Are Humans Innately Aggressive or Do We Learn to Be Aggressive?

¶ … Humans Innately Aggressive?

Aggression is "an action…intended to harm someone in a verbal sense (sarcasm, insults, threats or playing out "nasty motives" -- and it can be a physical act, pushing, hitting, shooting at another person or otherwise aiming to do harm to someone (McCawley, 2001, p. 1). According to a definition from Shippenburg University aggression is any form of human behavior "…directed toward the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such harm." Still another definition of aggression (Buss) is found in an essay by Bushman and Anderson: Aggression is "…a response that delivers noxious stimuli to another organism" (Bushman, et al., 1998). But the question that has been asked through the years is -- are people aggressive innately or do people learn to be aggressive? This paper delves into the issue, presents both sides (through the literature), and offers a conclusion.

The nature of aggression -- it is instinctive. The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis posits that aggression is "…always a consequence of frustration" and the very existence of frustration in a person's life "…always leads to some form of aggression" (McCawley, p. 2). That is, frustration may block a path the person had laid out to a specific goal and lead to aggression; the person notices that his or her way to that goal is being stymied and hence, "aggression arises" when frustration exists (McCawley, 2).

The "Revised Frustration-Aggression hypothesis" (Berkowitz) views aggression as an "externally elicited drive"; frustration creates a "readiness to respond in an aggressive manner" if in fact there are "proper environmental cues" that tell the frustrated person that indeed an aggressive response to the frustration "is appropriate" (Shippenburg). This hypothesis holds that when there is a clue in the environment (a person or a situation) -- that is "strongly associated with aggression" -- and the individual becomes frustrated in the presence of that environmental cue, that person is likely to behave "more aggressively" (Shippenburg).

The nature of aggression -- it is learned. On the other hand, iconic psychologist Albert Bandura has a theory that aggression is "…acquired through viewing aggressive models," and he believes people learn to be aggressive through their past experiences (Shippenburg). Bandura's theory that relates to aggression is his Social Cognitive Theory. This theory is a learning theory and it posits that people see what others are doing and they learn by observing others.

Bandura also believed that: a) given the same set of stimuli different people are going to naturally have different responses, and the same people will have different responses given different situations and different environmental cues; b) there is a linkage between what's out in the world and an individual's behavior; and c) personality is an "interaction" between three factors: "the environment, behaviour, and a person's psychological processes" (New Zealand).

In other words, people learn by observing role models; students learn by paying attention to teachers and parents; people model what they see, and it might be the media or a neighbor but "effective modeling teaches general rules and strategies for dealing with different situations" (New Zealand).

In order to learn something that is new to an individual, watching, listening, observing closely and paying strict attention is how that kind of learning (Bandura's learning style) takes place. And according to Bandura, the more "striking or different something is" (like a wild color or something very dramatic) the more likely an individual will pay close attention and learn something as well. When a baseball player does something really extraordinary (like running with his back to home plate to catch a long fly ball over his shoulders), and a young man who plays baseball sees that play, he naturally wants to emulate it and he has in fact learned from it.

Bandura's Bobo Doll experiment is used often to show that aggressive behavior is learned. In this experiment, 36 boys and 36 girls from a nursery school at Stanford University (ages 3 to 6) were tested under controlled conditions. Twenty-four of the children were exposed to a "non-aggressive model" and 24 were not exposed to any model. Prior to the study, the children were tested for aggressive behaviors. Then they were tested, 24 in a non-aggressive environment and 24 in an environment where a model was kicked, hit, and treated meanly.

Predictably, the children who witnessed the aggressive models "…made far more imitative aggressive responses than those who were in the non-aggressive or control groups" (McLeod, 2011). Boys were more likely to imitate "same-sex models than girls" and boys imitated "more physically aggressive acts than girls," which was also not surprising. The bottom line for Bandura's Social Learning Theory: children learn things (including aggression) through the process of "observation learning -- watching the behavior of another person" (McLeod).