Definition
Violence reduction is the set of conditions and interventions that make violence less frequent and less severe. Behave ends on this practical question: given everything known about the biology of aggression, what actually lowers the harm?
The answer is not a single lever. Violence has many causes — fear, inequality, dehumanization, in-group hostility, weak institutions — so reduction means working on several of them at once.
Why it matters
How it works
Behave argues that humans are not doomed to violence — the long historical record shows large declines, which means the conditions matter. The interventions that work map onto the book's biology. Because fear and stress prime aggression, reducing chronic threat and insecurity helps. Because dehumanization removes the brakes on cruelty, anything that re-humanizes an out-group — contact, shared goals, individuating stories — helps.
Stable institutions, reduced inequality, and norms that make peace prestigious all play a part. Sapolsky also emphasizes the contagiousness of both violence and its opposite: acts of courage, forgiveness, and refusal to retaliate can shift a group's norms. Violence reduction, in this view, is less about a cure than about steadily adjusting the many conditions that tip behavior toward harm or away from it.