Why We Hurt Each Other: Origins, Theories, and Definitions of Aggression

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Why We Hurt Each Other: Origins, Theories, and Definitions of Aggression

Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 11: Aggression and ViolenceSection 11.1 · lesson 72 of 8510 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Defining the construct, mapping its origins, and orienting the major theoretical traditions.

  • Define aggression with research-grade precision
  • Separate hostile from instrumental aggression
  • Trace the field from instinct theories to the GAM
  • Compare the 4 major theoretical lenses

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Everything said in the video, section by section (1,267 words). Read along, or search it.

Aggression and Violence

Why We Hurt Each Other

This chapter turns from helping to harming. Same lens, opposite behavior. And it opens with a job that sounds dull and turns out to be decisive. Defining aggression precisely enough to study it. The everyday word is far too loose to build a science on. So we start with a narrow definition, and see what it includes and excludes. Then we map where aggression comes from, at three different timescales. And we orient the four theoretical traditions that structure the whole field. One of those traditions is now largely of historical interest. Knowing why it failed is more instructive than knowing what it claimed.

Why Precision

One Word, Four Incompatible Meanings

Few constructs have suffered as much from imprecise everyday usage. In ordinary talk, one word covers a soccer striker's drive on goal. It covers a negotiator's tough opening. It covers a child's tantrum. And it covers a violent assault. Now name the specific defect they share. Each casual sense conflates forceful action with action intended to injure. Those are different things, and a science of harm-doing needs them apart. So the discipline converged on a narrow behavior-and-intention definition. One that lets hypotheses be tested, and findings compared across laboratories.

Working Definition

Behavior, Plus Proximate Intent

Here is the definition the field uses. Aggression is any behavior directed toward another individual. And it is carried out with the proximate intent to cause harm. The definition comes from Baron and Richardson, and from Anderson and Bushman. Two conditions are built into it, and both do work. First, the perpetrator must believe the behavior will harm the target. Second, the target must be motivated to avoid that harm. That second condition is easy to skim past, so notice what it does. It keeps consented-to harm outside the construct entirely. Violence then gets defined as a subset, not a synonym. It is aggression whose goal is extreme physical harm: injury or death.

Three Implications

What the Definition Includes and Excludes

Three implications follow, and each one settles a case people argue about. First, accidental harm is excluded. A surgeon who cuts a patient with healing intent is not aggressing. However invasive the act happens to be. Second, the behavior need not succeed. An attempted punch that misses still counts as aggression. The definition is about intent and act, not about outcome. Third, an internal state such as anger is neither necessary nor sufficient. Cold, premeditated harm-doing remains aggression. And anger with no behavioral expression is not aggression at all. So keep three words apart from now on. Anger is an emotion, hostility is a stable attitude, aggression is a behavior.

Axis One

Hostile Versus Instrumental

Two cross-cutting distinctions organize this literature. The first concerns the actor's goal. Hostile aggression, also called affective aggression, is impulsive. It is fueled by negative affect, and it treats harm as an end in itself. Instrumental aggression is calculated instead. Harm is a means toward some other goal. Money, or status, or social control. Now the honest caveat about this distinction. It has been criticized as overly clean. Real episodes often blend impulse and calculation in the same act. It survives anyway, and for a specific reason. The two forms have partly different neural, developmental, and intervention profiles.

Axis Two

How the Harm Is Delivered

The second distinction concerns the mode by which harm is delivered. Physical aggression means hitting, shoving, or weapon use. Verbal aggression means threats, insults, and demeaning speech. Relational aggression works through the target's social world. Gossip. Exclusion. Reputational damage. Cross the two axes and you get a two-dimensional typology. Goal on one axis, mode on the other. That third mode deserves special attention. Relational aggression is the form most often missed by definitions built around fists. A later section in this chapter is devoted entirely to it.

Three Questions

Why Do Humans Aggress?

Now the origins question, and it needs to be split before it can be answered. Asking why humans aggress is really asking three questions. And those three questions live at three different timescales. The evolutionary question asks about selection pressures. What shaped harm-doing capacities in our lineage over deep time? The developmental question asks about a lifetime. How are those capacities organized and channeled as a person grows? The proximate question asks about right now. What machinery produces this particular aggressive act, in this moment? Mature theories say which level they are addressing. Here is the confusion this prevents. Evolutionary and situational accounts usually answer different questions, not rival ones.

Biology

The Substrate, and What It Does Not Determine

Start at the biological level. Comparative work shows aggression within a species is widespread in social mammals. In humans it is supported by a specific network. The amygdala, the hypothalamic nuclei, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Read that as an emotion-generation system held in check by cortical control. Neuromodulators matter too. Low central serotonergic activity is reliably associated with impulsive aggression. Testosterone is more complicated than the popular account suggests. It interacts with status threat, rather than acting as a simple aggression switch. Behavior-genetic studies put the heritability of aggressive tendencies around forty to fifty percent. And one famous finding shows what heritability does not mean. The MAOA and maltreatment interaction, reported by Caspi and colleagues in two thousand two. Genetic risk was expressed only against particular environmental backgrounds.

Development

What Social Experience Writes

On top of those substrates, social experience writes a great deal. Four inputs are especially well documented. Early attachment quality. Harsh parenting. Exposure to community violence. And modeled aggression inside the family or the peer group. What those inputs shape is not a mood but a set of tools. Scripts, schemas, and attributional habits. The tools a person brings to an ambiguous social encounter. Crick and Dodge gave the canonical account of this in nineteen ninety-four. Chronically aggressive children encode hostile cues more readily. They infer hostile intent in ambiguous situations. They generate fewer competent response options, and rate aggressive ones more favorably.

The Situation

What the Moment Supplies

Finally the immediate situation supplies its own forces. Provocation and frustration. Pain, or other aversive stimulation. Alcohol, and anonymity. The presence of weapons, which is known as the weapons effect. That effect was reported by Berkowitz and LePage in nineteen sixty-seven. Heat, and crowding. And culturally specific honor norms that make an insult intolerable. Read that whole list as a list of levers. Almost every item is something an environment can have more or less of. Which is exactly what makes the proximate level the practical one.

Four Lenses

A Long Conversation Among Traditions

Hundreds of mini-theories exist in this area. But the field's debates read as a long conversation among four traditions. The oldest is instinct and drive theory. Freud, writing in nineteen twenty, posited a death-directed drive called Thanatos. Its energy had to be discharged outward in order to spare the self. Lorenz developed a related ethological account in nineteen sixty-six. Aggressive energy accumulates, and must periodically be released. Both are largely of historical interest now, and for a specific reason. They predict catharsis effects that have not survived replication. Then comes the frustration-aggression tradition, then social learning. And finally the integrative cognitive frameworks. The General Aggression Model attempts to pull all of them into one account.

The Comparative Map

Six Traditions, One Table

The comparative map is worth memorizing in outline. Dollard and colleagues, in nineteen thirty-nine, made two strong claims. Frustration always produces some instigation to aggress. And aggression always implies prior frustration. Berkowitz softened both of those in nineteen eighty-nine. Frustration produces aggression only insofar as it generates negative affect. And negative affect from any source can do the same work: heat, pain, noise. Bandura's social-learning approach treats aggression as learned like anything else. Through reinforcement, but more importantly through observing rewarded models. Anderson and Bushman's General Aggression Model integrates all of it. Person inputs and situational inputs shape an internal state. Cognition, affect, and arousal. That state is then appraised. The appraisal takes an impulsive or a thoughtful route, and behavior follows.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Why We Hurt Each Other: Origins, Theories, and Definitions of Aggression

What is the definition of aggression in social psychology?
In social psychology, aggression is any behavior directed at another person with the immediate intent to cause harm, where the target is motivated to avoid that harm. This definition, used by Baron and Richardson and by Anderson and Bushman, excludes accidental harm and consented harm such as surgery. A failed attempt still counts, and violence is the subset of aggression aimed at extreme physical harm, such as injury or death.
What is the difference between hostile and instrumental aggression?
Hostile aggression is impulsive, driven by anger or other negative feelings, and treats harm as the goal itself. Instrumental aggression is calculated, using harm as a means to another goal such as money, status, or control. A furious shove during an argument is hostile, while injuring someone during a planned robbery is instrumental. Real episodes often blend both, but the two forms differ partly in development and in which interventions work.
What is the difference between anger, hostility, and aggression?
Anger is an emotion, hostility is a stable negative attitude toward others, and aggression is a behavior intended to harm. They often occur together but are separate. Anger is neither necessary nor sufficient for aggression: a cold, premeditated attack counts as aggression without anger, while a person who feels furious but does nothing harmful has not aggressed. Keeping the three apart makes aggression measurable.
Is aggression genetic or learned?
Aggression reflects both genes and environment. Twin and adoption studies estimate that roughly 40 to 50 percent of the variation in aggressive tendencies is heritable, yet genes act through experience. In a 2002 study, Avshalom Caspi and colleagues found that males with a low-activity MAOA gene variant showed more antisocial behavior mainly if they had been maltreated as children. Harsh parenting and exposure to violence also shape aggressive habits.

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