Lecture 12: Aggression

Question 1

What is aggression?

Answer 1

• Behaviour intended to cause physical or psychological harm to another person

Question 2

What is instrumental aggression?

Answer 2

• Aggression as a means to a goal other than causing pain

Question 3

What is hostile aggression?

Answer 3

• Behaviour aimed at inflicting pain

Question 4

Hobbes believed that people are….and that life would be…

Answer 4

• Aggressive by nature

- “Nasty, brutish, and short”

Question 5

Freud believes in ____ and ____ instincts. The ____ instinct leads to aggression, and self- damaging behaviour. According to the hydraulic theory….. Also believed that the role of the government was to curb these instincts.

Answer 5

• Life
• Death
• Death
• The more you’re influenced by the life instinct, the less you are by the death instinct

Question 6

Lorenz believed that…

Answer 6

• The environment influenced aggression

Question 7

Darwin thought that aggression could have stemmed from adaptive problems such as …

Answer 7

• Acquiring responses
• Enhancing status
• Defence
• Sexual Rivalry
• Acquiring / regaining mates

Question 8

Loosening of social constraints (anonymity) resulted in…

Answer 8

• Increased aggression

Question 9

Diener et al. during a halloween experiment found that…

Answer 9

• When children were anonymous or in a group they stole more candy
• Not being able to be identified + being in a group are slightly different mechanisms

Question 10

Deindividuation (being in a group) results in the loss of..

Answer 10

• Self-awareness

Question 11

In the Stanford Prison Study…

Answer 11

• He had to cut the study off after two weeks because he feared for the welfare of his participants

Question 12

Is aggression a learned behaviour? What theory supports this?

Answer 12

• Social learning theory
• Children who saw adults behave violently towards a BOBO doll were more likely to be violent themselves
• Live > Video > Cartoon > None

Question 13

What is Numbing, Priming Aggressive Schemas, Informational/normative conformity, Interaction with pre-existing violent tendencies?

Answer 13

• You’ve seen so much violence in media that you’ve become less physiologically affected by it (won’t have same reaction)
• Observing people in the media may provide a way to categorise your event (not think of it as threatening)
• Arnold Schwarzenegger tells us what to do, we feel like violence is normal

Question 14

One method of reducing prejudice is by using the contact hypothesis where…

Answer 14

• You merely expose them more
• School desegregation
• However this only affects explicit behaviour and not implicit behaviour

Question 15

It’s not just contact that reduces prejudices, factors that influence the effect include…

Answer 15

• Equal social status
• Pursuit of common goals
• Institutional support
• Sustained, close, informal contact

Question 16

What is the jigsaw classroom?

Answer 16

• A cooperative learning technique that reduces racial conflict

Question 17

Aggression is more likely when…

Answer 17

• Social constraints (internal or external) are removed