Studies on Documented Historical Cases of Civil and War Heroism: A Mini-Review

This mini-review identifies and briefly describes a total of 12 published studies investigating aspects of war and civil heroism by analyzing larger data sets on documented historical cases of such behavior. Eleven of these studies focus on either Carnegie Medal or Medal of Honor recipients. These two most prominent data sources are briefly characterized and directions for future research are pointed out

The logic of human intergroup conflict::Knowns and known unknowns

Human history as well as our present are ripe with violent intergroup conflicts. Despite more than 2,000 years of academic engagement with this phenomenon [1] and (way too) much evidence available for analysis [2], we are still short ofencompassing theories of human belligerence. Not least, theoretical progress is thwarted by the fact that intergroup conflict is an interface phenomenon: its analysis requires the methods and background knowledge of several academicdisciplines. This review pushes for intensified interdisciplinary integration in the study of human warfare. It does so by presenting a selection of pathbreaking theoretical contributions from economics, political science, social psychology, andevolutionary biology, and contrasting their respective insights and blind spots against the results of recent empirical work on human behavior before, during, and after war. As a result, three key areas are identified where theoretical breakthroughis still pending: (i) individual mobilization, (ii) the ambiguous roles of leaders, and (iii) the endogenous and dynamic interaction between conflict and its participants’ malleable preferences. Thus, this review provides an overview ofthe research frontier and highlights crucial challenges in the theoretical study of human warfare

Evolutionary Aesthetics: an Introduction to Key Concepts and Current Issues

In this article we try to give a philosophically reflected introductory overview of the current theoretical developments in the field of evolutionary aesthetics. Our aim is not completeness. Rather, we try to depict some of the central assumptions and explanatory  tools frequently used in evolutionary accounts of human aesthetical preferences and address a number of currently debated, open research questions