REFER TO THE FOLLOWING FILM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxR3krMAw8c

Define HUMAN AGRESSION

1. How does this film connect or relate to the origins of human aggression? How does the film correlate to the Etext below? Does it contradict any specific assumptions that we know today about Human Aggression?

2. what new material covered in the film added to the importance surrounding the topic of Human Aggression? What are some of the origins of Human Aggression and how can they impact us?

3. How does this information connect to our daily life experiences from an early age to adulthood? How do such experiences shape who we are as individuals?

References

Culture and Aggression

Cultures vary dramatically in howand how muchtheir members aggress against each other. We can see this variation across societies and across specific groups, or subcultures, within a society. Comparisons Across Societies The United States has enjoyed recent dramatic decreases in its rates of violent crimes, but it continues to be an exceptionally vio-lent country (see Table 11.1). Its murder rate is one of the highest among politically stable, industrialized nations, far worse than the rates for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and much of Western Europe. However, several countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas have worse rates than the United States. d Figure 11.1 illustrates some of the variation in homicide rates around the world. Murder rates tend to be much higher in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Southern and Middle Africa than in other regions in the world (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011) (see d Figure 11.2). A variety of factors contribute to this tendency, including poverty, drug trafficking, availability of guns, political and social unrest, and so on. Countries with wide disparities in income have murder rates almost four times greater than societies with more equal income distribution. Another difference across countries concerns how individualistic or collectiv-istic cultures tend to be. As discussed throughout this book, individualist cultures place more emphasis on the values of independence, autonomy, and self-reliance, whereas collectivist cultures place greater emphasis on the values of interdepen-dence, cooperation, and social harmony. Gordon Forbes and others (2009; 2011) hy-pothesized that individualist cultures, which are less concerned with social harmony and the avoidance of open conflict, are most likely to have a relatively high rate of aggression. To examine this idea, they asked college students in China (a highly col-lectivistic culture) and the United States (a highly individualistic culture) to answer questions about how they would likely respond in a particular conflict situation. The researchers found that men in the United States tended to be significantly more likely to advocate overt aggressive responses compared to men in China; the women tended not to differ in their responses across culture. A more recent study involving 15 countries found that countries high in individualism were associated with greater frequency of school violence (Menzer & Torney-Purta, 2012). In addition, Yan Li and others (2010) found that within a sample of Chinese adolescents, those who were more likely to endorse values associated with individualism tended to be more ag-gressive than were adolescents who more strongly endorsed collectivism values. Similarly, in both the United States and Thailand, the more partici-pants saw themselves as independent from others, the more likely they were to report being aggres-sive in consumer interactions, such as by "being nasty" or "telling off" a salesperson (Polyorat et al., 2013). It is important to note, however, that collectivist cultures are not immune from aggres-sion and violence. For example, murder rates in India and Korea (relatively collectivistic cultures) tend to be much higher than in the United King-dom or France (relatively individualistic cultures).

Violence and Anti Social Behavior

What is aggression? In everyday conversation, some people may describe a salesperson who tries really hard to sell merchandise as "aggressive." The salesperson does not, however, want to harm potential customers. Most social psychologists define human aggression as any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed.11 This definition includes three important features. First, aggression is a behavioryou can see it. Aggression is not an emotion, such as anger (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of emotion). Aggression is not a thought, such as mentally rehearsing a murder (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of cognition). Second, aggression is intentional (not accidental), and the intent is to harm. For example, a dentist might intentionally give a patient a shot of anesthetic (which hurts!), but the goal is to help rather than hurt the patient. Third, the definition stipulates that the victim wants to avoid the harm. Thus, again, the dental patient is excluded because she or he is not seeking to avoid the harm (in fact, the patient probably booked the appointment weeks in advance and paid to have the dental work done). Suicide and sadomasochistic sex play are also not included because again the victim actively seeks to be harmed. Note that behaviors that are intended to harm others are still acts of aggression even if they don't actually harm them. For example, if a person shoots a gun at you but misses, it is still an act of aggression. It is useful to distinguish among various forms and functions of aggression. By "forms" we mean how the aggressive act is expressed, such as physically (e.g., hitting, kicking, stabbing, shooting) or verbally (e.g., yelling, screaming, swearing, name calling). In displaced aggression, a substitute aggression target is used.12 For example, a man is berated by his boss at work but does not retaliate. When he gets home, he kicks his dog or yells at a family member instead. Different forms of aggression can be expressed directly or indirectly. In direct aggression any behavior intended to harm another person who is motivated to avoid the harm displaced aggression any behavior that intentionally harms a substitute target rather than the provocateur direct aggression any behavior that intentionally harms another person who is physically present indirect aggression any behavior that intentionally harms another person who is physically absent aggression, the victim is physically present; in indirect aggression, the victim is absent. For example, physical aggression can be direct (e.g., hitting a person in the face) or indi-rect (e.g., burning his house down while he is away). Likewise, verbal aggression can be direct (e.g., screaming in a person's face) or indirect (e.g., spreading rumors behind her back). Males are more likely than females to use direct aggression, whereas females are more likely than males to use indirect aggression.13 Aggressive acts may also differ in their function or motivation. Consider two ex-amples. In the first, a husband finds his wife and her lover together in bed. He grabs his rifle from the closet and shoots and kills them both. In the second, a "hit man" uses a rifle to kill another person for money. The form of aggression is the same (shooting and killing victims with a rifle); however, the motives appear quite different. In the first example, the husband is probably motivated by anger. He is enraged when he finds his wife making love to another man, so he shoots them both. In the second example, the "hit man" is motivated by money. The "hit man" probably does not hate his victim. He might not even know his victim, but he kills the person anyway for the money.