Konrad Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation In: B. Schaffner (ed.) Group processes. Transactions of the Fourth Conference 1957. New York: Macy Foundation. pp. 181-252. [OCR by Konrad Lorenz Haus Altenberg – http://klha.at] Seitenumbrüche und -zahlen wie im Original. Page breaks and page numbers correspond to the original paper Thanks to the Macy Foundation for providing us with the original paper. K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 181   The role of aggression in group formation When I was asked to give a presentation, I said I had nothing to present, because adolescence is a purely human phenomenon; I also said that the particular period between childhood and puberty or between puberty and maturity was something that simply did not occur in any animal I knew. I would have to talk about anthropologic subjects, which would not be my own field at all. Dr. Fremont-Smith said, "Your special subject, the goose, reaches its full body weight in 9 weeks, it gets betrothed, forms provisional adolescent formation and group formation at one year of age, is sexually mature at 3 years of age, and lives to be 60. Man has a period of adolescence, and you know something about group formations taking place during that period, so why not talk about that? I decided then that I would like to speak on the subject thus mapped out by Dr. Fremont-Smith and I find I have much to say. I hope you will interrupt me when I tell you something you don't believe because I expect much flat disbelief of facts. I am not going to give you much interpretation. What I am concentrating on are just descriptive, random facts which we observed in our geese. Before going into the special subject, I ought to say what I mean by group formation: It is the formation of a personal bond between two or more individuals. I assure you that this "bond" is defined in a purely objective way, and in a very simple way at that, meaning that these two individuals stay together in space much of the time, that if one runs away or is taken away, the other will follow it, that, if you separate them, you get searching behavior. In other words, each of these individuals behaves toward the other as a territorial animal does to its home. Meyer-Holzapfel (1) has coined a very good term for this: "Das Tier mit der Heimvalenz" — the animal with the home valence — which I consider very apt. Though K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 182   objective, it holds something of the emotional warmth which I am certainly the last to deny. Going through the whole hierarchy — Fremont-Smith: The animal behaves towards the other animal in the pair as if the other — Lorenz: Not necessarily in a pair, it might be in a group. Fremont-Smith: The one animal behaves toward the other one in the group as if that other one was the home, the territory, but the difference would be that the territory does not react upon the individual. However, the other one in the group does interact and, therefore, the warmth is greater. Lorenz: Yes. Just yelling out loud doesn't bring home to you but it brings your home- friend back to you. It is an important difference, I quite agree. If you go through the whole hierarchy of vertebrates, you find a very queer correlation between aggression and personal bonds. I'll say later what I mean by personal bonds. There is no nonaggressive animal able to form personal bonds. Aggression, and I mean aggression against a fellow-member of the species, is in itself a very interesting phenomenon. For Freud, aggression is something intrinsically against the survival of the species; aggression, for him, is curiously related to his "death drive," which, of course, is nonsense. You must ask yourselves what the survival value of fighting is? If you take two vertebrates of one species, two animals which are unknown to each other, and put them together in a cage or test box, in 99 per cent of vertebrates there will be a fight. This fight is dependent on a number of factors. For instance, one factor is that animals must know the locality. They must feel at home in the locality because, if they are in a strange locality, they will very often flock instead of fighting. If two cichlids are put together in a tank which looks exactly like the home tank, and they can think they are at home, they will fight. If they are put together in a large pond, they put on quite a particular color, which is a nonfighting color, and they flock together. What I want to point out at the outset is that this type of flocking is anonymous, and anonymous flocking is something entirely different from a personal bond. Anonymous flocking occurs, let us say, in fishes swimming together. It occurs in birds on migration; the flock of starlings is entirely anonymous. Curiously enough, starlings don't really fight, because they are incapable of individual recognition. As far as we know now, a starling recognizes its mate K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 183   only by the fact that he or she is creeping into the same nesting hole. It is only this local sign which tells one bird that the other is its mate. Birdwhistell: These are starlings? Lorenz: Yes, but don't generalize that. I don't know another bird that does it, which is quite amazing. Liddell: Isn't the gathering of a crowd at the scene of an accident an analogous phenomenon? Lorenz: Yes. Gofman: A parallel comment might be made about human societies. As you move from rural settlements to small towns and then to larger cities you reach a point, in American society at least, where unacquainted people passing on the street don't say hello to each other. There must be a previous introduction or special reason for passing greetings to occur. But below this line, on the rural-urban continuum, the rule is that you offer a greeting to anyone you pass, whether or not you have been introduced before, and whether or not you know him for a stranger. This is little like anonymous flocking. Lorenz: You mean in the small city you don't know the chap? Goffman: Yes, below the non-greeting line, mutual presence in the same territory is enough. Lorenz: There are lots of such sliding transactions between anonymous and non- anonymous greeting. I am just drawing a sharper line. Mirsky: On the physiologic level, you state, when these animals are in a strange environment, that is when the flocking occurs, but if they are in — Lorenz: In their own environment, they will fight. Mirsky: The reason I asked for a restatement is that if an animal is put into a strange environment, a marked physiologic change occurs in that there is an activation of the hypothalamus, which we can demonstrate in a variety of ways. Accordingly, the animal is no longer the same the moment it is put into the strange environment. Fremont-Smith: On that same point, in the environment, when they feel at home, almost by your own definition, they have already established bonds to the territory and, therefore, the presence of another one so near in the cage is an invasion. Lorenz: Exactly. Erikson: How will they fight? Lorenz: Of course, each kind fights in a different way. Fish are good subjects for the study of these phenomena, because they have K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 184   relatively controlled color patterns. The color pattern of chromatophores tells what physiologic state they are in. If Etroplus, Asian cichlids, are put in a tank, it is possible to tell by their coloration whether they will fight or whether they will flock. Mirsky: I believe that it should be emphasized that we must be careful about extrapolating in terms of socialization because of the probability that the animal is in a strange environment; it is itself in a different state. Lorenz: Yes. Fremont-Smith: And so is the person. Mirsky: I can only talk of that which we know. We assume about people but we have no measurements. Fremont-Smith: Yes, we have measured them. Birdwhistell: It appears that Americans, when standing face to face, stand about arm's length from each other. When they stand side by side, the distance demanded is much less. When "middle majority Americans" stand closer than this in a face-to-face position they will either gradually separate or come toward each other and begin to emit signs of irritation. However, if they are put in a situation in which they are not required to interact — say on a streetcar — they can stand quite close, even to the point of making complete contact. The amount of this territory seems to vary culturally. So, there can be a situation where two or three ethnic groups occupy different territories, that is, varying amounts of personal space. For example, put together a Southeastern European Jew (who occupies about half the area of personal space) and a middle class American and a high degree of imitation results, particularly if the middle class American keep drifting around to the side, in order not to be insulting, and the Southeastern European Jewish man tries to move around to get face- to-face relationship. You get an actual dance, which very often turns into what is practically a fight. I have observed this a number of times. Lorenz: That is an excellent example. I may add that people who notice other people drawing back from them and avoiding the face-to-face contact develop a hypertrophy of the drive to get nearer, and these unfortunates are those cursed with halitosis. It is a known fact that people with halitosis try to get nearer and nearer to you because they are conditioned to everybody moving backward from them. That is quite in line with what you say, the same phenomenon of hypertrophy in a much more exaggerated situation. Fremont-Smith: Dr. Erikson, you had a question about fighting that wasn't answered. Erikson: I wanted to know something about the quality of fighting and how far it would go. Lorenz: I am now making a very large generalization. The answer is, to any extent, to killing each other, or to just having a little more or less ritualized bout which settles the rank- K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 185   order relationship between the two animals you put together. Erikson: Does that depend on the personality? Lorenz: That depends on lots of things. Fremont-Smith: On the species, too, doesn't it? Lorenz: Yes, of course, but I am now putting forth rather sweeping generalizations. The point which I want to make is just this: Unless you get an animal in the physiologic state of readiness to fight, and of a species which is ready to fight, you cannot get a personal bond. Or, putting it the other way round, as far as we know today there is no single case where a personal bond is formed either in a species which simply does not have the possibility to fight or in animals which are in a physiologic state of non-fighting, even if they belong to a potentially fighting species. In other words, the non-fighting anonymous aggregation never shows any group formation, any personal interrelation between individuals. This is a thing which became clear to me only very lately and which I think is very curious. Why do animals fight? Let us look at it from the ecological side. Quite obviously one of the most important survival values of intra-specific fighting is spacing out of individuals. One pair of blue jays needs a territory of this or that size. If a given area is at the disposal of a given number of pairs, it is of obvious survival value to distribute them evenly over this inhabited area. Another factor which makes aggression valuable is rival fighting, for instance in cichlids. Where males defend the family, there it is in the interest of the latter that the father is the largest fish accessible to the mother. It can be demonstrated in a very convincing manner that in a community tank the bigger the male, the better the chances for the babies to get reared. Whenever you have an animal of a species which will fight con-specifics and is in the physiologic state of fighting, this animal would fight any conspecific, including — Mead: I think you had better define that word. Lorenz: Animals of the same species, fellow members of the species — conspecific. The difficulty is he will fight the female, too. In many species where one parent only takes care of the young, it is sufficient that sexuality inhibits aggression long enough to make a momentary K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 186   contact possible and immediately after copulation, the male chases out the female or the female chases out the male, and that is that. The moment there is a pair which defends the territory and the babies together, there arises an enormous problem: how to prevent the fight between a pair of cichlids, let us say, how to make it possible that one cichlid tolerates the other, even when the latter is giving all the key stimuli to fighting, because it is itself fighting a third cichlid. It is erecting its fins, showing all the motions of excitation, but yet does not release fighting. It is sending out all the optimal stimulations of fighting but does not release a fight. Every time I see a pair of cichlids fighting and chasing out an intruder, and not reacting to each other, it is to me one of the major miracles. The miracle is brought about by a very special physiological mechanism in which learned responses and particularly habituation play a large role. The fish learns to tolerate the approach of its mate, and it takes quite a long period of pair formation to do so. At first, fights threaten to break out at short intervals. They are then suppressed by certain innate behavior patterns of which I shall have something to say in a moment. But as mutual habituation proceeds, these beautiful fight-suppressing ceremonies become rarer and rarer until habit and routine take over more or less complete control of the married life of these fish. What concerns us here are the unlearned behavior patterns which suppress fighting. They have often been termed "submissive" attitudes, etc., but they certainly are not purely submissive. They often involve a very active approach of the partner. In many cases they obviously have been developed under the selection pressure of the Innate Releasing Mechanisms which elicit fighting, but in a very curious way so as to represent a sort of negative of that stimulus situation which does release fighting. If, for instance, a fish, in order to release fighting, erects its fins, turns broadside-on to its partner and moves forward in jerks, then, in order to signify peace, it does the very opposite. Forgive me, for the moment, for this teleologic shorthand, which just denotes the biological function. I assure you I am not a teleologist. I mean it is the function, the selection pressure of which is — Steinbach: You can be a teleologist. Mirsky: What is wrong with teleology? Lorenz: I object to it very strongly. If the fish stands broadside-on, presenting the largest possible contour in threatening, then, in the peace ceremony it will turn edgewise and fold all its fins. If it moves in jerks when challenging a fight, it glides slowly to prevent K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 187   it. If it threatens head-on to the rival, it approaches tail-first in the peace-ceremony. Very many female cichlids do that. The principle of these negative fight-releasers was discovered by Niko Tinbergen of Oxford University and me, simultaneously. We were watching a pair of coots. The white patch on the forehead of a coot is used in threatening. As we were watching these two coots approach each other in a sexual mood, suddenly they bent their necks forward and lowered their heads, so that the white patches disappeared below the surface and ceased to exist as key stimuli to fighting. The moment Dr. Tinbergen and I saw that we each started to try to tell the other what the whole thing meant. The question of priority is still not settled. That was back in 1937. Peck: I didn't get the matter of standing, so they present the least breadth. Did you say that, when they want to avoid fighting, they might stand so that the greatest breadth — Lorenz: No, when they avoid fighting, they try to look as small and as unobjectionable as possible. If you want to see that nicely, take the common fighting fish, Betta splendens, which threatens broadside-on with all fins erect while the female, submissive, does just the opposite, all fins folded and presenting the narrowest possible contour to the male; in order to avoid attack, she must never show her broadside. They dance around in a circle, under the nest. This circling has led to their special copulation movement, when the two bodies entwine in two opposed half-circles. It is really very beautiful, like a Siamese dance. Mead: Will you also say when you are talking about fish or birds? Lorenz: The cichlids are a family of tropical perch, very close to sunfish and, outwardly, quite similar to them. In cichlids, we find one "peace-ceremony" which is of particular interest because it is a functional analogy to the triumph ceremony of geese, which is my main subject now. This so-called greeting ceremony is really what Dr. Tinbergen has called a re-directed activity. A re-directed activity is just this: If I am furious with my boss, my fear may inhibit my aggression against him, so I release my aggression toward the underdog or toward anything else. If I am furious and 1 don't want to strike you, I could, for example, strike the table. This is a re-directed activity. Re-directed activities can become ritualized, and I need not explain ritualization to this group. In cichlids, the peace or greeting ceremony originates out of a re-directed attack in the following manner: The fish starts out actually to attack its partner. In the last moment, this attack is inhibited K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 188   by individual habituation, if you will, by personal acquaintanceship, and also by sexual motivations. In this conflict, the fish swerves around the partner and attacks another fish, or even launches a "sham" attack into emptiness. The peace or greeting ceremony, in its ritualized form, still contains the motor patterns of mutual threatening but is clearly distinguishable from real threat in one important point: The fish does not stop when standing broadside-on to the partner, but swims past him and even emphasizes the fact that he is going elsewhere to attack by accelerating a bit while going past the mate. The presence of real aggressive motivation is still plainly discernible. When one fish relieves the other from "duty" at the nest by the ceremony just described, the relieved one, while coming forward a few inches in order to be on the move while meeting the oncoming partner, and after performing the ceremony, immediately continues on to the territory border, obviously looking for trouble with hostile neighbors. A hostile neighboring pair is actually necessary as a valve, as an outlet for aggression. If a pair is quite alone in a tank, the fish will sooner or later start to fight and, in some species, actually kill each other. So, the re-directed activity is still definitely dependent on the re-direction as an outlet of aggression, which primarily is directed at the partner. From other experiments we know that another cichlid in full nuptial coloration, standing in the middle of the territory, is the most irritating thing that can happen to this fish. Yet, the mechanism just described enables him to tolerate it. And this mechanism is even made so cleverly that the fighting irritation actually elicited by the mate is exploited to enhance the attack at the territorial enemy. Hess: I think there is apparently some question in some people's minds about the term you used. It is being confused with "displacement activity." Lorenz: That is quite important. Displacement activity is something entirely different. I will say it in two words: Displacement activity happens if two mutually inhibiting motivations result in such a perfect equilibrium as to block each other completely. What happens then is that another movement, which is usually inhibited by both of them, becomes disinhibited because the other two neutralize each other. So, if a bird wants to attack and is afraid in more or less perfect equilibrium of these two motivations, he may start to preen or to scratch, or to perform other activities which are inhibited both by attack and by escape, attack and escape being at the moment mutually inhibited. This last has been shown quite conclusively by the Leiden people, K. Lorenz 1959 The role of aggression in group formation 189   particularly by Piet Sevenster and Angela Bol.* It is really the mutual inhibition of the two contrary drives which relieves the inhibition which both of them exert on the lower one. Fremont-Smith: That which each of them exerts? Lorenz: Yes. Walter: Would it be possible in a situation where say fight, flight, and flocking are possible, if fight and flight are equal and opposite, neither would occur, but flocking would occur? Lorenz: I don't know an actual observed example, but it is possible. Walter: It tends to happen with mechanical animals. In a population of artificial animals, this can happen. Lorenz: It might be. Fremont-Smith: With models. Lorenz: I understand, artificial animals. What Dr. Hess wants me to say is that one activity which is being blocked in one direction only, not completely inhibited, seeks another outlet. Fremont-Smith: It is the same activity but directed toward another goal? Lorenz: Exactly! The object is changed, the motivation, the "mood," remains the same. Walter: It is less personal surely? The displacement activity of preening is impersonal and rather formal. Lorenz: It may search for an object. In displacement eating, the bird might find a grain. Walter: It is rather a formality, isn't it? Lorenz: I come to that because this redirected activity actually has become "formalized." Walter: It does start as a personal redirection. Lorenz: It starts as a personal redirection. Of course, there may be some embarrassment about where to redirect it. If the male's attack sort of glances off the female and he looks around for some fish and doesn't find one easily, he may go quite far for another. One of the most interesting of these fight-suppressing ceremonies derived from a re- directed activity is the so-called triumph ceremony in ducks, geese, swans, and other Anatidae, i.e., in birds with web-feet, and the duckbill and lamellae. This triumph ceremony is obviously a re-directed activity. It consists of threatening movements. In all Anatidae which do have a triumph ceremony, the threatening movement is still recognizable as such, though it may be formalized to a certain extent. As in cichlids, the threat aims past the partner                                                                                                                 * Not published.