ABSTRACT
179In the course of writing The Exceptional Executive (1968), I came across an article by L.S. Ewing 1 in which he reported a phenomenon that fascinated me. When he paired male cockroaches against each other in combat, up to 80% of the losers died from injuries, most of which seemed not to be serious enough to cause death. The moral of that research seemed to be that even among primitive insects defeat has powerful psychological consequences.
