Bandura And Aggression

Bandura stated that aggression is behavior that results in personal injury or destruction of property. (Bandura, 1973) Besides, Baron stated that aggression is a behavior directed toward the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment. (Baron, 1977) In overall, the common point among these three definitions is aggression is a behavior that causes harm or injury to others. Aggression can be delivering in different ways therefore, it is difficult to agree by researchers about how to describe it, explain it or isolate its component. For example, some researcher defining aggression as a type of physical action such as fighting, pushing and bullying whereas threatening speech, verbal insults and facial

Albert Bandura has come out with social learning theory which support aggression is a learned behavior. Bandura stated that aggression can be learned through 2 ways which is by direct and vicarious experience. (Hogg & Vaughan, 2011) Learning by direct experience means an individual learn aggressive behavior because he or she were receive reinforcement from it. For example, Adam grabs a candy from the other kid, but no one stop him or he did not receive any punishment for doing this, he will most properly do it next time. This is because he receives the reinforcement (candy) from bullying other kid and nobody stop him and tell him not to do that. In the other hand, learning by vicarious experience means an individual will learn aggressive behavior when he or she saw others receiving reward by behave in that way. For example, when James saw his brother hit a dog and his parent didn’t stop James’s brother from doing that action but give his brother some reward, James will be encouraged by this and will do the same thing next time because he think that he will receive reward by doing that action. In addition, aggression also can be learned through observation. For example, when parent always argue and fight in front of their children, their child will learn all this behavior and imitating those action. Some research also found out that children who exposed to violent in family are likely to grow up become aggressive themselves. This theory illustrated in the famous Bobo Doll Experiment by Bandura. Based on the experiment, Bandura found out when compare to those children who did not exposed to the aggressive model, the children who exposed to the aggression model are more likely to act in psychically aggression. (McLeod,