How to win wars and influence people
- Correspondence to: Dr R Persaud Consultant Psychiatrist and Gresham Professor For Public Understanding Of Psychiatry, The Maudsley Hospital, Westways Clinic, 49 St James Road, Croydon CR9 2RR, UK; r.persaudiop.kcl.ac.uk
World leaders need to consider listening to the medical profession to assist in the resolution of violent conflicts.
Doctors treat an ever increasing number of the casualties arising from violent conflicts around the world.1 Given prevention is inestimably better than cure, should the medical profession, besides patching up victims, also assist resolution of these conflicts, which are becoming the source of spiralling mortality and morbidity?2
After all, there is much that constitutes the experience and expertise of the medical world from which conflict resolution approaches could benefit; should our leaders listen to doctors more as they attempt to tackle mounting geo-political instability?
The neurobiology of violence is increasingly well understood and this knowledge could be of benefit to politicians wrestling with the problem—the brain’s prefrontal cortex is now implicated in various forms of antisocial personality problems and intriguingly, it is also implicated in understanding other’s mental states3 otherwise referred to as “theory of mind”.
It has been suggested that our progress from non-human primate to Homo sapiens rests in our capacity to understand others’ subjective experience.4 Assuming that others have minds worth trying to understand enables us to work together.
Psychiatrists argue we need ourselves to have a viable “theory of mind”, …
