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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, mus...


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