Aggression is any behavior intended to harm another person who is motivated to avoid harm SOP Exam 4 Study Guide Aggression It is a behavior not an emotion or a thought It is intentional Individual Differences Related to Aggression Narcissists more likely to be aggressive due to their feeling of superiority and self entitlement Psychopaths Antisocial PD more likely to be aggressive due to their low empathy and lack of basic affective responses Gender and Testosterone Young Male Syndrome Testosterone leads to direct aggression Men in their teens and early adulthood have the most testosterone which leads to behavior aimed at causing harm or pain direct aggression as well as high levels of risky and antisocial activities There is no known culture where women commit more violent crimes than men 2D4D ratio is the length of your ring finger versus your pointer finger the more testosterone you were exposed to in the womb the longer your ring finger should be Most men have a longer ring finger while women have a longer pointer finger More Likely to Use Aggression When Inhibitions self consciousness is broken down the more aware of our actions and emotions we are the less we let our behavior dictate our actions Potential Evolutionary Functions Can be used for acquiring material sources status mates Aggressive impulses are natural aggression is not functional when people fail to avoid aggressive impulses Aggression is not as functional as when used in early forms of human life Theories of Aggression Frustration Aggression Hypothesis all acts of aggression are the result of previous frustration from an un obtained goal and all frustration leads to aggression Blocked goal frustration anger aggression Problem with FA is that reactive aggression is an aggressive response to provocation while proactive aggression is a behavior that anticipates a reward A blocked goal leads to frustration Frustration Aggression Hypothesis Reformulated aggression is a result of an interaction between an internal emotional state and cues that are available in the environment Any unpleasant experience frustration pain heat negative feelings reactive aggression Reactive aggression aggressive response to provocation Social Learning Theory Children model adults Bobo doll experiment Albert Bandura 1961 1 Recorded adults beating up bobo doll 2 Showed it to children 3 Put those children in a room with toys and a bobo doll 4 Results Kids went up to the bobo doll immediately and began to act violently Many argued that the kids would obviously act this way if they have never seen a bobo doll and act aggressively like they saw adults do in the video do 5 Results To correct this they repeated the experiment but placed the kids in a room with only toys and each other The kids reacted aggressively with each other even performing aggressive behavior not seen in the video Meaning kids model what adults do Types of Aggression Direct Behavior aimed at causing someone harm or pain psychological harm or personal injury or physical distraction Going up to someone and hitting them Indirect Not physically doing something but still harming someone Gossiping behind someone s back Reactive Reacting to feelings of anger Jack yells at Dianne because he s mad at her Proactive Acts aggressively in order to receive award Ken killed his wife to get her life insurance Active Doing something to inflict harm Cursing someone out or insulting them Passive Not doing something in order to inflict harm Not giving someone an important message because you re mad at them Groups Power Group generally perceived as a single unit composed of more than one person rather than seeing each person as an individual An example of this is people walking down the street around each other not being perceived as a group but a group of friends talking and walking down the street together are perceived as a group Entitativity How much the group is seen as a single unit how group like a group is Example When asked whether a soccer team or classmates work together more most would say a soccer team due to the following factors Test Question What factors contribute to entitativity Proximity how close in space members are Similarity looks group of girls wearing sorority shirts beliefs etc Shared fate people in same class have the shared fate of taking the same exams Optimal Distinctiveness Theory It gives us an idea of when we may be motivated to emphasize particular group identities The theory suggests that people do not want to be significantly different from others in their groups since that makes them more likely to be rejected by group members but people still want to stand out in small ways optimal levels of distinctiveness Lau Study 1989 1 Asked hundreds of black participants across U S how much they see themselves as black 2 Measured proportion of population that was black of each person 3 Results Where the black population was low less people identified as black not wanting to feel dissimilar from the rest of the population Where the black population was very high few identified as black due to the desire of wanting to be unique Those in neither a low or high population were the most likely to identify with their race Social Facilitation Theory This theory says that the presence of others increases physiological arousal This can lead to either better or worse performance depending on the complexity of the task and whether the task is well learned or rehearsed Examples Tim has been playing the guitar for 3 weeks so playing in a group would hurt his performance Kayla is a professional dancer so dancing in a group would improve her performance Minimal Group Paradigm Defined as completely random meaningless distinctions between groups Minimal Group Paradigm can lead to Increased liking of in group decreased liking of out group More empathy for in group Empathy altruism hypothesis less empathy for out group More empathy for in group Empathy altruism hypothesis less empathy for out group less help towards out group Group serving bias makes one attribute group success to internal factors and attribute your group failures to external factors Gramzow Gaertner 2005 1 P s are shown a picture and ask how many of an certain item do they perceive 2 P s categorized as over under estimators regardless of what they re answers were 3 P s read 36 statements about typical overestimated and underestimated people Half of the factors being positive and the other half negative for each
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