Social  psychology theories of agression

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  • Social  psychology theories of agression
    • Behaviorist argue that aggression is a learned behavior as people are born with a blank mind
      • It was a video so it lack validity as it was not a real life experience
      • Research support for SLT was by Bandura who had 69 children split into 3 groups : - video of being rewarded - video of being punished - video of nothing ; Findings were that
        • the children who were shown a reward they were most aggressive
          • Doesn't take into account individual differences as some children may have been aggressive before the video
        • Specific sample as it was children and it can't be applied to adults plus they were American so it is a cultural bias
      • Freud criticized SLT as it isn't about imitating, it is about the conflict in id,ego and super ego
    • Social learning theory is proposed by behaviorist as individual imitate their role models
      • Role model is most likely to be the same age, gender and successful
      • Support for SLT comes from Patterson who studied aggressive behavior and found that the most aggressive individuals had both parents aggressive
    • Behavior will be seen either through direct experience or vicarious experience where the role model will be rewarded for their actions
    • Bandura came up with 4 stages of SLT : - paying attention ; retention ( behavior remembered ) ; reproduction ; motivation
      • Further characteristic which is important is self-efficy where the individual must truly believe that he can be aggressive
    • Second explanation is deindividuation where an individual losses a sense of identify
      • Research support comes from Diener who found that out of 1300 children the majority of them who were in big groups had made problems on Halloween night
        • Good sample size but they were children
      • Criticism as there are many peaceful events were there are large groups which go without any violence
    • It happens in groups as a sense of responsibility is lost
      • Example of deindividuation are uniforms where individuals loss a sense of identification
        • Research support into uniforms and deindividuation comes from Zimbardo who had 24 male students who were prisoners and guards in Stanfrod university , research lasted only 6 days instead of 14 as situation went out of control
          • Bad sample as it was small, gendered and cultural - only 24 male american
      • Research support comes form Zimbardo who replicated Miligrams research into shocks and found that participants who were in KKK masks had gave higher shocks than the ones who had their name on the badge
        • Criticism as the research was a replication so participants may have known what the experimenter wanted so they show demand charachetiristics

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