Chapter 13 Of Textbook Flashcards
(16 cards)
general aggression model
A broad approach to understanding the causes of aggression through a focus on situational factors, construal factors, and biological and cultural contributions.
Hostile aggression
Behavior intended to harm another person, either physically or psychologically, and motivated by feelings of anger and
hostility.
Instrumental aggression
Behavior intended to harm another person in the service of motives other than pure hostility (such as attracting attention, acquiring wealth, or advancing political or ideological causes).
dehumanization
The attribution of nonhuman characteristics and denial of human qualities to groups (generally to groups other than one’s own).
culture of honor
A culture defined by its members’ strong concerns about their own and others’ reputations, leading to sensitivity to
insults and a willingness to use violence to avenge any perceived slight.
rape-prone culture
A culture in which rape tends to be used as an act of war against enemy women, as a ritual act, or as a threat against women to keep them subservient to men.
inclusive fitness
According to evolutionary theory, an individual’s reproductive success, which ensures the transmission of an individual’s genes to future generations.
precarious manhood hypothesis
The idea that a man’s gender identity, which significantly involves strength and toughness, may be lost under various conditions and that such a loss can trigger aggressive behavior
reactive devaluation
The tendency to attach less value to an offer in a negotiation once the opposing group makes it.
restorative justice
the process of having perpetrators of harm take responsibility and apologize to those they’ve harmed and for those individuals to express their grievances.
Describe the culture of honor, and provide two pieces of evidence that such a culture exists in the U.S. South. What might be the origin of these cultural tendencies?
A culture of honor, such as the one in parts of the U.S. South, is characterized by strong concerns regarding reputation. Acts of aggression or violence may be used to avenge insults or other threats to one’s honor. According to research covered in this chapter, homicides resulting from perceived insult are more common in the South than in the North, and people from the South have been found to react with greater emotion when insulted. There are no differences in the rates of other types of crimes between the North and South. Cultures of honor are believed to grow out of societies that rely on animal herding as a main source of income, in which a herder’s entire livelihood would be lost if someone stole the herder’s animals.
According to the research described in this chapter, what kinds of attitudes and behaviors are more likely among men who dehumanize women?
Men who show faster response times to pairings of the concept of “woman” with animal-related words, indicating implicit dehumanization, are more likely to report a willingness to sexually harass and rape women and to believe that women sometimes deserve to be raped.
Suppose you’re the warden at a prison and can select the temperature setting for the master prison thermostat. The thermostat doesn’t have enough settings, forcing you to choose between an uncomfortably cold setting and an uncomfortably hot setting. Which should you choose, and why?
Given the strong connection between hot temperatures and aggressive behavior, you may want to set the thermostat a bit too cold rather than too hot. If the temperature is too hot, the prisoners might start to exhibit increasingly aggressive behavior (due, perhaps, to attributing their discomfort to their fellow inmates rather than to the prison’s temperature), which could result in more fights and potentially spiral into a prison riot. It would be safer, at least in terms of levels of aggression, to err on the side of the prison being too cool.
Sometimes people respond to social rejection with physical aggression. How does the fundamental nature of our need for social connectedness help explain this tendency?
Humans are an inherently social species and have evolved a fundamental system to maintain social connectedness, which probably aided our early survival. Because social rejection was a kind of death sentence, we have a basic aversive response to it that activates a threat defense system. This system triggers responses normally cued by physical threats, such as surges in stress hormones, aroused fight-or-flight patterns, and increased defensive aggressive tendencies.
Suppose a friend said to you, “Well, men are just biologically hardwired to be more aggressive than women.” How would you respond? What nuances might this perspective miss?
First, women do exhibit aggression but in different ways than men do. Women more commonly express relational aggression, which involves emotional rather than physical forms of harm, such as spreading rumors and damaging others’ reputations. Second, although some biological factors dictate gender differences in aggression, such as testosterone levels and overall size and strength, cultural factors also play a role. From a very young age, boys and girls are treated differently, and aggressive behavior is more encouraged among boys than among girls. Thus, any gender differences in physical aggression may not be purely biologically determined but may be encouraged by cultural values as well.
What kinds of strategies have been shown to be most effective for reducing conflict and promoting peace, and why?
Face-to-face communication involving respectful dialogue and complex reasoning has been shown to facilitate conflict resolution by encouraging participants to find common ground and overcome misperceptions of the their opponents. It can also be helpful to understand that violence is often motivated not by bloodlust but by a genuine sense of moral obligation, misguided as it may be; failure to recognize the motivation for violence can lead to ineffective military interventions. Formal and informal reconciliation processes involving confession, apology, taking responsibility, and making reparations have been shown to be highly effective; for example, crime victims who participate in restorative justice programs report fewer thoughts of revenge.
