MAH MBA CET Sample Paper 2026

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"Violence is a driver of much of human history," David C. Geary, a cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, stated in an email. "All of humanity's early empires were built through intimidation and violence." "There's also evidence of aggression before recorded history: bones with evidence of violent death, like embedded arrow points or skulls staved in," says Pat Barclay, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. That suggests violence predated complex societies and the rise of civilization.

But on the flip side, rates of violence vary (and have historically varied) wildly across cultures and communities, Barclay said. That suggests violence can be dialled up or down dramatically in our species. Nomadic peoples, for example, tend to have lower levels of lethal interpersonal human violence, while eras filled with societies bent on plunder and conquest, unsurprisingly, had higher levels. And modern-day American culture is more violent than most of those in Europe. "There's wide variation in violence rates — order of magnitude difference," Barclay noted. "In some specific recorded societies, up to half of all men die violently at the hands of other men. In other societies, physical violence is very rare, like in modern Japan."

Violence tends to breed violence, meaning that cultures where conflict is common are more likely to experience violence generation after generation, Geary said. In this way, violence is "transmitted" as a contagious disease would be, according to University of Illinois epidemiologist Gary Slutkin. However, Brad Evans, a professor of political violence at the University of Bath in the U.K., pointed out that even people in the most progressive and peaceful communities are capable of violence. "Ordinary, lawful persons can quickly turn into monsters once conditions change; equally, some who are most dislikeable can end up showing remarkable acts of kindness. There is no clear formula as to why a person acts in a violent way. And that is why it is such a complex problem," Evans said.

Additionally, according to both Barclay and Evans, it can be far easier to carry out violent acts if the individual committing the violence is distant from their victims; it is far easier to press a button launching a nuclear missile than it is to physically and directly strike a killing blow. For instance, in Stanley Milgram's classic studies of obedience, in which an experimenter told participants to deliver electric shocks of increasing intensity to other people, participants were more reluctant to shock victims if they were physically closer to them, Barclay noted. And historically, acts of genocide occur after perpetrators dehumanize, or create psychological distance, between themselves and those of a different race or ethnicity.

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One example of a multi-residence building from the ancient world was the Roman insula, or “apartment block.” While not as grand or luxurious as the domus (a private, single-family townhouse), multi-story insulae were important structures in crowded Roman cities. In a time before elevators, ground-floor and lower-level apartments were the most desirable. But while the idea that a Roman insula could rise as many as ten-to-twelve stories high may have taken hold in popular culture, anthropologist Glenn R. Storey points out that historical evidence doesn’t back up this assumption. He explains that this view “comes mostly from anecdotal written descriptions about Rome and other Roman cities” and that the “archaeological evidence for tall buildings in the Roman world is in reality very sparse.” Most material evidence places insulae at around four-to-five stories tall. The ruins of Case a Giardino in Ostia, Italy, supports this, as do the remains of other structures, such the Insula dell’Ara Coeli, within Rome itself.

Spinning the globe a bit, we arrive at the ancient city of Teotihuacan, outside present-day Mexico City. Teotihuacan was full of apartment compounds at its peak. The compounds were an essential part of Teotihuacan’s urban fabric, allowing a population of up to 200,000 people to live compactly within the city. While these may have looked a bit different than what we think of as apartments today, evidence shows that these structures “generally consist[ed] of several rooms at slightly different levels, arranged around open spaces (courtyards, refuse areas, and light wells) that serve[d] as places for ritual, rainwater collection, partial refuse disposal, and light provision,” explains archaeologist Linda R. Manzanilla. It’s believed that these apartments were shared by those either connected through kinship or through occupation.

In more recent times, apartments have been used as tools to clean-up and revitalize a city’s urban landscape. Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s urban plan for Paris, initiated in 1853, is a well-cited example of this. Hired by Napoléon III, Haussmann was granted wide authority to redesign Paris in his vision, as many—particularly those in power—found the city far too crowded and dirty. He widened the streets, making grand boulevards lined with the iconic “Haussmann buildings.” Standing as tall as six stories, these large structures with mansard roofs provided modern apartments while, along with the broad streets, gave Paris a visual unity—along with giving ample subject matter to the Impressionists for their paintings!

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“At critical junctures in American history, immigrants have been stigmatized as the etiology of a wide variety of physical and societal ills,” write scholars Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern. “Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy have often been framed by an explicitly medical language, one in which the line between perceived and actual threat is slippery and prone to hysteria and hyperbole.”

Markel and Stern explore the persistence of the notion that “immigrants threatened the health of the nation,” with “health” here being defined in both the public health sense and the ideological (political, moral) sense. So powerful is this persistence that some descendants of those who were once stigmatized now do the stigmatizing. Because most Americans are the descendants of immigrants, a division between “us” and “them” developed around the twentieth century, when a politically freighted distinction between the “old” immigrants who came from northern Europe and the “new” immigrants from eastern, central, and southern Europe seemed necessary. Between 1819 and 1880, 95 percent of immigrants came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, the Low Countries, and the Nordic countries. By 1892, people from northern Europe made up less than 50 percent of immigrants, and that percentage steady dropped as arrivals from Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, the Balkans, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey increased.

These new immigrants ran afoul of hardening racial and eugenicist ideologies that defined them as not quite “white” and therefore biologically inferior and disease-ridden, a threat to both public health and a fantasy of racial purity. A diagnosis of a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” as the Immigration Act of 1891 put it, at the border “almost always meant deportation,” write Markel and Stern. At entrepôts such as Ellis Island, the US Public Health Service (USPHS) acted as the lookout for contagious diseases. But they also looked for cardiac problems, goiter, trachoma, sexually transmitted diseases, and parasitic infections, as well as “insanity, hernias, rheumatism, senility, malignancies, varicose veins, poor eyesight or blindness, and a range of other infirmities.” In 1898, some 2 percent of excluded immigrants were rejected entry for medical reasons. In 1915, 69 percent of all exclusions were based on medical criteria. This was because the list of medical reasons got longer and longer: the “creation and application of categories of medical exclusion outpaced the actual presence of diseases among the newly arrived.”