Social Psychological Theories of Aggression Essay Example for Free

Social Psychological Theories of Aggression Essay With increasing violence in the Big Brother House I have been asked to create a report that explains this violence occurring in the Big Brother House in terms of two or more social psychological theories.  In general the violence in the big brother house is escalating and theories need to be brought to the attention of the media bosses in order to explain this aggression. The violence does not need to be stopped as the house mates are not breaking any of the Big Brother rules behaving in this manner. Violence on this show can not be viewed as a negative aspect as it increases the number of viewers. However it does need to be explained logically. One explanation could be the Social Learning Theory.  In order for such learning to take place a person must observe persons behaviour and imitate this in the future. The concept of identification is also important as the individual is more likely to imitate some he/she identifies with, in this case it could be another house mate or perhaps previous contestants on the Big Brother show.  For this there are three stages  Ã‚  The Registration Stage, where the observer must pay attention to the model. The observers attention is influenced by characteristics of both the observer and the model. The Storage Stage is when the observer may code and organise the information in relation to any reinforces present, past experiences, expectation, relevance etc  Ã‚  And finally the Retrieval Stage is when the reinforcers determine whether the behaviour is imitated and the observers performance will be dependant on the persons ability to perform the act.  From this one idea would be that these contestants are just mimicking other house mates actions. This is one an idea but I believe it is that the new house mates are mimicking other years Big Brothers contestants. This is due to the fact that if you want to go onto Big brother you would like to become famous, and most of the time the most aggressive, avoidant, destructive contestants are the ones who get the most air time and incidentally are more widely known in society thereafter. There are many studies that support this view, of which one of the most astounding is that of Bandura et al 63 which was based on two groups of children where an experimental group observed an adult play aggressively with a 5 foot inflatable doll. The control condition observed an adult play properly in the room ignoring the doll completely. The findings from this study showed that the children from this experimental group showed significantly more verbal and physical acts of aggression than the control group, supporting evidence that they imitated the behaviour of the role model. On the other hand the children could have just copied the adults actions as it is a novel situation, or were unsure of how to play with the bobo doll and just followed the adults actions. Also with young children it would be hard to generalise the findings to adults, in particular our contestants. Not entirely supporting the views of learning, Banduras study shows learning still could be a contributing factor. This is because there are still many other ways of learning to be aggressive, for example learning from society, your family, and more often than not, the media. One attempt at showing how behaviours could be learnt from the media is from Manstead et al 95 in which he outlines these five variables;  1. If the observed behaviour is thought to be real it is more likely to be imitated. 2. If viewers identify with the aggressor then they are more likely to imitate.  3. If the aggressive behaviour is based on revenge it is more likely to be copied than aggressive behaviour based on achieving goals.  4. If the behaviour is seen to be just then it is more likely to be imitated.  5. Aggressive behaviour which is followed by punishment is less likely to be pursued.  With these five variables comes the proposition that acts of violence have to follow two other criteria to be considered as acts of violence;  1. People, human groups or living things (including animals with human characteristics) are physically harmed, restrained, barely escape death, injury, pain etc 2. Also that the harm is caused by or explained in terms of the behaviour of other people  So if the media is to blame why isnt all of society acting aggressive, and not just out housemates? The main answer is that most of the media (not including news bulletins which have around 1%) have between 37 and 80% non aggressive incidents within a typical programme, documentary or article.  This then means that the Big Brother contestants that are behaving aggressively see the same percentage of aggression within the media as the non-aggressive contestants. Which leads to the next question, why are they all not behaving quite similar? Well I believe there has to be an underlying factor that changes the level of aggression shown by different people, as we are all exposed to the same amount of violence in the media. I believe that comes in the form of relative deprivation. This proposes that the cause of a conflict is the unacceptable discrepancy between what people think they have a right to expect, and what people (given current social conditions) are actually able to obtain. In the case of the Big Brother aggression the relative deprivation theory offers an explanation which is based on the contrast between groups expected and actual access and prosperity to power. This is always seen in every Big Brother series as there are independent groups that form within the first week and then contrast on views with other groups of people within the Big Brother House. This is portrayed well over the television and the whole series and is sometimes used by the producers to increase conflict within the house which in turn then increases ratings. This is done by giving groups of people more access or the notion that they have more access to luxury goods for example alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate etc this then leads on to absolute deprivation (Gurr 70) where some groups of people are actually worse off than others within a proximity.