1. Chapter 13
Aggression
Taylor, 2006, Prentice Hall

2. Origins of Aggression
Freud suggested that we have an instinct to aggress.
Sociobiologists argue that aggression is an inherited tendency because it promotes reproductive fitness.
Testosterone and serotonin levels are associated with aggression.
Despite evidence of biological underpinnings, social factors greatly influence the expression of aggression.
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3. Definition of Aggression
Aggression is any action that is intended to hurt another.
Aggression may be antisocial, sanctioned (e.g., self-defense), or prosocial (e.g., law enforcement)
Aggression is a behavior and should be distinguished from feelings of anger
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4. Sources of Anger Attack Frustration
= interference with goal attainment
includes family conflicts, job and money problems, even high temperatures
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5. Aggressive Behavior Learning to Be Aggressive
A main mechanism that determines aggression is past learning.
As with other learned behaviors, aggression is influenced by both imitation and reinforcement.
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6. Aggressive Behavior Bandura et al. (1961) studied aggressive behavior.
Children watched an adult play quietly with Tinkertoys and either play aggressively with a Bobo doll or ignore the Bobo doll.
Children who saw the model play aggressively with Bobo were subsequently more aggressive when they were left in a playroom with a Bobo.
More so when the model was rewarded, the same sex as the child, or had a nurturing relationship with the child.
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7. Aggression by Children Witnessing Violent or Neutral Model
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8. Aggressive Behavior
Reinforcement is a major facilitator of aggression.
Parents provide both reinforcement and a model.
Children whose parents punish them for fighting tend to be less aggressive at home but more aggressive away.
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9. Aggressive Behavior
For an attack or frustration to produce anger and aggression, it must be perceived as intended to harm.
Attributions of controllability affect this assessment.
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10. Aggressive Behavior
People who are chronically aggressive have a strong attributional bias to perceive others as acting against them with hostile intent, especially in ambiguous situations.
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11. Aggressive Behavior
Graham et al (1992) developed an effective 12-session program that trained aggressive youths to infer non-hostile intent following ambiguous peer provocation.
E.g., ask them to consider how easy it is for a ball thrown by a peer to hit someone in the head accidentally.
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12. Aggressive Behavior
Reinforcement, imitation, and assumptions about others’ motives may all combine to produce a schema for aggression.
Once these schemas are in place, aggressive behaviors can be self-perpetuating.
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13. Aggressive Behavior
The general affective aggression model suggests that factors increasing aggression do so by increasing the accessibility of aggressive thoughts.
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14. General Affective Aggression Model
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15. Aggressive Behavior
Social Norms are crucial in determining what aggressive habits are learned.
Dehumanization: Taking away the personhood or human qualities of another person.
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16. Aggressive Behavior
Instrumental Aggression occurs when a person uses aggression to obtain a practical goal by hurting others, even when he or she is not angry.
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17. Aggressive Behavior
Deindividuation may produce contagious violence in crowd situations.
Factors that influence this include anonymity, diffusion of responsibility, group size, arousal due to noise and fatigue, and novel, unstructured situations.
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18. Reduction of Aggressive Behavior
Punishment and Retaliation
Learned Inhibitions
Distraction
Aggression Anxiety
Pain Cues
Alcohol and Drugs
Displaced Aggression
Catharsis
Teens and Violence
Reducing Aggressive Behavior: A Comment
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19. Reduction of Aggressive Behavior
Aggressive behavior is a major problem for the human species.
All societies expend much energy trying to control tendencies towards violence.
Every solution has its own risks and unintended consequences.
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20. Reduction of Aggressive Behavior
Fear of punishment or retaliation reduce aggression only in the immediate situation.
Generate anger
Spark counter-aggression
Even if they worked, this is too expensive to be a wide-spread solution
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21. Reduction of Aggressive Behavior
Trying to reduce frustration is also ineffective.
Government responses to try to reduce large-scale economic frustrations are sometimes effective, sometimes not.
However, such programs can never eliminate frustration, so other techniques for reducing aggression are necessary.
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22. Reduction of Aggressive Behavior
One way to reduce aggression is for people to learn to control their own aggressive urges.
Distraction is one way to cope with anger; it may or may not succeed.
Aggression anxiety is the anxiety people feel when they are about to commit an aggressive act.
Women, children from middle-class homes, and children whose parents use reasoning and withdrawal of affection (rather than physical aggression) as disciplinary techniques are higher in this anxiety.
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23. Reduction of Aggressive Behavior
Pain cues from the victim reduce aggression unless the aggressor is extremely angry to begin with; then they can increase aggression.
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24. Reduction of Aggressive Behavior
Alcohol and some other drugs (PCP, methamphetamines, crack cocaine) may increase violence by reducing inhibitions against it.
People who are intoxicated attend less to the consequences of their behavior.
Alcohol also heightens people’s response to social pressures to aggress.
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25. Amount of shock administered ---- alcohol consumed
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26. Displaced Aggression
When aggressive feelings cannot be expressed against the cause of the anger, we may engage in displaced aggression against a substitute target.
The more similar a target is to the original source, the stronger the aggressive impulse, but also the greater the anxiety that is felt about aggressing. Thus displaced aggression is most likely to be directed towards targets that are weaker & less dangerous.
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27. Catharsis
Catharsis refers to Freud’s idea that the release of anger would reduce subsequent aggression.
Catharsis may reduce subsequent aggression when an angry person expresses that anger directly towards the person who frustrated them.
But under many conditions, catharsis may actually increase aggression
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28. Violence in schools High rates of teen violence Which teens kill?
Every day, 5000 teachers are threatened and 200 actually attacked.
Which teens kill?
More likely if child comes from a violent family, has a history of abuse, belongs to a gang, abuses drugs or alcohol, has access to weapons, has problems at school, has a neurological disorder.
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29. Violence in schools
Most school shootings have occurred in rural or suburban, not urban, settings.
Most perpetrators are young white males with a history of social problems.
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30. Media Violence
Does watching violent programming have an effect on aggressive behavior?
Theories that suggest it could include
Learning theory (observation; reinforcement too since much media aggression is rewarded)
Cognitive theories (children could learn aggressive scripts and be over-quick to respond aggressively to minor insults; especially those with a predisposition to aggression)
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31. Media Violence
What does research actually find about the effects of media violence?
Laboratory Experiments
Laboratory studies generally find that observing televised aggression increases aggressive behavior
Recent studies suggest that the causal mechanism may be that TV violence primes aggression-related material in memory
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32. Media Violence
A problem with laboratory studies is that they may be low in external validity.
Exposure to conditions is brief and controlled
Little opportunity is provided for alternative responses such as distraction
Aggression may be measured in ways that encourage its expression
However, the lab studies and real-world studies agree on the conditions under which aggression occurs: more so after provocation, alcohol consumption, anonymity; men more than women
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33. Media Violence
Correlational research on media violence focuses on longitudinal studies asking whether those children who watch more violent TV are more aggressive as adults.
Overall results show a modest positive correlation
But as with correlational research in general, there are alternative explanations
Children who watch more TV in general more violent?
Personality characteristics as a “third variable”?
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34. Media Violence
Field Experiments answer criticisms by using experimental methods in real-world settings.
Most studies have found mixed results.
In real-life situations, observed violence seems to have fairly weak effects on aggressive behavior.
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35. Media Violence
Recent studies have begun to examine the effects of violence in video games
Anderson & Dill (2000) found that violent video games increase aggressive thoughts & behavior in the lab and are related to delinquency in the real world
More so for males and for people with a prior history of aggression
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36. Media Violence Conclusions on Media Violence
Media violence is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce aggressive behavior
Aggressive behavior is multiply determined. By itself, media violence is unlikely to foster aggression.
However, media violence may contribute to aggressive acts in some individuals
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37. Media Violence Does watching pornography promote sexual violence?
Research that examines this makes a distinction between violent and nonviolent erotica.
One hypothesis is that violent erotica may trigger aggression against women.
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38. Shock Intensity as a function of prior angering and type of erotic film
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39. Media Violence
The results of the Donnerstein & Berkowitz study show that the violent erotic film that showed a woman enjoying the violence provoked aggression against a woman even by men who were not angry at her.
For angry men, seeing any violent erotic film (but not a nonviolent erotic film), provoked aggression.
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40. Media Violence
Exposure to violent erotica may contribute to desensitization of men to violence towards women and foster more accepting attitudes to such violence
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41. Media Violence
However, note that there are problems with the external validity of such research
Demand characteristics in the lab situation may increase aggression because the purpose of the study seems obvious
Separated post-test research shows lesser effects
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42. Intimate Violence
Domestic Violence is violence committed by one family member against another
Most common: parents abusing children, husbands abusing wives
There are huge personal and social costs to this abuse
Police are more reluctant to intervene in family violence than stranger violence
Why do women remain? Economic dependence, few options for escape or alternatives
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43. Intimate Violence
A man’s need to control or dominate women and an inability to empathize with others may make violence more likely.
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44. Total rapes/sexual assaults per year and the relationship of the attacker to the victim.
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45. Intimate Violence
Rape is forced sexual activity without the partner’s consent.
It is a crime of aggression and power, involving a male need for control & domination
~20% of women in the U.S. have been raped, often when under age 18, and usually by someone they know, often by a relative or boyfriend (current or former)
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46. Intimate Violence Rape Myths may contribute to the high rates of rape
E.g.,“Women ask for it”
One important myth is the idea that only disturbed men rape.
However, about half of male college students said they would force a woman to have sex against her will if they could get away with it.
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47. Intimate Violence Men and women have different perceptions of rape.
Muehlenhard (1988) had students evaluate scenarios. Men were more likely to overestimate the woman’s interest in sex and rated the use of force as more justifiable than women did.
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48. Intimate Violence Men hold more rape myths than women.
Men who hold rape myths tolerate more violence in general, hold more conservative sex-role stereotypes, & exhibit hostility towards women
Rape myths create a cultural climate that is tolerant of rape
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49. Intimate Violence Why Do Men Rape? Hostile childhood experiences
Believing rape myths
Anger towards women
Need for dominance over women
Sex & aggression are linked in the minds of some men
Peer influence
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50. Intimate Violence Adjustment to Rape
Victims are often blamed, and may blame themselves
Neither self-blame nor societal blame fosters good adjustment
There are long-lasting physical & psychological consequences
STDs, pregnancies; fear, anxiety, depression
Current legal system structure may make things worse & foster decreased reporting
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51. Intimate Violence
Sexual Harassment includes many aggressive behaviors: unwelcome sexual advances, verbal & physical conduct of a sexual nature that creates a hostile and intimidating work environment
Widespread problem in the workplace
Creates profound job, psychological, and health consequences for those who experience it
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52. Intimate Violence
Factors contributing to sexual harassment are unequal power in the workplace, and men who have an automatic link between sex and power.
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53. Intimate Violence
The mechanisms for reporting sexual harassment appear to encourage rather than discourage its reporting
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