Why Do People Engage In Aggression

Chapter 2: A Social Psychological Approach to Interpersonal Aggression

This chapter begins to describe what aggression is and the motives of aggression. The book opens up with, “a social psychological approach focuses on the situational factors that lead to aggression” (Van Hasselt & Hersen, pg. 9). Those situational factors include the current conditions instead of what happened in the past. There are many ways to understand the concept of aggression and it can be used in various ways. The authors describe aggression as coercive meaning that someone will be harmed and the one being harmed is the target. One thing I learned from reading this chapter is that there is a huge difference between anger and aggression and the two should not be confused

The main three reasons why people engage in aggression is because in order to control the behavior of the target, for retribution or justice, and to promote or defend their self-image (Van Hasselt & Hersen, pg. 14). Control is one of the reasons why people involve themselves with aggression and that reason is because they like to be in charge of others. For example, the book talks about how parents want their children to behave. When a mother is trying to convince their child to go to bed but they do not want too, the mother has to be controlling of some sort. After trying to persuade the child to go to sleep and try giving rewards, the child still resists and does not want to listen. That is when the mother will begin to get angry and start yelling and becomes controlling. She uses the tactic of go to bed or not television tomorrow. This will make the child want to go to sleep right away because the child will definitely will want to go to bed so they can still watch television the next day. Some children tend to be difficult and not listen to their parents but this give the parents a chance to be controlling but not too aggressive since that can lead to child abuse (Van Hasselt & Hersen, pg. 14). Another reason why people tend to engage in aggression is retribution. Retribution is basically like revenge, when someone does something wrong to us we feel the need to give that right back to the person who wronged