Aggression as Learned Behavior
The third approach to understanding individual aggression assumes most human behavior is learned. It is associated with anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu and behavioral psychologists such as Albert Bandura, B.
F. Skinner, and John Watson.If aggression and its control can be learned in varying degrees depending on individual abilities, then it can and often is purposeful, or instrumental as psychologists prefer to say. Psychologists generally try to reduce it in their patients but marine gunnery sergeants try for a highly disciplined increase in their recruits.
Anthropologists have studied societies in which individuals are aggressive but there is no group warfare (Inuit), and vice versa (Pueblos), suggesting that individual and group aggressiveness are learned separately. Dyson-Hudson (1998) found that low conflict societies with affectionate socialization and aversion to interpersonal confrontation (e.g. Inuit, !Kung Bushmen, Gebusi of low-land New Guinea) have high murder rates. In contrast, Turkana children learn to fight and take part in raids on the neighboring Pokot as children, while within-group homicide rates are lower than those reported for the 'low-conflict' societies. It may be that Turkana rules that require bystander intervention and adjudication by elders are effective in preventing within-group aggression and violence from escalating into lethal fights.
Individuals raised in a culture foreign to the natural parents display the attitudes of the adoptive culture, not the parents, and the growing level of aggressiveness and violent crime among women in our own society (Chapter 8) suggest “nurture” is more important than “nature” in individual aggressiveness.
Albert Bandura found that “the specific forms that aggressive behavior takes, the frequency with which it is displayed, and the specific targets selected for attack are largely determined by social learning factors.” In Bandura’s most famous experiments, he observed children to determine if they imitated the way adults interacted with a life-size "Bobo Doll" designed to bounce upright after someone knocked it down.
In one such experiment, children saw the adult who behaved aggressively toward the doll being either punished or rewarded. Children who saw the adults punished proved less likely to imitate the aggression toward the doll (Bandura and Walters 1963, Bandura 1973, 1986), reinforcing the theory that aggression is learned and that people can learn to control it.Bandura also studied whether violence seen on television causes violence in the real world. He postulated three stages leading from the former to the latter. The first is exposure, violence attracting interest because it is frequent, easy to understand, and positively depicted. The second stage is learning how to fight or to use weapons. The third stage is actual violence. However, few people take the violence they see to this third stage because, as the Bobo Doll experiments demonstrate, they also understand punishment or even disapproval by parents, friends, and teachers.
A woman told American talk-show host Dennis Prager of a five year old who for no apparent reason walked over and threw her two year old onto the concrete. The boy’s mother rushed over and, without even looking at the howling infant on the ground, asked the five year old what was troubling him. Two psychologists, Baumeister (1994) and Bushman (2001) blame such aggression on the constant emphasis psychologists and psychiatrists give to self-esteem and expressing feelings, which is to say, catharsis. They ask, “Is it not possible that children so raised turn into the adults who shoot up post-offices and schools? Forget about self-esteem and concentrate on self-control.” They suggest that if we gave as much attention to personal responsibility and self-control as we do to rights, we would have fewer people who resort to violence, and a society better protected from those who do (Begley 1998; Goode 1999).
In an infamous series of experiments, Harry Harlow (1974) studied affection, depression, and aggression based on substitution of cloth-covered or wire “mothers” for infant rhesus, pigtail, and bonnet monkeys, with real mothers as controls.
One of the more bizarre metal “mothers” shook violently whenever an infant tried to cling to it. These infants often developed peculiar behaviors and, like some abused children, grew into abusive parents. Harlow concluded that maternal deprivation was one if not necessarily the only cause.Three difficulties prevent easy generalizing from such research to humans. First, researchers often select species for experimental studies based on availability, ease of care, and personal preference rather than similarity to human behavior. Second, there is considerable variety among species. As noted above, baboons and chimpanzees are hyperactive and aggressive, but gorillas and orangutans are calm and gentle. Behavior does not necessarily generalize from one species of monkey or ape to another, let alone to humans. Third, the clinical definition of depression includes feelings of worthlessness, excessive guilt, in-decisiveness, and thoughts of death difficult to infer from animal behavior. Even in humans, psychiatrists recognize that mood and behavior are neither identical nor inferable from one another.
These powerful criticisms suggest that there are no valid animal models for human behaviors such as depression or aggression due to crowding. This has led ethicists to suggest an important dilemma with respect to experiments on animals. If the monkeys experience feelings such as despair, can the experiments be justified? If they do not experience such feelings, what is the point of the experiments (Gruen and Singer 1987)? Studies to understand animal behavior (e.g., Jane Goodall) remain valid. Studies of animals to understand human behavior seem increasingly dubious.