Three Aggression Theories

This essay will talk about and describe similarities and differences between three theories of aggression. The theories that will be researched are the Instinct Theory of Aggression, Frustration aggression hypothesis and the Social Learning Theory. Aggression refers to a range of behaviours that can result in both physical and psychological harm to a person, object or anything surround the aggressor. This essay will be focusing on aggression vented from humans to physically hurt or mentally damage another person. Aggression can take a variety of forms including physical, mental, emotional and verbal. Although we tend to think of aggression as physical, verbal, emotional and mental damage can harm the person just the same and in some cases worse.

This theory argues that by blocking a person from achieving a goal they are striving toward will result in a build of aggression. Millard and Dollard believed by blocking ones goal this will lead to a build-up of aggression. For example a person who has lost out on his childhood sweetheart who has went off and married someone else is said to be suffering from severe frustration. A famous German Psychologist Otterank believed that the birth cry is the indication of the greatest frustration in human life.

The Frustration Aggression Hypothesis believes, by thwarting a person 's attempt at achieving a goal will induce an aggressive drive in them which triggers off behaviour to injure or destroy the person or object which is causing them to be frustrated. Expressing the aggression, it then reduces the desire for it. Furthermore according to this hypothesis is not inborn but is a learned behaviour. This theory believing aggression is a learned behaviour goes against Freud 's belief that is an innate

Correspondingly Bandura, Berkowitz and others believed that The Frustration Aggression Hypothesis should be modified and from there research and findings they came up with a theory called The Social Learning Theory. The Social Learning theory argues that frustration does not always lead to aggression but creates a condition of readiness for you to cope in the threatening situation. The theory believes the individual will have a different response based on the ways they have learned to cope in situations in early life, for example the individual may cry, become silent, become recluse, may take his anger out on others and might speak to someone to help vent their aggression. In comparison an experiment undertook by Bandura (1965) demonstrated that aggressive responses can be learned by reinforcement or imitation by modelling which comes under Social Learning theory. Bandura used a blow up doll called a Bobo doll and observed nursery children 's behaviour as adults hit the doll aggressively with different things, when the children were then left in the room with the doll they began to emulate the actions they had seen the adults doing to the doll. Equally important this experiment was good to begin with but a weakness of the experiment was the children knew they had to hit the doll one report saying "mum look it’s the doll we have to hit" the children already knew they had to hit the