Coalitionary killing is the evolutionary-anthropology principle that lethal violence in chimpanzees and humans is a group-level rather than individual-level phenomenon, because an individual attacker gains nothing from a fight carrying reciprocal risk of injury; killing becomes adaptively motivated only under overwhelming numerical asymmetry, where a coalition can immobilize a victim and inflict fatal damage at near-zero cost to itself. Because the behavior is selected for, the proximate motivation need not represent the victim's death or perspective at all — selection favors enthusiasm for the act itself, and any capacity for perspective-taking would function as an inhibitor and be selected against. The theory sits within evolutionary anthropology and comparative primatology, connecting the imbalance-of-power hypothesis to the psychology of in-group/out-group boundaries and dehumanization, which define who falls outside the coalition and is therefore an eligible target.
Coalitionary killing is the evolutionary-anthropology principle that lethal violence in chimpanzees and humans is a group-level rather than individual-level phenomenon, because an individual attacker…