Welcome to lesson sixteen. In this lecture I’ll be
discussing aggression and conflict.
Let’s move to slide two and begin. When we talk about aggression we can
talk about it in terms of many different dimensions and types of
aggression. For example aggression may be justified or not justified.
Aggression can be physical or verbal, instrumental or emotional,
intentional, unintentional, antisocial and prosocial, sanctioned or
unsanctioned, behavioral aggression or emotional aggression, in terms of
feelings, and direct versus indirect aggression.
Let’s move on to slide three and discuss some of these types in more
detail. Instrumental aggression is the idea that you aggress against
someone in order to obtain something of value, that is, it’s a means to
an end. Children often engage in this kind of aggression during play.
Hitting another child to make them drop a toy that the other child
wants. This would be instrumental. The aggression isn’t because the
child doesn’t like the other one, but rather because they’re trying to
get that toy. Emotional aggression, on the other hand, has to do with
impulsive behavior intended solely to hurt another person. It’s an end
in itself. This is when you hurt someone simply because you want to or
you kick a wall because you’re angry. It’s emotional. You don’t expect
that anything will happen because of it, it’s just a way to express an
aggression. Another way to think about this in terms of crime,
instrumental aggression includes things like robbery where the motive is
money, it’s holding the gun or beating someone up is a way in which to
get the money. Emotional aggression is much more like serial
killing, the aggression is an end in itself.
Let’s move to slide four and talk about some cultural differences.
Killing in defense of self-protection. Kahn, Andrews, & Head in 1972
did a survey which has since been replicated many times, looking at
southern states and non-southern states. What they found is that
everyone agrees that it’s ok to kill someone in self-defense, at least
most people agree about 50% versus 70%. Similar is true for defending
your family. It’s ok, in fact even more ok to kill in defense of your
family. Eighty percent of southerners and about 55% of non-southerners
believe this. However, if the talk we discussed is defending property or
defense of your home, southerners are much more likely to believe it’s
ok to kill someone for trespassing than non-southerners.
Let’s move on to slide five and discuss anger. Anger is one of the
reasons that we aggress. We may be angry for a variety of reasons. One
if you’ve been attacked, this may make us angry. You can also become
angry due to frustration, being unable to attain a goal. In addition if
there’s an expectation that you’ll be able to retaliate later, you may
become even more angry. And finally depending on what your attributions
are about the intensity aggression, you may be more or less angry.
Let’s move to slide six. Social learning. We learn how to be aggressive.
According to social learning theory, because it’s a behavior learned,
either through observation or direct experience based on punishment and
reward. If you see others being awarded or rewarded for aggression, then
you will also aggress. If you see others being punished for aggression,
you’re less likely to aggress. Obviously being punished or rewarded can
increase or decrease aggression.
Let’s move on to slide seven. Classic experiments conducted by Bandura are referred
to as the Bobo doll studies. If you click that link it will take you to a
web page. It will discuss the study in more detail. Here you see a
graph. Children were shown either an adult being violent or neutral
towards a Bobo doll. You can see the Bobo doll pictured in the upper
right hand corner. They then had the children interact with the doll and
found that those who see a violent model were much more likely to be
both physically and verbally aggressive towards the Bobo doll, while
those who have seen a neutral model, that is an adult not being violent
towards the Bobo doll were also not very aggressive toward the Bobo
doll.
Let’s move on to slide eight. The frustration aggression hypothesis. The
idea is that frustration which is the emotion you feel when someone’s
blocking the attainment of a goal always leads to a motive to aggress.
This is the first tenet of the hypothesis. Secondly when aggressive
motive cannot be satisfied due to situational constraints, they can be
temporarily inhibited. This in turn leads to displacement, the idea that
you aggress against a substitute target or catharsis. The idea that if
you aggress by being if you aggress on a different target, this can lead
to
catharsis. Reduction to emotion aggress after being aggressive or even
witnessing aggression. The idea here is you can get it out of your
system.
In the next slide we’re going to discuss criticisms of the frustration
aggression hypothesis. First, frustration does not always lead to an
aggressive motive. Sometimes people become frustrated and then give up.
They’re not angry, they’re just frustrated. Therefore they don’t have
any need to aggress against anyone. Second, frustration is not the only
cause of aggression as the FA hypothesis would have us believe. We can
become aggressive for reasons that have nothing to do with goal
attainment. Third, the evidence for displacement is ambiguous. That
is, it’s not clear that people always displace if they’re able to resist
being aggressive in a situation. It’s not clear that they will always
displace in another. And finally there’s little evidence that catharsis
works at all.
Let’s move on to slide ten. This is a different hypothesis. It’s called
the negative affect hypothesis. It’s more general than FA hypothesis and
used to explain more data. Negative affect, that is, negative feelings
not frustration lead to aggression while frustration can be negative
affect, there are certainly other types of affect that are negative that
will lead to aggression as well. There are many possible sources of
negative affect, one being frustration, but others as well, such as
physical pain and provocation. The negative affect hypothesis, says
there are
four stages through the process of aggression. First you have some sort
of unpleasant experience, frustration, being exposed to a noxious
stimuli, being provoked. This leads in turn to negative affect. You
begin to feel negatively about this. Third, this will trigger a memory,
a thought or motor response association. The last time this happened did
you fight or flight. How have you dealt with this in the past? What
memories do you have of a similar experience? And fourth you’ll have
higher order cognitive processing. This is where you determine how
you’ll actually behave. In spite of the associations, we often choose to
stand our ground when flight might be our gut instinct or to fight even though flight
might be better or to flee even when we could win a fight.
Let’s move on to slide eleven. The negative affect hypothesis is
supported when we examine situational cues. For example there’s much concern
about TV violence and it’s impact on aggression. We know that this is a
correlation and the situational cues influence the third and fourth
stages, that is, they can help you if you have a salient weapon, this
will help you to bring to mind memories associated with more violence.
The same thing is true for television violence. And at the fourth stage
in terms of when we’re there deciding what might be appropriate, we may
feel that violence is more appropriate if we’ve been exposed to violence
in the past. And what kind of thoughts are going on in that fourth stage
during that higher order cognitive processing. One is attributions of
intent to harm. That is you try to decide if the person meant to hurt
you. If there was some intent to harm you. For example if you’re almost
hit by a car, you have to make an attribution of whether they were
actually trying to aim for you or had some other things going on in the
car that led them to not pay attention to the road. Second is
expectations of successful aggression. If you come to the conclusion
that you might want to aggress against this person, you then have to
decide whether or not you’ll be successful. In some instances, even
though you would like to aggress, very much want to fight this person,
you may choose not to because you don’t think you would be successful.
And then third understanding mitigating information. What else might be
going on that leaves this person to be aggressive towards you.
Lets continue with slide twelve. Alcohol myopia helps us to understand
why there’s more violence when alcohol is involved. Alcohol restricts
the range of cues received and our ability to process those cues. So
when we get to the third and fourth stages of the negative affect
hypothesis, we run into trouble. So we definitely know that we’ve had an
unpleasant experience. Someone has bumped into us, said something that
made us angry and we then have the negative affect. And then we have a
triggered memory thought or motor response. Now this may be restricted
because we aren’t sure what associations might come to mind, but if you
have a history of being violent, especially in an alcoholic situation,
you’re likely to have memories of that. Finally during the fourth stage,
you might not be able to notice what the mitigating circumstances are.
That is, you don’t realize that the only reason the person bumped into
you is because they, themselves, are quite intoxicated or perhaps
because it’s simply a crowded place, but they didn’t mean anything by
it, but you don’t see that. Therefore a brawl will entail.
Let’s move on to slide thirteen. Clearly we know there are gender
differences in aggression. Men typically are more aggressive than
females overall. However, females are more aggressive than males if we
look at indirect forms of aggression, that is, manipulation, meanness,
ways to get back at someone that doesn’t involve physicality.
Let’s move on to slide fourteen and discuss common couple violence.
Common couple violence is much more prevalent than domestic violence in
a traditional sense or a patriarchal terrorism. What we know about
common couple violence is that women are more likely than men to be
violent both physically and verbally inside close relationships.
Remember men are more violent overall but typically more violent or
aggressive with strangers. Women are also more likely to start
aggressive interaction. About 25% of couples say violence is a normal
part of their relationship and men are most likely to suffer in these
cases due to societal constraints. We also know that there’s some sexual
couple violence that receives very little support. Gay men who are in
relationships that become violent are often not accepted at most of the
centers that are set up to deal with domestic violence. Common couple
violence starts usually in high school and sometimes even before that.
We talk about it in terms of typical physical interaction, such as play
wrestling and other sorts of play fighting that will then become more violent
as the couple continue to take those sorts of physical interactions into all
sorts of interactions, including those in which they're arguing or engaging in
conflict.
Let’s move on to slide fifteen. Berkowitz & LePage in 1967 did a study in
which a participant was allowed to shock another participant. What they
found was that if there was a gun associated with the person they were
shocking, then they would be more likely to engage in more shock
behavior. It also had to do with whether or not they, themselves, had
been shocked and how many shocks they had received. So the participants
were shocked once or they were shocked seven times and in this case, the
experimenter did the shocking. Then they were brought into a room and
said now it’s your turn you will be in turn shocking someone else and
there was either no objects in the room a gun that was said to belong to
someone that was outside the experiment or a gun that belonged to the
person who would be shocked. What they found is that if you were only
shocked once, then you weren’t very aggressive. The shocks that you gave
ranging from one to three or two to three actually. However, if you were
shocked seven times, where you have that pain and you were in the
presence of a gun, you delivered six shocks and even if it was an
unassociated gun, about five and a half on average, and if there were no
objects in the room, you were still more likely to shock the other
person, not nearly as severely, with only four and a half shocks being
delivered. You should note the time and date of this study, it was 1967
and the shocks the participants received were very mild and they were
not actually delivering shocks to anyone.
Let’s move on to slide sixteen. You can also prime aggression. Langley,
O'Neal, Craig, & Yost in
1992 did a study where people saw crime. They saw some words flash onto
a computer screen very quickly among many other words. In some cases to the
aggressive crime, which were insults, stab, anger, these three words
appeared in a list of 10 to 15 other words that were just fillers,
irrelevant words; hold, zone and move were non-aggressive words. Praise,
smile, jolly. They then watched either a violent film or a neutral film.
What we found is that the aggressive crimes did not show any interest.
If you were primed with aggressive irrelevant and non-aggressive noun
words, you were then not more likely to want to watch initial film, in
fact everyone was equally interested in watching such a film. However,
if you were primed with the aggressive words, you were more likely to
want to watch a violent film. Your interest in watching violent films
increased, simply by being primed with insult, stab and anger. The
non-aggressive and irrelevant conditions, although different, were not
significantly different and the only significant differences that people
in the aggressive prime condition were more interested in watching the
violent films.
Let’s move on to seventeen. Often when people are aggressive in our
society, in our families, in our schools, we try to deter this. We
choose to punish this. Will deterrence work? Only if the anger level is
low. If you punish aggression in children by telling them no, having
them sit out in a corner, they’re not very angry about it, they were
doing instrumental aggression, then you’ll likely to have deterrence.
Instrumental aggression is also more likely to be suggestive deterrence
as long as there was a small reward involved. That is if you hold up a
candy store and steal $20 and I deter you by throwing you in prison for
a little while, that will work and you probably won’t rob again. However
if you held up a bank and stole millions of dollars that you lived on
until you were caught years later, then deterrence probably wouldn’t
work. In addition speed and magnitude of the punishment matter. Just
like puppies and cats and any other animal you’re trying to train,
children and humans, both children and adults also react to speed and
magnitude. If it takes a while to get caught and then punished for your
aggression, you’re more likely to do it again later because the
association between the aggression and the punishment is lag and also
the probability of punishment. So people believe if they’re engaging in
some sort of aggressive act of which most people get away with it,
they’re less likely to be deterred even if they are punished.
Let’s move on to slide eighteen. The effects of punishment. We tend to
think that punishment works so parents see that a child has failed a
test. They then punish the child. The child then improves. Did the
punishment actually work. Maybe, but it could just be regression of the
means, that is most people regress to whatever is a common mean for them. It may not
be the punishment at all, but we think it works, therefore we continue
to use it, even though there’s no evidence that this was necessarily
true in all cases. There are also biological approaches of ways for
punishing others, hormone therapy for rapists, aging hormones so it’s ok
to relief criminals who may have been aggressive in the past because now
that they’re old perhaps they won’t be as aggressive. In past years
we’ve known people who have punished others via lobotomy and also
looking at genetic proclivity, so determining whether or not the person
is genetically inclined to be aggressive.
Let’s move on to slide nineteen. What are some solutions you can drive
from the theory. We’ve already discussed catharsis and while it
certainly might lead to exhaustion if you beat that pillow long enough,
it doesn’t tend to be very effective at decreasing aggressive behavior.
They’ve also thought about imagined catharsis, so if you just think
about taking your anger out on someone; does that get rid of it? No.
Evidence indicates that that doesn’t work either.
Let’s move on to slide twenty. Here’s some solutions using social
learning. First if you can teach a non-aggressive response so the next
time the person feels that negative affect, give them a non-aggressive
response that they can engage in. The other thing to do is plant
non-aggressive models, so if you anticipate that there’s going to be
aggression in the situation, find some people, some models who are
certainly not aggressive and who are also in the situation so people
will have someone to model and finally cue a non-aggressive response.
Engage in incompatible responding, so if you have a young child who
likes to punch people in the nose, tell them the next time he gets mad
he should thrust his hands into his pockets and leave them there until
he’s over it. This will typically be a non-aggressive response. It’s
hard to punch someone in the nose if your hands are in your pockets.
This concludes lesson sixteen. Thank you.
