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Discuss how far aggression is influenced by social factors

There is no doubt that aggression is an integral part of what it means to be human. A quick glance at the 20th Century, for example, reveals a time of wars and violence occurring all around the world. But it is not just at this level, but in all our lives that aggression can be seen to varying degrees. Psychologists have long tried to explain why people are aggressive and what factors affect that aggression. This essay will examine the theoretical position on aggression and some of the evidence from the research.

One of the major problems faced by social psychologists in understanding aggression is in defining the word. Hogg & Vaughan (2002) point to the wide variety of different ways in which the definition of aggression is formulated. Some researchers, for example, emphasise the importance of physical contact while others may concentrate on body language in the form of facial expressions. de Rivera (2003) points to the possibility of aggression being more related to the need to push out into the world without regard to other's feelings, but without being violent. The idea of being aggressive in business, for example, is practically a necessity. Aggression in relationships, also, might refer not to violence, but to the assertion of individuality and the personal viewpoint. Further difficulties can be seen in operationalising aggression, or, in other words, trying to decide what constitutes aggression. It is hard to decide if someone is being aggressive if there is no agreement about what aggression involves.

There are two major frameworks within which aggression has been discussed in psychology: the biological approach and the more social approach. Dealing first with the biological approach, then, there are a number of different threads that are often considered. Hogg & Vaughan (2002) point to three major views of the biological basis of aggression as well as identifying a number of factors that are common to most of these approaches. Some of these are that it is: beneficial to the individual, goal-directed, adapted to the environment, shared by most species members (Riopelle, 2002).

Lorenz (1966), for example, theorised that humans had an inbuilt instinct to fight. This was often seen by early ethologists as a positive survival mechanism. While aggression was instinctual for these ethologists, it was only released by stimuli in the environment. These ideas were very much continuations of Freudian theory that posited aggression as a one-dimensional instinctual drive. Evolutionary psychology has also provided a biological theory of aggression. Within this theory, aggression, since we have developed it, must be adaptive, in some way useful for our survival.

Social psychologists and others have criticised the purely biological approach for a number of reasons. Hogg & Vaughan (2002) point to the limited evidence, circular logic and having at its root an unknowable energy - this instinctual urge. Instead, social psychologists have theorised that social effects are extremely important in how humans aggress.

The frustration-aggression hypothesis was important in early models. This model, largely created by John Dollard and others (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Maurer & Sears, 1939), hypothesised that frustration inevitably lead to aggression. The frustration was caused in the first place by some stimuli in the environment, generally social in nature, but this idea was central to its problems as it was difficult to assess what circumstances lead to frustration. The problem of the roots of aggression wasn't solved, it was just moved to frustration instead. A later theory was on excitation-transfer. Zillman's (1979) model emphasised the possibility of carrying over the excitation from one activity to another situation. It is excitation, then, that causes a person to make an aggressive interpretation on a different situation. This approach does not place so much emphasis on social variables but is rooted in biology and does not provide a particularly social explanation of how aggression occurs.

Perhaps one of the most influential ways of analysing aggression has been in the form of social learning theories (de Rivera, 2003). Social learning theories were heavily influenced by the work of Bandura. At the heart of social learning theory is the idea that aggression is learnt by people when they witness it or carry it out themselves. In this approach the biological urge for aggression is still taken into account but it is seen as subordinate to the importance of social learning. Learning is seen to occur in a similar way to that theorised by the behaviourists: reward leads to reinforcement and punishment leads to inhibition.

It is clear that people are not aggressive in all situations and Bandura (1973) argues that there are a number features which predict when aggression will occur. These are rooted in the person's experience of aggression - both that which they have carried out themselves and that which they have experienced, whether this has been successful and whether punishment or reward is likely now. Finally Bandura (1973) sees a group of environmental, cognitive and social factors as being important.

A number of experiments were carried out to attempt to validate the social learning hypothesis of aggression. One of the most famous was carried out by Bandura, Ross & Ross (1963) and it involved some children watching a person being aggressive towards a Bobo doll - a type of inflatable toy, while another group of children saw friendly behaviour. It was shown that the children who saw the aggressive behaviour tended to repeat it themselves. These findings tended to support the idea that social learning theory - learning by modelling other people's behaviour - is important in aggression.

A wide range of both personal and situational factors have been implicated in aggression. Personality has been shown to be important in people's reactions to particular events. Type A personalities, for example, are supposed to have higher levels of latent aggression than other people (Matthews, 1982). This approach downplays the importance of social variables and concentrates on the characteristics of the individual.

In contrast, an approach that tends to show the importance of social variables is the effect of deindividuation. In this situation the social effects of being in a large group change people's behaviour. Festinger, Pepitone & Newcomb (1952) found that participants in a poorly lit area, dressed in lab coats, made more negative comments about their parents than a control group. They hypothesised this was because of the process of deindividuation which caused them to feel more anonymous and so be more likely to express aggressive urges. This idea was further explored in the classic prison experiment carried out by Zimbardo, Haney, Banks & Jaffe (1974) in which participants playing the roles of 'guards' and 'prisoners' were deindividuated by a number of processes. In this experiment very high levels of violence were seen, such that the experiment had to be stopped midway.

Further research in a similar context has looked at the effect that crowds have on people's behaviour. Mann (1981), for example, examined how crowds tended to form watching someone threatening to commit suicide by jumping from a building. Often chanting would break out, taunting the person to jump. This was hypothesised to be the result of deindividuation and the consequent disinhibition thus causing people to act in ways that would not normally be acceptable to them.

Social learning theory allows for the effects of a number of other factors that have been found to be important in aggression. There are many variations in society which have been associated with changes in levels of aggression. Subcultures of violence have been examined and it has been found that some groups have higher norms for the amount of violence that is acceptable. One example of this is provided by Nieburg (1969) in research that examined the Sicilian Mafia. In the particularly gruesome initiation rite, a new member swears an oath with their own blood and seals their membership by murdering a suitable target.

There are overall differences in levels of acceptable violence between cultures. Cultural norms, therefore, vary and this has been demonstrated by a number of researchers. Hogg & Vaughan (2002) cite the work of Gorer (1968) which explains that there are a number of societies such as the Amish community in the US and the Pygmies of Africa who place a higher value on non-aggression.

Perhaps one of the places in which humans display the most extreme forms of aggression is during a war. As Hogg & Vaughan (2002) point out, war has been explained at both the individual and the societal level. It is, however, hard to see people killing each other in huge numbers without considerable social influences.

In conclusion, two broad types of theoretical perspectives on aggression can be seen, those that place the importance on biology and those that place it on social factors. Early theoretical perspective were often biological, while more recent theories attempt to integrate, and place more emphasis on social factors. Social learning theory, which provides a model for how aggression might come about, sees its causes in both the individual and the experiences to which they are exposed. A variety of different social and cultural situations are also seen to influence the levels of aggression that people display. It is clear from this research that social factors play a very important role in aggression although personal factors also have an effect.

References

Bandura, A., Ross, D., Ross, S. A. (1963) Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66, 3-11.

Bandura, A. (1973) Aggression: A social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Dollard, J., Doob, L.W., Miller, N.E., Maurer, O.H., Sears, R.R. (1939) Frustration and Aggression. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Festinger, L., Pepitone, A., Newcomb, T. (1952) Some consequences of deindividuation in a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47, 382-389.

Hogg, M. A. Vaughan, G. M. (2002) Social Psychology, Third Edition, London: Prentice Hall.

Lorenz, K. (1966) On Aggression. New York, Hardcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Mann, L. (1981) The baiting crowd in episodes of threatened suicide. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41, 703-9.

Matthews, K. A. (1982) Psychological perspectives on the type A behaviour patter. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 293-323.

Nieburg, H.L. (1969) Political Violence; The Behavioral Process. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Riopelle, A. J. (2002) Aggression. In R. J. Corsini (ed), The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science. Chichester: Wiley.

de Rivera, J. (2003) Aggression, Violence, Evil, and Peace. In: T. Millon, L. J. Melvin (eds.) Handbook of Psychology: Volume 5, Personality and Social Psychology. London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Zillmann, D. (1979) Excitation transfer in hostility and aggression. In D. Zillman (Ed.), Hostility and aggression. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, C., Jaffe, D. (1974). The psychology of imprisonment: Privation, power, and pathology. In Z. Rubin (Ed.), Doing unto others: Explorations in social behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.