Many conflicts causing homicides involve status conflicts, protecting reputation, and seemingly trivial insults.[1] Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate argues that in non-state societies without a police it was very important to have a credible deterrence against aggression. Therefore, it was important to have a reputation for retaliation, causing humans to develop instincts for revenge as well as for protecting reputation ("honor"). Pinker argues that the development of the state and the police have dramatically reduced the level of violence compared to the ancestral environment.