Mass murders committed by men may be linked to evolutionary last-ditch attempts to gain, or hold on to status, one psychologist’s research suggests.
Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter that killed 59 people, has been described as a poor fit for the typical profile of a mass murderer, due in part to his age.
Preliminary research on mass-murdering men, done at University College Cork, in Ireland, found a pattern of middle-aged and older men who feel that their social status and value have been taken away or threatened, and make a final attempt to attract attention.
Dr Robert J King analyzed data on men who had committed mass murders in North America. The killers ranged in age from 11 to 66, but Dr King found that their ages clustered around two peaks.
The study is still under peer review, but Dr King has written and spoken about its findings as it may be of interest while authorities and the public attempt to understand the motives behind Sunday night’s Las Vegas killings.
Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was 64, wealthy and had no criminal record. Many have been baffled by his profile, but new preliminary research on mass murderers shows that there is a cluster of older men, who are in an evolutionary stage of trying to protect their status
The research, compiled and analyzed carefully-controlled data on mass murderers who used guns and acted on a personal – not political or religious – motives.
The first cluster of murderers had an average age of 23, and the second averaged 41 years old.
Dr King says that these two ages closely track the beginning and end of the period when men are most attractive as mates. In other words, when they have reproductive status and value.
The behaviors and traits of the first, younger group, align more closely with how we usually, and most comfortably, think of killers. These young men tend to have a history of trouble with law, mental illness.
Dr King says that this is an age at which these young men are supposed to be acquiring status, but are struggling to succeed in society. ‘They were, in fact, acquiring signs that they were on a fast track to reproductive oblivion,’ he wrote on his Psychology Today blog.
From an evolutionary perspective, their killing sprees are, in part, like ‘Hail Mary’ attempts to catch the eye of a mate, Dr King writes.
‘But it’s a mismatched theory,’ Dr King told Daily Mail Online.
‘You’re not going to get a huge amount of status by killing people, any more than you will with road rage,’ he says, and yet what he calls ‘male anger flashes’ go back thousand of years. They’re an evolutionary grab for status, but are ‘not actually adaptive.’
And yet, some of the most infamous serial killers are known to have received letters from smitten women while they were in prison.
Charles Manson, for example, developed a romantic relationship with a woman, now known as Star, who started writing him after he was in prison for killing five people, including Sharon Tate.
Manson and Star were once engaged, though the relationship has ended since rumors arose that she wanted to marry him in the hopes of later using her custody over his corpse to make money.
Dr King writes that his continuing research suggests that these younger mass murderers are more likely than their older counterparts to survive long enough to develop their own female fan bases while behind bars.
The second, older group, on the other hand, is made up of men who have established their statuses, Dr King argues.
Data on the older killers showed that they were less likely to have criminal records. They tended to be married, and many even had families.
They succeeded, but felt that the statuses they’d worked so hard to attain were being threatened by things like losing their jobs, scandal, or divorce.
Dr King’s research looked at North American killers for a number of reasons. For one, firearms are more consistently effective at killing as many people as possible, and guns are prevalent in the US.
Evolutionarily speaking, the US is a nation where ‘people have descended from people who had to protect their property. Men have to have a dangerous reputation,’ which becomes entwined with a ‘strong sense of honor,’ Dr King says.
‘When they get older, they’ve got a house, got a family, a reputation. All of those things could be lost, could collapse…[it becomes] kind of a desperate thing’ to protect these sources of honor and identity, Dr King says.
Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was 64, wealthy and in a relationship, though he had no children, when he shot and killed 59 people and injured another 500 from the window of his room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel.
Paddock did not have a criminal record or significant history of mental health issues, though he was prescribed diazepam, an anti-anxiety medication, in June.
Mass murderers tend to fall into one of two age clusters, averaging either 23 or 41 years old, according to new research from University College Cork in Ireland. Dr Robert J King says that younger killers are struggling to acquire evolutionary ‘status,’ while older ones are fighting to protect the ones they’ve gained
He had 23 guns in that room, and police found an additional 19 in his Mesquite, Nevada home. he had had multiple additional homes and his family told the Washington Post that he was worth $2 million.
Paddock was retired, but described himself to some as a professional gambler, and he was known to Las Vegas casinos and police as a high stakes player.
Dr King’s research does not include – much less explain – Paddock’s pathology. But he does note that ‘huge gambling losses are not encoded in genes, but the sense of shame that might attend [them] would be quite an old mechanism,’ related to territory and defending status.
His research also notes that about 60 percent of men do not reproduce, a fact that, could affect a man’s primal sense of status and value.
‘If you’ve got men left over you start getting abhorrent male behavior. Too many men to go around, get behavior you don’t like to see in men, like riots or sexual assault.’
This is ‘evolutionarily, the dark side of male competitiveness. It spills over into an obsession with status,’ Dr King says.
His research found no intelligible patterns related to which past mass murderers stockpiled guns. But he does note that people who stockpile guns are not people who have just been jumped in the street.
A mass murderer that stockpiles is ‘someone who feels their meaningful life is coming to an end.’
After wiring money to his girlfriend in the Philippines and completing his killing spree, Paddock shot and killed himself. We will likely never have answers to many questions about his motives and pathology.
Dr King emphasizes that ‘evolution draws attention to particularly big themes, like status or reproductive fitness. It is by no means a replacement for forensic psychology.’ He says that understanding evolutionary motives may simply help ‘complete a picture,’ of what makes a mass murderer.