“The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men” writes Steven Pinker in the book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature‘.
According to him, “not only are males the more competitive sex in most mammalian species, but with Homo sapiens a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood”.
We can probably argue with this explanation, it is still a constant observation in the news and the statistics that this is true. Just referring to the typical profile of jihadists (in particular foreign jihadists) is totally correlated to this observation. There is something in young males’ hormones that promotes violence between those ages.
I was not aware that the differences in violence were so sharply driven by age and gender. That is certainly something to take into account as part of management and building organizations!
