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PART SIX
DIFFICULT CONFLICTS
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE Causes and Correctives
Wen Liu
Susan Opotow
How can we understand the causes of aggression and violence? Sadly, examples abound. Violence can be part of daily life in structural arrangements, such as unemployment, poverty-level wages, and inadequate health care, in which some have benefits and others do not, and it is always present during war. In this chapter, we invite readers to consider aggression and violence from a broad perspective that includes varied explanations and examples of aggression and violence. We begin by defining aggression and violence and then discuss five lines of psychological research that study the nature, scope, and the dynamics of aggression and violence. The next section describes key precepts of conflict resolution practice and discusses nonviolent and violent collective action.
DEFINING AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE
Morton Deutsch (1973) has argued that conflict can have constructive as well as destructive potential. Even competitive conflict, he argues, can serve constructive social functions, particularly in such cooperative, playful contexts as sports (Opotow and Deutsch, 1999). Competition, however, can be destructive when it does not occur in a cooperative context and is not regulated by fair rules (Deutsch, 1973, discusses regulation of competition). Destructive conflict and competition can foster a win-lose orientation to conflict rather than an interest in mutual concern. As a result, conflict can rapidly expand and escalate, ratcheting up the stakes of the conflict and its costs (Deutsch, 1973, 1983).
What is the relationship between the constructs aggression and violence? While aggression does not inevitably lead to violence and violence can occur without aggression (e.g., failures of the built environment, natural disasters), the terms are closely related and often used interchangeably. In popular usage, aggression can be confused with assertion—the bold, energetic pursuit of one’s goals. Robert Baron’s (1977) influential psychological definition of aggression clarifies that aggression is negative in action and intent: “Any form of behavior directed toward the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment” (p. 7). A public health definition of aggression, which is broader, describes it as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (World Health Organization, 2002, p. 4).
This definition encompasses interpersonal violence as well as self-inflicted injury and armed conflict. It also includes the negative consequences of violence that, beyond physical injury, compromise the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. In its emphasis on force and power, this definition is attentive to both direct and structural violence.
Aggression and violence can be characterized as direct or structural (Galtung, 1969). Direct violence occurs at every level of analysis from individual to international and involves some kind of physical force, from stabbing to rampage shooting. Worldwide, violent acts account for one in ten deaths annually for people of all ages and all economic backgrounds, with suicides (844,000) and homicides (600,000) the leading modes of violence (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011). Structural violence can be less obvious than direct violence but nevertheless injurious. It accounts for chronic, accumulated sources of harm that occur as normalized discrimination, segregation, or disparate access to important resources (e.g., medical care, clean water, and adequate nutrition). Structural violence can result in negative material and psychological disadvantage that can last throughout a lifetime and across generations. Under colonization, for example, an inferior racial identity imposed on colonized subjects profoundly affected their sense of self-efficacy and worthiness (Fanon, 2008).
An enduring debate about aggression and violence concerns its origins: Are aggression and violence hardwired, ineradicable aspects of human nature, or do they emerge from social contexts? More simply, do aggression and violence result from nature or nurture? The Seville Statement on Violence, written in 1969 by twenty leading scientists throughout the world, argues that it is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by instinct, humans have a violent brain, evolution has selected for aggressive behavior, aggression is programmed into human nature, or we have inherited our tendency for warlike behavior from animal ancestors. Instead, the Seville Statement argues, “Biology does not condemn humanity to war. . . . Just as ‘wars begin in the minds of men,’ peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us” (Adams, 1989, p. 113).
Our view, consistent with the 1969 Seville Statement, is that social context makes a crucial difference. It can influence the forms that aggression and violence take, their intensity, and the formal and informal norms and mechanisms that can curb the tendency to aggress or act violently. This view is hopeful because if violence emerges from social structures, then the systems that created it are amenable to change.
As Deutsch points out (1973) in his Crude Law of Social Relations, “The characteristic processes and effects elicited by a given type of relationship tend also to elicit that type of social relationship” (p. 365). Thus, aggression and violence can be understood as a both a cause and outcome of malignant social relations. Applying Deutsch’s seminal theorizing on conflict to the constructs aggression and violence offers a way to interrogate them critically. From this perspective, social structures and social relations are closely related as causes and outcomes of aggression and violence. Both must be considered if we seek to understand aggression and violence.
THEORIES OF AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE
Over the past seventy years, psychologists have investigated the human capacity for violence from a number of perspectives that offer a variety of ways to understand the causes of aggression and violence. Our discussion focuses on five influential approaches: biology and personality, frustration and social learning, morals, culture, and structural violence.
Aggression and Violence as Innate: Biology and Personality
Biological, evolutionary, and traits and dispositional research positions aggression and violence as part of human nature or as within the person.
Biology.
Biologically focused research describes aggression and violence as emerging from an innate human response that promotes survival in threatening contexts. Using animal and anthropological studies, experiments, and clinical trials, evolutionary theories describe aggression and violence as an adaptive, hardwired, physiologically based human predisposition that has evolved over millennia (Waller, 2002; Mobbs, Lau, Jones, and F
rith, 2007). While biologically oriented research has tended to focus on direct violence at the individual level, recent studies are now examining mechanisms of aggression and violence beyond simplified biological determinism. This work is offering a more complex social understanding of violent social relations consistent with Kurt Lewin’s tenet (1935) that social behavior is a function of the person and the environment.
Social biological research on the interaction among biological mechanisms, social context, and social perception examines how young men respond to a provoking agent’s perceived fighting ability, operationalized as physical size, number of allies, and reputation for aggression in simulated settings (Archer and Benson, 2008). These studies found that as a survival strategy, research participants were less likely to respond to a provocation when a provoker’s perceived fighting ability was high. In prison settings, however, where social norms and rules were replaced by a culture of honor, this finding was reversed: men in prison were less likely to attack those who seemed weaker due to the need to establish reputation (Archer, 2007), indicating the importance of social context on the propensity to aggress (also see Coleman, Goldman, and Kugler, 2009).
Personality.
Personality (also called disposition or temperament) influences how individuals perceive and respond to conflict. Some people are unflappable and others easily irritated. Although a hostile environment might provoke aggressive responses in anyone, people labeled aggressive can see hostility in ambiguous circumstances, tend to react to minimal provocation, and are highly reactive when under the influence of alcohol (Giancola, 2006; Parrot and Zeichner, 2002).
Similar to a biological orientation, personality research looks within individuals to understand the origins of aggression and violence. This kind of analysis can risk stereotyping individuals based on a particular trait or can rely on available but unexamined assumptions to explain the causes of aggression and violence. For example, the media describe teen perpetrators of mass violence (e.g., the 1999 Columbine High School massacre) as harboring pent-up grudges and being explosively angry at the “point of no return” (Egan, 1998, p. 22). Scientific evidence, however, has not linked such acts with a mental illness diagnosis (Harmon, 2013). In the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre and, more recently, the 2013 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, causal accounts foreground mental illness, downplaying other factors that can contribute to such tragedies (e.g., Urbina, 2007; Barron, 2013). In these cases, personality-focused explanation of aggression blamed individuals but ignored structural roots of violence (Psychologists for Social Responsibility, 2013). By slighting the contribution of context (Diefenbach, 1997) and offering simple, dispositional explanations of aggression and violence, the media emphasize individual factors.
Aggregated data, for example, indicate that 90 percent of mass shootings in elementary and high schools in the United States over the past thirty years have been committed by young white men, implicating a culture of violent masculinity in mass violence (Kimmel, 2013). Analyses attentive to social and political contexts emphasize other than dispositional factors: the availability of semiautomatic weapons, lax federal gun control policy, a system that ignores or is insensitive to adolescent needs, the unavailability of affordable mental health services, and a culture in which exposure to media violence is high across age groups (Negy, Ferguson, Galvanovkis, and Smither, 2013; Gentile, Mathieson, and Crick, 2010). Clearly both personality and context are important, and troubled youths with a sense of entitlement to retribution and easy access to weapons can be a lethal combination.
Personality or dispositional explanations for aggression and violence are not limited to individuals. In conflicts at larger levels, dispositional explanations can also oversimplify causes of aggression and violence, for example, by depicting opposing groups in conflict as malevolent or depicting an entire sociopolitical or ethnic group—or even an entire country—as dangerous, unprincipled, uncivilized, or evil (DiFilippo, 2006).
Aggression and Violence as Internal and Social Processes: Frustration and Social Learning
In contrast to the biological or personality perspective that conceptualizes aggression and violence as innate, predetermined by genes, hormones, neuron activity, or a person’s enduring personality, this section on frustration and social learning describes research addressing an interaction between internal and social processes.
Frustration.
In 1939, a group of psychologists at Yale sparked controversy and influenced a robust research agenda in the behavioral sciences when they asserted that “aggression is always a consequence of frustration” (Dollard et al., 1939, p. 1). They defined frustration as a state that emerges when circumstances interfere with a goal response. This work gave rise to decades of research by these scholars, Roger Barker, Leonard Berkowitz, and others. A revision of frustration-aggression theory proposes that frustration gives rise to aggression only when it is experienced as unpleasant (Berkowitz, 1988, 1989), suggesting that how a person interprets a stimulus and emotions that arise from it mediates how a person will respond to frustration.
Building on this theory and psychoanalytical ideas, motivation theories describe aggression as resulting from blocked human needs. Maslow (1970) argued that biological needs for food, water, oxygen, and rest must be met before higher needs (i.e., social attachment, self-esteem, creativity, understanding, self-actualization, and spiritual transcendence) can be satisfied.
Critique of the frustration-aggression hypothesis has argued that although frustrated needs can intensify competition, anger, and aggression, frustration can also motivate constructive behavior. For example, frustrated biological or safety needs can mobilize war or community cooperation; frustrated love needs can prompt self-destructive behavior and stalking, or it can inspire other creative energies. Motivation theories focus on individual needs, but social groups (e.g., families, communities, states) also have basic needs for environmental resources, security, and positive identity. These needs are at the heart of many protracted deadly intranational and international conflicts. In addition, while frustration can activate the readiness to aggress, it does not inevitably result in aggression. Instead, frustration may generate creative and productive problem solving. Nor does aggression always result from frustration. It can also result from competition, greed, or fear. Research has identified a number of key factors, including negative and positive feelings, prior learning, understandings about the situation, displaced hostility, social rules, and individual differences, that can mediate the effects of frustration on aggression (Berkowitz, 1989, 1993). Critique of the frustration-aggression hypothesis has also argued that aggression is not always based on frustration and may not be hostile. Instead, aggression can be a learned response that functions as instrumental behavior to achieve goals and benefits.
At larger levels of analysis, frustration, arousal, and social comparisons interact in the construct of relative deprivation, defined as the sense of injustice that can emerge when groups compare their lot with others (Crosby, 1982). When such comparisons reveal that one’s own group is disadvantaged compared with similarly situated groups, it can give rise to shared frustrations and the conviction that fairness has been violated. This can in turn precipitate political unrest and violence (Gurr, 1970). Relative deprivation theory positions violence as a political response to structural marginalization in political and economic contexts (Fortman, 2005). From this theoretical perspective, aggression is not viewed as human instinct but is instead highly motivated, cognitively complex, and environmentally driven.
Social Learning and Behavior.
Social learning theory describes the origins of aggression and violence in behaviors people learn from watching influential role models act in social contexts. Observations can then segue into behavioral imitation (Bandura, 1983; Cairns, 1996). Research on social learning and violence has examined the potential of media to facilitate the social learning of aggression and violence, particularly in young populations. Although there is no
consensus on whether exposure to media violence directly causes aggressive behaviors, current evidence supports the assertion that violent media content increases the likelihood of aggressive inclinations (Anderson, 2004; Huesmann and Kirwil, 2007). Through repeated exposure to violent content, an individual can develop cognitive structures that support the enactment of violence (Krahe et al., 2011).
Recent research on social learning is focused on school-related aggression and violence, particularly antisocial behavior, bullying, and the use of weapons. Exposure to school violence can have adverse effects on youth, affecting their social skills, self-concept, and academic competence (Cedeno, Elias, Kelly, and Chu, 2010). Because the prevalence and severity of school violence has intensified, social scientists have developed school-based violence prevention programs that take the entire psychosocial dynamics of young people’s life setting into account. This body of work promotes youth’s engagement in prosocial community service as a way to reduce violence (e.g., Kelder et al., 1995; O’Donnell et al., 1999) and also includes effective conflict resolution programs in schools (Coleman and Deutsch, 2001).
Moral Theories of Aggression and Violence
Morton Deutsch’s (1982) theory of interdependence and psychological orientation emphasizes that psychological orientations to social situations have moral as well as cognitive and motivational components. From this standpoint, it is apparent that theories of aggression that primarily emphasize biology, personality, frustration, and social learning may neglect moral aspects. Morals are the norms, rights, entitlements, obligations, responsibilities, and duties that guide our behavior with others and shape our sense of fairness. Morals can be conveyed through observational learning and culture. They are attuned to what is owed to whom in particular social contexts (e.g., family, work, community). They can deter aggression and violence when they instruct patience when faced with provocation, but they can also provoke aggression and violence when they instruct honor-, reputation-, or status-preserving responses to provocation. Perceived violations of shared social norms can activate a sense of threat capable of charging a conflict with great intensity. Even unarticulated morals can be deeply felt, such as when people perceive a discrepancy between what should be and what is (Opotow, 2009). Moral theories about norms and social judgment, moral exclusion, and structural violence emphasize the close relationship between morals and violence.
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