1 Psychology and human development1.10 Social psychology
1.10.3.2 Aggression
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
Definition and types
Aggression is behaviour intended to harm someone who is motivated to avoid it. Accidents are excluded, but failed attacks count.
Feature | Hostile (reactive) | Instrumental (proactive) |
|---|---|---|
Aim | Harm is the goal | Harm is a means to a separate end |
Driver | Anger after provocation, with high arousal | Often no anger |
Planning | Reactive and poorly planned | Planned and goal-directed |
Both motives can coexist in one act.
Instinct theories
Freud paired the death instinct, Thanatos, against Eros, the life instinct. He saw aggression as this innate destructive drive turned outwards onto others so that the self is not destroyed.
Catharsis is Freud's term for the release of accumulated aggressive energy.
The catharsis hypothesis predicts that expressing aggression lowers the drive towards further aggression. It has not held up, because venting often increases aggression.
Lorenz based his ethological theory on Darwinian evolution. Aggression is an inherited instinct kept by natural selection because it aids survival and reproduction, whereas Freud derives the drive from a death instinct.
Lorenz's psycho-hydraulic model (On Aggression, 1963) holds that instinctive energy builds up inside and is discharged by specific sign stimuli, or even with no stimulus at all.
Animal evidence
In wild baboon troops, aggression and cortisol rise when the dominance hierarchy becomes unstable, not with fixed rank or sex.
Frustration and cue theories
The frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard and colleagues, Yale, 1939) holds that all aggression follows frustration and all frustration produces an aggressive drive.
Displacement redirects aggression that cannot be aimed at the frustrator onto a weaker, more accessible or safer target, not a more powerful one.
The hypothesis fails because frustration can lead to negotiation or withdrawal instead, and instrumental aggression needs no frustration.
Berkowitz later reformulated the hypothesis around anger and aggressive cues.
In the weapons effect (Berkowitz and LePage, 1967), objects associated with violence make an angered person more likely to act aggressively.
Berkowitz's cognitive neoassociation theory holds that any aversive event, such as pain, heat, noise or insult, produces negative affect. This affect primes an associative network of aggression-related thoughts, memories and motor tendencies.
Arousal
Zillmann's excitation transfer theory holds that arousal fades slowly. Residual arousal from an unrelated source is attributed to a later provocation and intensifies anger.
Learning and maintenance
In Bandura's 1965 Bobo doll study, children acquired aggressive acts by watching a model.
Seeing the model punished suppressed only performance. Once an incentive was offered, these children reproduced the aggression, which shows that learning is separate from performance.
Once learnt, aggression is kept going by what it achieves: attention, tangible rewards, status or escape from demands, which is negative reinforcement.
Intermittent reinforcement, where aggression occasionally succeeds, makes it resist extinction.
In Patterson's coercive cycle, a child protests and the parent withdraws the demand. The relief reinforces both protest and withdrawal, so escalation grows.
Media
Violent media have small short-term effects on aggressive thoughts, feelings and mild behaviour. A lasting contribution to serious violence is not established.