Notes for Social Psychology-November 18th

Well, here we go. Aggression...try your best to focus.

What constitutes as aggression?
-A doctor inoculates a screaming child.
-A prison guard executes a condemned man.
-A boxer punches his opponent.
-Israeli soldiers kill a 12 year-old Palestinian.
-A man cheats on his wife.
-A boy hits another boy who called him a sissy.
-A girl spreads a rumor that another girl is "loose."
-U.S. soldiers mistakenly kill 4 Canadian soldiers.
Aggression may be defined as an act intended to harm another living being. The critical
distinction that is made, then, is the intention of the individual. Unnecessary elements
include physical action. However, it need not be solely physical. An individual may also
have their reputation under attack, or their social lives. Thus, the common denominator
from a social-psychological point of view is the intent.
Theories of aggression:
A. Instinct (Konrad Lorenz, ethologist)
Basically, animals display the same warning signs of aggression as humans right,
particularly when they perceive a threatening situation. Animals additionally have
instincts that inhibit them from displaying aggression when given stop-signals.
Lorenz lamented that humans do not have any "stop signals" for aggression.
An example of this would be the Dani of New Zealand, in which ritualized war is
enacted. In this, one man is killed in one town, and then, in retaliation, another man is
killed. Once this equilibrium is reached, however, then the conflict ceases. The majority
of humans, however, do not set this limit for themselves. Indeed, humans have developed
more aggressive technologies than stop-signals.
Richard Alexander, evolutionary psychologist: There are no other hominids because
humans...never mind.
In sum, humans may have survived due to genocide and Neanderthals were sentimental
to a fault.
There is literature to suggest that testosterone enables aggression.

For example, men and women are statistically more aggressive than women. People's
levels of testosterone has a firm connection with interpersonal dominance and projective
tests of aggressiveness.
Athletes on injected testosterone become aggressive, anti-social.
Testosterone and "delinquency."
The study with alcohol abuse, violence, and testosterone levels hoped to adequately
measure all of these
Dodds conducted personality research along with his findings. He realized that
individuals with high testosterone levels also tend to take greater risks. Those who enjoy
the feelings of elation with danger might be correlated with high levels of testosterone.
Personality, too, provides a stagnancy towards aggression. Individual aggression levels
are highly stable: they correlate .60 to .80 over decades.
If one measures people's aggression in childhood, it serves as a good predictor for one's
criminality later in life.
The social learning theory, of course, can be traced back to Albert Bandura.