Aggression Desensitisation Dishinibition and Cognitive Priming Flashcards
What Is Desesitisation?
Desensitisation is the consequence of repeated exposure to violent or aggressive acts, particularly in the media. This causes individuals to be less empathic towards victims and increasingly accept aggression as the ‘social norm’, with reduced physiological responses from the sympathetic nervous system.
This idea was supported by Funk et al (2004), who was concerned about the increasingly common trend in the media to minimise the consequences of aggression.
What Is Dishinibition?
Disinhibiton describes the process whereby our restraints towards violence and aggression are lowered, through direct or indirect learning during the process of social learning.
The media is a particularly important influence due to rewarding aggressive behaviour and minimising its negative consequences.
This results in new social norms and attitudes towards aggression being developed.
What Is Cognitive Priming ?
Huesmann (1998) suggests that ‘cognitive priming’ describes the idea that, through exposure to a repeated number of aggressive acts being rewarded/vicariously reinforced (SLT), we develop a mental framework to make predictions about how aggression will ‘play out’ in the real world.
The subsequent changes in memory means that we are automatically cognitively primed to anticipate the consequences of aggression.
This was demonstrated by Greitemeyer (2006), who found that male participants who’d listened to aggressive songs featuring derogatory comments about women, behaved more aggressively towards a female confederate, compared to those who’d heard gender-neutral lyrics. This suggests that the media may cognitively prime audiences to develop an increasing tolerance
towards violence.
evidence supporting the idea of desensitisation and the role it plays in transforming social norms about aggression.
For example, Krahé (2011) demonstrated that individuals who have a history of regularly viewing aggressive acts on TV, experienced more positive arousal and less anxious arousal when watching examples of aggressive media in a laboratory experiment, compared to those without such regular viewing.
This suggests that desensitisation may be a precursor of disinhibition, overriding the innate reaction towards aggression of increased activity in the autonomic sympathetic division, which usually produces unpleasant symptoms such as increased heart rate and nervous laughter.
understanding of cognitive priming may increase the effectiveness of treatments tackling the increasing rates of disinhibition towards aggression,
For example, Bushman and Anderson suggested that regularly watching violent media reinforces the cognitive scripts within the brain, as well as causing permanent changes within our memory of such events where we sympathise less with the victims and minimise the event’s emotional significance.
By challenging these cognitive hostile attribution biases and minimalisation, we are more likely to combat these changing social norms towards aggression.
Cartoon violence is a useful example of how neither social learning theory, nor disinhibition and desensitisation can form complete explanations of how children learn violence.
For example, most children understand that it is not possible to punch someone so that their eyes burst out of their sockets.
Instead, as Krahe suggested, children observe that these aggressive acts are not punished, and therefore prepare their own cognitive scripts, through the process of cognitive priming, about what is socially acceptable behaviour.
