Explaining Aggression

Explaining Aggression 'One of the achievements of social psychology has been in extending

explanations of aggression and violence away from merely being

reflections of the inner state of individuals'

There many ways of explaining aggressive behaviour in humans. Some

theories view aggression as an important part of our evolutionary

heritage , others as an imbalance in hormones or neurotransmitters in

the brain. Early psychological theories of aggression explained

aggressive behaviour as an automatic consequence of personal

frustration. Social learning theories see the cause of our aggressive

behaviour as arising out of our interactions with others in our social

world.

Social psychologists claim that aggressive behaviour can be learnt

through direct experience derived from Skinner's principles of operant

reinforcement. In other words, if a child pushes another child and as

a result gets what they want then the actions is reinforced and they

are more likely to do it again. Learning by vicarious experience is a

contribution made by social psychologists and is a from of

observational learning where a child sees a role model behaving in a

particular way and imitates the behaviour of the model. This was shown

in Bandura's experiment where children watched the behaviour of an

adult towards a Bobo doll. He found that each of instances below

increases the likelihood that the observing child will imitate the

aggressive behaviour of the model.

Children observe aggressive behaviour

Model is rewarded for aggressive behaviour

Other adults ...

... middle of paper ...

...s noisy situations but fear of

retaliation from the 'victim' may inhibit aggression.

Biological explanations of aggressive behaviour have stressed factors

quite unrelated to social learning. Higher levels of the male hormone

testosterone have been cited as a primary causal agent in aggressive

behaviour. This casts doubt on aggression being purely a learned

behaviour. However, social psychologists point to societies that have

no aggressive behaviour such as Amish in the USA as powerful evidence

of the dominant role played by learning over biology.

In conclusion, evidence shows that social psychological explanations

of aggression being learned behaviour have an element of truth.

However, it is not the only explanation of aggression and other

explanations such as biological studies have to been taken into

account.