Aggressive behaviour - Essay Example

Aggressive behaviour Introduction Aggression is behaviour that is hostile or threatening towards another person with the intention to cause harm. Aggression occurs under provocation as a form of retaliation although at times it occurs unprovoked. Aggression is ubiquitous with human existence and as a psychological concept has been widely researched and studied; giving rise to various theories on the sources, causes, forms and factors of aggression. These studies bring forth a pertinent question; is aggression attributable to dispositional factors or is it the result of situational factors? First, a look at theories that support the idea that aggression is a result of dispositional factors. Prominent among the ideas offering that aggression is intrinsic in human beings is the notion that aggression is instinctual. This is posited by the evolutionary theory more specifically evolutionary social psychology. The theory sees aggression as having grown as an adaptation as the human being evolved through time and aggression serving the purpose of increasing the chances of sexual selection akin to the behaviour of animals. The only difference is that unlike animal behaviour in which aggression is aimed at proving physical dominance, human behaviour is more complex and geared towards social and economic dominance. The problem with this theory is that it maps animal behaviour squarely on human behaviour and has little empirical evidence to support its claims. Closely related to the evolutionary social psychology is human ethology which studies human behaviour of aggression and submission but from an evolutionary perspective. The central tenet of ethology is that organisms of the same species are naturally aggressive towards one another and usually maintain territories for the sake of equitable sharing of resources and distribution of the population too. Just like the preceding theory discussed above, ethology has a weakness of having no empirical backing as well as the human lacking evolutionary evidence showing the necessity for aggression e.g. the human has no defined aggression rituals like other animals and have not special adaptive killing features. The psychodynamic theory also suggests that aggression is instinctual to humans. Freud suggested the sex instinct (Eros) and death instinct (Thanatos) in all humans and these instincts are guided by unconscious drives. The death instinct is formatively directed to the self but it can also be directed towards other people. The theory’s weakness is that it is largely speculative and not backed by research-based data (Freud 1930)). The flipside of approaching aggression is that it is largely due to the situation that one is in and therefore does not emanate from within the individual. The frustration-aggression theory puts forth the idea that aggression is a reaction to frustration. People tend to direct aggressive behaviour towards the perceived hindrances to their goals and at times aggression can be displaced and directed towards non-partisans too. The theory is simplistic as it presents only frustration as the cause of aggression and it is not always that frustration ends up in aggressive behaviour. A more influential theory explaining aggression is Bandura’s famous social learning theory. A clip showing children acting aggressively towards a doll after observing an adult behaving aggressively towards the doll is common. The theory is more cogent especially due to factoring in other variables like the personality of the individual, reinforcement, the environment conducive for replicating the aggressive behaviour and social circumstances like peer pressure (Shaffer 2008). The excitation transfer model focuses on how states of physiological or psychological arousal predispose an individual to aggressive behaviour. People learn to associate some phenomena with aggressive behaviour through continued exposure to the phenomenon accompanied by aggression. The effect is that there is a learnt association and every time the phenomenon presents, the person is likely to react in an aggressive way. Excitation from other sources is likely to make an individual react in an aggressive way. For example, someone who has been excited by a highly emotional event like watching a game in the stadium in which the team he supported lost is more likely to react in an aggressive way when confronted by an ambiguous situation. This is best demonstrated by crowd violence in football stadia in places like Brazil, Italy and Spain where fans of the losing team react aggressively to the celebrations of the fans of the winning team. The phenomenon of crowd violence can also be explained by the interpretation of the losing team’s fans who interpret the winning team’s celebration as mocking their loss. The excitation transfer model also asserts that lingering arousal from previous situations can cause someone to act aggressively. This makes the model more holistic in explaining aggressive behaviour as it also factors in how exposures to previous situations of aggression affect subsequent reactions. It explains, for example, why people more intense reactions if they were earlier exposed to unpleasant situations and emotions like annoyance and frustration. Cognitive neo-association links aggression to an individual’s cognitive and affective states. This means that negative affective states like stress, anger and depression leads to aggression. The theory also explains how some stimuli automatically elicit aggression like the sight of a weapon is likely to draw out feelings and behaviour that are of an aggressive nature. As seen in the discussion, most of the theories describing aggression being caused by either dispositional or situational factors do not fully explain aggression. This is where the general aggression model fits; it does not explain aggression from a single factor. The model takes into account several possible causes of aggression like personal factors, environmental cues and internal states of affect and cognition. Personal factors include sex, personality, cultural orientation, age and psychopathology. Males are usually more aggressive than females in most cases due to androgens and also their acculturation. The personality of some people makes them more predisposed to react aggressively than other people e.g. type A personalities and narcissists. In relation to age, studies show that individuals most susceptible to aggression and aggressive behaviour are those in the range of adolescence and middle adulthood. The environment can also cause aggressive behaviour. It has been shown for example that overcrowding and high density living is likely to lead to more cases of aggressive behaviour. There is also a positive correlation between temperature and aggressive behaviour. The environment need not be physical as the social environment also influences occurrence of aggressive behaviour. Living in an environment where aggressive behaviour is rewarded e.g. around gangs, people are more likely to display aggressive behaviour. Conclusion Aggression cannot be fully explained by appealing to only situational factors or solely on dispositional factors. The situation that one is largely determines how an individual behaves in order to adapt but at the same time, the human is not a passive recipient of environmental cues. There is an element of reciprocal determinism between the individual and the environment in the causation of aggression. Aggression is sometimes also not wholly a psychological concept as sometimes aggressive behaviour can come from situations of real conflict like war. In such a case, a soldier that acts aggressively is not necessarily acting at their discretion but as more of a vocation. Aggression can also be goal oriented like in the case of protests and riots in opposition to regimes and policies. Aggression therefore is caused by a multiplicity of factors; personal, environmental and situational. Read More