Combative Sport and Warfare: A Reappraisal of the Spillover and Catharsis Hypotheses

Abstract

In his classic 1973 study, Richard Sipes used a cross-cultural sample to examine the relationship between combative sport and warfare. He found that combat sport and war tended to co-occur, thus supporting a spillover hypothesis, rather than a catharsis hypothesis. However, his sample was small (n = 20) and composed of outliers—societies that were either extremely warlike or extremely peaceful-and did not address a current concern in cross-cultural research-that is, time and place foci. In this restudy of the rela tionship between combative sport and warfare, the authors use Carol Ember and Melvin Ember's recent Standard Cross-Cultural Sample codes for warfare and other forms of violence with the authors' own new codes for combative sport.