter contributors participated in it. Special thanks go to the Lorentz Center’s Mieke Schutte, Henriette Jensenius, and Ikram Cakir for their kind support, and to the workshop sponsors for their generous financial backing. We also gratefully acknowledge Miyazaki International College (MIC) and its founder, Hisayasu Otsubo. We began our collaboration at MIC’s pioneering School of International Liberal Arts, where we benefited from teaching and discussing peace ethology research with our intellectually curious and critically perspicacious students. In addition, MIC generously supported us through funding and time allocations for conference participation and research. We also thank the peace ethology students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) for their critical thoughts and for keeping us honest and focused on peace ethology’s future. Kacey Keith merits special mention for her graduate work at UAB on sharing the methods and findings of peace ethology with the community at large and for coining the fortuitous label of “prosocial learning for a prosocial species” for that effort. Last but not least, we recognize the scholars who came before us and blazed a trail for peace ethology. Without the vision and exemplary science of Theodore Lentz, Niko Tinbergen, Frans de Waal, and others, our own work on peace ethology would never have seen the light of day.