Instrumental Aggression Essay
Are Humans Innately Aggressive or Do We Learn To Be Aggressive?
013587
The debate on nature and nurture occurrence of aggression had been going on for centuries. Psychologist had not found any strong evidence supporting either one of the approach. Looking deeply into aggression, we can say that there are 2 main types of aggression, which are instrumental and hostile aggression (Peter Mitchell & Fenja Ziegler, 2013). Instrumental aggression is referring to someone acting aggressively to achieve a certain goal. Children fighting for a toy is an example of instrumental aggression. Whereas, if an individual act aggressively just to release his or her frustration, we can say that hostile aggression is expressed. One simple example of hostile …show more content…
Whereas, the nurture approach claims that the deposition of aggression in human is mostly a learned behaviour. Albert Bandura comes up with the Social Learning Theory (1977), which states that “most human behaviour is learned observationally through modelling” (Kendra Cherry, 2013). Bandura and his colleagues had done the ‘Bobo Doll Experiment’ (Bandura, A., Ross, D & Ross, S.A., 1961). In this experiment, he picked 36 nursery school children randomly and divides them into 3 groups equally while placing them in 3 different rooms, each with a bobo doll in it. The first group is asked to observe adult playing aggressively with the bobo doll. The second group is exposed to adult playing peacefully with the bobo doll while the last group is not exposed to any adult. After that, they were allowed to play on their own in the same room and the third group show not much aggression in playing. As a result, the first group of children, both boys and girls, exert the most aggressive character while playing with the bobo doll. Whereas, the second and third groups played peacefully with the bobo doll. Result of this experiment had proved Bandura’s modelling hypothesis. However, since the bobo doll is not a human subject, it is difficult to relate the result with real life. We can even say that the child is just merely imitating the adult’s actions on the bobo doll instead of referring them as behaving aggressively, because to consider an action as a behaviour it has to be consistent and
013587
The debate on nature and nurture occurrence of aggression had been going on for centuries. Psychologist had not found any strong evidence supporting either one of the approach. Looking deeply into aggression, we can say that there are 2 main types of aggression, which are instrumental and hostile aggression (Peter Mitchell & Fenja Ziegler, 2013). Instrumental aggression is referring to someone acting aggressively to achieve a certain goal. Children fighting for a toy is an example of instrumental aggression. Whereas, if an individual act aggressively just to release his or her frustration, we can say that hostile aggression is expressed. One simple example of hostile …show more content…
Whereas, the nurture approach claims that the deposition of aggression in human is mostly a learned behaviour. Albert Bandura comes up with the Social Learning Theory (1977), which states that “most human behaviour is learned observationally through modelling” (Kendra Cherry, 2013). Bandura and his colleagues had done the ‘Bobo Doll Experiment’ (Bandura, A., Ross, D & Ross, S.A., 1961). In this experiment, he picked 36 nursery school children randomly and divides them into 3 groups equally while placing them in 3 different rooms, each with a bobo doll in it. The first group is asked to observe adult playing aggressively with the bobo doll. The second group is exposed to adult playing peacefully with the bobo doll while the last group is not exposed to any adult. After that, they were allowed to play on their own in the same room and the third group show not much aggression in playing. As a result, the first group of children, both boys and girls, exert the most aggressive character while playing with the bobo doll. Whereas, the second and third groups played peacefully with the bobo doll. Result of this experiment had proved Bandura’s modelling hypothesis. However, since the bobo doll is not a human subject, it is difficult to relate the result with real life. We can even say that the child is just merely imitating the adult’s actions on the bobo doll instead of referring them as behaving aggressively, because to consider an action as a behaviour it has to be consistent and