Ethological Explanations of Aggression

11 Key excerpts on "Ethological Explanations of Aggression"

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  The Social Psychology of Aggression

  3rd Edition

  • Barbara Krahé(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 12 of this volume). Given that there is little support for Lorenz’s ethological model as an explanation of human aggression, you may wonder why it has been presented here at all. The reason is that it still remains widely popular in everyday discourse when people suggest explanations, and indeed cures, for aggression. Enabling readers to participate in this discourse well-equipped with critical arguments to challenge popular myths about aggression is one of the goals of the present volume.

  The sociobiological view: Aggression as a product of natural selection

  Sociobiology is concerned with analysing the biological foundation of social behaviour on the basis of the evolutionary principle of natural selection . This approach also offers an explanation of aggression in both humans and animals, focusing on the long-term, “ultimate” mechanisms that shape and promote aggression through the generations. Rooted in Darwin’s (1859) theory on “the origin of species”, evolutionary theory is based on the idea that in order for a behaviour to be genetically transmitted within a species, it has to be adaptive . Behaviours are adaptive to the extent that they increase the chances of survival of the species as a whole in the environment in which it lives.

  sociobiology: discipline devoted to the study of the evolutionary basis of social behaviour.

  Concise presentations of the evolutionary thinking about social behaviour have been provided by Daly and Wilson (1994) and Buss and Shackelford (1997). Applying the principle of evolution through natural selection to the study of aggression, aggressive behaviour directed at fighting off attackers as well as rivals in mate selection is seen as adaptive in the sense of enhancing the reproductive success of the aggressor (Archer, 1995). Because they are better able to control access to female mating partners, the more aggressive members of a species are more successful in passing their genes on to the next generation, thus favouring the natural selection of aggressive behaviour. Their genetic make-up slowly spreads at the expense of less aggressive, and therefore less reproductively successful, members. However, aggression may be a potentially costly and maladaptive behaviour in certain cases. For example, attacking an opponent of superior fighting power entails the risk of being killed. Therefore, the functional mechanism seen as driving the evolution of aggressive behaviour is a cost–benefit calculus (Archer, 2009; Georgiev, Klimczuk, Traficonte, & Maestripieri, 2013). As it would be maladaptive to engage in aggressive behaviour when the risk of being overpowered and potentially killed by the opponent is high, it is functional from the point of view of reproductive success to withdraw from confrontations that involve an opponent of superior strength and fighting power.

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  Origins of Aggression

  • Willard W. Hartup, Jan de Wit, Willard W. Hartup, Jan de Wit(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Phylogenetic adaptation as determinants of aggressive behavior in man I R E N A U S E I B L -E I B E S F E L D T Max Planck Institute, Percha/Starnberg The last few years have witnessed lively discussions on the determi-nants of aggression. Attempts at understanding this phenomenon and at subsequently finding ways to control it have led to a variety of explanatory models: 1. The proponents of learning theory assume that aggressive behavior is learned; its roots lie in early childhood, where the indivi-dual's attempts to satisfy his demands by aggressive means are success-ful and are thus reinforced. In addition, social learning from a model plays an important part in the acquisition of aggressive behavior patterns (Bandura & Walters, 1963). 2. According to the frustration-aggression hypothesis, aggressive behavior is the result of deprivation experiences in early childhood. Since, in practice, such experiences never can be totally avoided, the development of aggressive behavior is just about inevitable (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939). 3. The drive model of Lorenz and Freud assumes an innate drive for aggression. This theory is also referred to as an instinct theory of aggression (Lorenz, 1963). In its wider version, the instinct theory of aggression assumes that phylogenetic adaptations preprogram aggressive behavior in various ways, the aggressive drive being just one possibility. Preprogramming occurs, for example, also on the receptor and motor levels. Since all these paradigms are built on observations and experiments, it seems strange indeed that some proponents of learning theory models insist upon their exclusive validity with such monistic vehemence. 28 Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt Must we regard the different interpretational models as incompatible? It seems more plausible to take into consideration all evidence and to construct an interactional model which does justice to various theoreti-cal frameworks.

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  Human Behavior and Public Policy

  A Political Psychology

  • Marshall H. Segall, Arnold P. Goldstein, Leonerd Krenser(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  To ask whether aggression is instinctive or learned is to accept a false dichotomy. As the following argument unfolds, it should become clear that aggressive behavior is learned, while the potential for its being learned has much to do with the biological predispositions of the human animal. Those behaviors that we define as aggressive—responses resulting in intentional harm to others—are, like any other behaviors emitted by an organism, subject to environmental control. In other words, they are learnable and, by implication, extinguishable. Like any other response, an aggressive response is likely to be strengthened when rewarded, and weakened when not. This is, of course, a very basic psychological statement, the validity of which is known by those who have taken only one course in psychology. But it bears reiteration. Having stated this basic principle, however, we have merely begun the argument. The next step must be to consider how aggressive responses come to occur and get rewarded in the first place. What 200 Human Behavior and Public Policy: A Political Psychology accounts for the very high probability of occurrence which in turn allows it to be rewarded? Since we know that aggression is an extremely common class of behavior, it seems very likely that it has a high probability of occurrence in advance of its being rewarded. This is indeed the case. During early childhood in every society, responses with aggressive components are very likely to occur and very likely to be rewarded. Basing my argument on this premise, I shall assert that the two keys to understanding human aggression, both of which are essential, are (1) its prepotency during infancy and (2) its socialization during childhood. 1. The prepotency of human aggression The human infant starts life with an incredibly wide behavioral potential, but it can actually produce a very narrow repertory of responses.

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  The War System

  An Interdisciplinary Approach

  • Richard Falk, Samuel S Kim(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  However, there are different causal variables of animal aggression. The heritability of aggressiveness in dogs and leghorn chickens has been demonstrated through selective breeding (Corning 1973). It is also argued that frustration is as much a source of aggression in animals as it is in children and adults (Berkowitz 1968b; Durbin and Bowlby 1968). The social conditions of rearing are also believed to influence the probability of aggression in "intra-species encounters in mice, cats, dogs, monkeys, and other animals" (Hinde 1973:99). Despite the differences in emphasis on the etiological variables of agonistic behavior, there is little doubt now that the causes of animal aggression are not as simple as the Lorenzians would have us believe and that the stimuli evoking aggressive responses can be ecological, social, experiential, genetic, hereditary, hormonal, and even psychological (perceptual). Can animal research shed light on human behavior in general and human aggression in particular? By repeatedly stressing our common origin with animals, the Lorenzians ignore the crucial fact that contemporary monkeys and apes are not the equivalents of human ancestors (Washburn and Hamburg 1973:64). Without direct fossil evidence for the evolution of behavior, we cannot make an inductive leap from contemporary primates to our hominid ancestors nor from the latter to contemporary man. Even in physiological attributes, contemporary man is unique. For his brain has "enlarged from roughly 500 cc 1.75 million years ago to about 1450 cc at present" (Holloway 1968:43)

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  The Psychology of Conflict and Combat

  • Ben Shalit(Author)
  • 1988(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  5 Origins of Aggression a nd Its Evaluatio n One should not discuss the payoff for aggression without some analysis of the theories describing the roots of aggression. Very roughly, there seem to be two major viewpoints about the origins of aggression. The first is ex- emplified by Freud (1933), Lorenz (1966), and Ardrey (1970 a;b), who view aggression as stemming directly from an innate need or drive of the organism. These authors differ in their view of the form that aggression takes, but are united in viewing it as resulting from a basic biological drive or state. The other approach is exemplified by Berkovitz (1974), Feshbach (1970), or Baron (1977), who view aggression as a response to external stimuli or conditions—a response acquired by and essentially related to the stimulus that triggered it. SELF-PERCEPTION AND INTERNAL DEMANDS Lorenz and Ardrey describe aggression in terms of its payoff. For both, aggression is behavior aimed at dominating the opponent—their emphasis is on the control aspect of aggressive behavior, rather than on the damage inflicted on the opponent. According to Ardrey, aggression does not necessarily involve physical violence; and much of Lorenz's descriptions of aggressive behavior are devoted to the control of the opponent by means of nonphysical cues. He shows that much physical violence is preferentially avoided, rather than engaged in. Lorenz distinctly states that there is no need for war in men—that there is no innate need to engage in violent behavior—but that there is a clear and innate need to dominate others. (These statements are selectively ignored by Montagu [1976] in his attempt to prove his anti-innate aggression argument.) Only when external conditions 57 58 Psychology of Conflict & Combat prevent or frustrate attempts to gain control or dominate—then and only then—are violent physical strategies of aggression resorted to.

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  Perspectives on Aggression

  • Russell G. Geen, Edgar C. O'Neal, Russell G. Geen, Edgar C. O'Neal(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Frequently cited examples would include the presence of a territorial intruder (O'Neal, Caldwell, & Gallup, 1976) or of a weapon (Berkowitz, 1969). It has been variously suggested that such a stimulus may serve as an ethological releaser to aggressive behavior patterns (Berkowitz, 1969) or as a discriminative stimulus (Hanratty, O'Neal, & Sulzer, 1972). A third way in which the environment may influence aggression is through the drive effects of an environmental condition such as noise, heat, or crowding. An arousing stimulus can serve to increase the probability of a prepotent aggressive response (Bandura, 1973) or increase responsiveness to aggressive cues (Berkowitz, 1969). The environment may also provide barriers and physical limits that affect the probability of aggressive behaviors. Ten violent criminals housed in separate cells would have very little opportunity to assault each other, but a bloodbath would be the probable result of assigning them all to the same cell. Physical barriers often serve as society's ulti-mate safeguard against aggression when other controls are found to be less than effective deterrents. Confinement, isolation, and crowding are often the result of environmental constraints and frequently influence the likelihood of aggressive encounters. In the case of aggression among humans, two additional processes may be cited which, in some situations, link environment with ag-gression. In an unfamiliar environment, especially in one that affords anonymity, norms that proscribe aggression may be less salient or their behavioral effects reduced (Zimbardo, 1969). The sanctions against norm violation (e.g., ruined reputation, social isolation, criminal ap-prehension) are not as strong as they are in a familiar setting or in one in which the individual's identity is known. Finally, aggressiveness may be influenced by what an individual believes to be the influence of a given environmental condition, whether that belief is valid or not.

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  Aggression in Humans and Other Primates

  Biology, Psychology, Sociology

  • Hans-Henning Kortüm, Jürgen Heinze, Hans-Henning Kortüm, Jürgen Heinze(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Fortunately, the influence of anger on our behavior is constrained by an-other mental mechanism, the emotion fear . So biology matters once again, but let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Aggressive acts are not al-ways influenced by strong emotions and can sometimes best be understood as resulting from “cold-blooded reasoning”. A criminal may, for example, decide in a sober state of mind to kill the witnesses of a crime in order to protect him-self from prosecution. But even this criminal’s cold-blooded reasoning could be understood as a cognitive process that is instrumentalized by the biological “whispering within” that tells him to do all he can to save his neck. What Theoretical Biology has to say on Aggression in Humans and Animals 25 II. The Meandering of Biological Thought on Aggression Compared to now, ethologists in the early 1960s had little quantitative infor-mation about animal fighting in natural environments. This made it easy for “cock-and-bull stories” to proliferate within the profession. One such story claims that animals would not intentionally kill members of the same species, and that their fighting would resemble a “fair contest” where opponents avoid inflicting injury on each other. With this story in mind, any lethal combat ob-served in cages had to be interpreted as an artifact of captivity. Lorenz (1963) was the most prominent representative of classical ethology who proclaimed an innate inhibition for animals to kill members of the same species. He had to admit, of course, that for Homo sapiens this inhibition fails to work properly. In Lorenz’s view humans kill each other because their innate adaptations got eroded in recent evolutionary times through a hypothetical process of “self-domestication”. This line of reasoning is utterly misleading because an inhibi-tion that does not exist cannot erode.

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  Social Psychology

  • Jeffrey H Goldstein(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  8 THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF AGGRESSION THE NATURE OF HUMAN AGGRESSION A DEFINITION OF AGGRESSION/ MEASUREMENT OF AGGRESSION/IS AGGRESSION AN INSTINCT?/ AGGRESSION AS SOCIAL BEHAVIOR THEORIES OF AGGRESSION FRUSTRATION-AGGRESSION THEORY, THEN AND NOW/SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY/DEINDIVIDUATION ODEINDIVIDUATION, ESCALATION, AND CHILD ABUSE OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WAR FRUSTRATION AS A CAUSE OF WAR/ PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY/CONFLICT RESOLUTION SUMMARY SUGGESTED READINGS THE NATURE OF HUMAN AGGRESSION Most of us are familiar with acts of aggression, either through personal experience or through the mass media. A report in The New York Times in 1973 indicated that 34 percent of adult women in one congressional district of New York City were victims of serious crimes in 1972. Even if we have not been so victimized, we may have engaged in hitting our siblings, spouses, or children, or have seen combat on the battlefield. We may have been involved in less direct, though no less damaging, acts of aggression, such as refusing food to someone hungry or failing to stop a fight in progress. A DEFINITION OF AGGRESSION Ever since psychologists became interested in studying human vio-lence, they have had difficulty in defining aggression. We will define human aggression as behavior whose intent is the physical or psycho-logical injury of another person. While this is less than an ideal definition, it is closest to the definitions commonly used in research. Among its difficulties are the exclusion of nonhuman targets of aggression and the fact that it is not at all easy to determine an aggressor's intentions. Nevertheless, we would probably want to exclude injury to organisms such as viruses and insects from our consideration, as well as accidental injuries. Note that the definition includes not only physical injury to others but psychological injury as well.

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  Love and Hate

  The Natural History of Behavior Patterns

  • Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 The Ethologist’s View of Aggression

  Advantages of Intolerance

  Animals of very many species fight their own kind, and man is no exception to this. On the contrary, his whole history is, among other things, a history of acts of violence, and this aggressive trait characterizes our own time. Even if we were to make a case for the view put forward in the first chapter of the social, friendly nature of man, we must not overlook his inclination toward antisocial behavior and intolerance; it is a fact we must come to grips with. We shall be solely concerned here with intraspecific aggression, that is, the remarkable fact that animals of a given species do fight their conspecifics. There is also aggression between species—predators attack their prey—but this we will leave aside for the moment. We shall confine ourselves to emphasizing implicitly that the two forms must be clearly distinguished. Intra-and interspecific often employ quite different motor sequences: a cat attacking a mouse behaves quite differently from when it is attacking a rival. These two basically different behavior patterns can be activated through electric stimulation of quite different parts of the brain.

  We emphasize the need to make this distinction because intra-and interspecific aggression are sometimes uncritically treated as the same, as for example in the discussion of Y. Z. Kuo (127 ), who succeeded in bringing up cats and mice to live peaceably together and who concludes from this that a harmonious communal life among men is possible. R. Dart (34 ) has attempted to explain the aggressiveness of modern man through the predatory way of life of his australopithecine ancestors. These apemen, who lived about 1.7 million years ago, killed their prey with antelope bones: it is this "aggressiveness" which is said to be the root of man's aggressiveness. Robert Ardrey (8 ) follows Dart's arguments. What both of them overlook is the fact that herbivores are by no means more peaceable than predators. Bulls attack other bulls. Cocks have even become symbols of aggressiveness.*

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  Biological Psychiatry

  • Edward Bittar(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 The Biology of Aggression PAUL F. BRAIN Introduction Aggression and Genes Aggression and Diet Aggression and Neural Systems Aggression and Hormones Aggression and Drugs Conclusions 103 104 106 107 108 110 111 INTRODUCTION The main problem with specifying the biology of aggression is knowing which phenomena the biological variables should be related to. Aggression is clearly a heterogeneous concept (Brain, 1984) in which biological variables, environmental factors, and social learning all play complex, intertwined roles. Violence is acom-Biological Psychiatry, pages 103-113. Copyright 9 2000by JAI Press Inc. All rightsof reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 1-55938-819-6 103 104 PAUL F. BRAIN plex phenomenon and one must specify the importance (and limitations) of genes, diet, neural systems, hormones, and drugs in its expression. Furthermore, as well as forming the basis of some clinical treatments, a knowledge of biological corre-lates may have some predictive value in assessing the risk of aggression in popu-lations of humans. It must also be maintained that individuals with greatly disor-dered biologies (e.g., brain tumors or endocrine disorders) cannot be regarded as wholly responsible for their actions, but the legitimate use of such claims in legal circles is often contentious. It should be self-evident that there are considerable dangers in seeking to equate all examples of human aggression to medical disor-ders. If a disordered biology has a role, it is only likely to be of relevance to some forms of interpersonal behavior, not group activities such as riots and war, which clearly have a largely sociocultural basis. It should be admitted at the outset that even focusing on particular expressions of aggression, such as assault, homicide, or rape, does not lead to simple associations with biological factors.

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  Biological Foundations of Emotion

  • Robert Plutchik, Henry Kellerman, Robert Plutchik, Henry Kellerman(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Part III THE BIOLOGY OF AGGRESSION This page intentionally left blank Chapter 9 BIOLOGICAL BASES OF AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR KENNETH E. MOYER ABSTRACT A model is proposed to account for aggressive behavior. The basic premise of this model states that there are, in the brains of animals and humans, specific neural systems for the various types of aggression. When these neural systems fire in the presence of a relevant target, aggressive behavior ensues. It has now been shown repeatedly that a cat with implanted electrodes will show a specific aggressive behavior, depending on what portion of the brain is stimulated. Humans who have electrodes implanted in their brains, for therapeutic reasons, have shown incipient rage when properly stimulated. The reaction occurs in spite of the fact that they are unaware of the stimulation. A variety of dysfunctions in the brain of humans increase irritability level and the expression of hostility. Some brain tumors, particularly in the temporal lobe, may be associated with increasing levels of aggression, from verbal aggression to homicidal rage. If the tumor is removed successfully, the patient regains his normal personality. Other brain dysfunctions producing a similar result include diffuse head injuries, caused by falls and automobile accidents, brain damage caused by rabies, encephalitis lethargica, and some kinds of epilepsy. Inhibition of the neural systems for aggression can be accomplished in several ways. There are neural systems that tend to block activity in their aggressive counterparts. Thus, it is possible to stimulate an enraged and threatening patient and make of him a rational, pleasant person. Although it may be a dubious therapy, aggressive behavior can be reduced by making lesions in parts of the aggressive neural system. Changes 219 EMOTION: Theory, Research, and Experience Volume 3 Copyright © 1986 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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