Institutional Aggression Flashcards
What is an institution?
-Institutions are forms of human organisation.(Military,school,church,prison,orphanages)
-Often those within an organisation will share behavioural characteristics.
-The main institution studied in psychology is aggression and why they are so violent.
-Psychologists put this down to situational and dispositional factors.
Dispositional factors.
-A dispositional factor is any factor involving ones personality.
-Dispositional factors would put aggression in prisons down to the internal characteristics of prisoners.
-internal characteristics consist of:
-high levels of anger
-Impulsivity
-Experience of using violence to solve problems
-This is the basis of the importation model.
-There may also be other personal factors that can lead to aggression(i.e. alcohol withdrawl, lack of education, gang involvement, drug addiction, being young)
Importation model
-The idea that aggression is imported into the prison environment from the outside as a result of the inmates personalities they take in from the outside world.
-Prisons typically gather a majority of violent individuals inside prisons (due to the link between criminality and aggression).
-This then fills up the whole prison and it becomes a hive of aggression full in a majority of violent individuals.
-Prisoners may bring their prior gang alliances into the prison.
-Gang involvement can cause instrumental violence and can be used as a tool to up their status and influence in prisons.
-Biological factors may also be imported, i.e those with high testosterone.
Instrumental violence
Violence that is used as a means to achieve a goal instead of an instinctive response to a threat. It is pre-meditated.
Situational factors
-Situational factors suggest aggression in prisons is down to external factors.
-Prisons are unpleasant and highly stressful places by design
-This makes prisons ‘criminogenic’ (the prisons environment is the cause of the aggression).
-physical factors are what makes prisons criminogenic (i.e. poor layouts, excessive noise, access to improvised weapons and CCTV blind spots)
-The lack of poor quality of facilities can also cause boredom and in turn frustration.
-attitude and quality of staff can also lead to aggression within prisons. (i.e. most staff are poorly trained and are unable to control aggressive situations in a less aggressive manner)
-Gender and race differences between staff and inmates can generate tension within the prison.
Deprivation model
-Proposes that depriving prisoners of their freedom, sense of safety, heterosexual relationships and autonomy lead to stress.
-This stress acts as a source of frustration and/or fear.
-This frustration and or fear can lead to expressive violence.
Expressive violence
Violence triggered by an unplanned emotional response to conditions the Individual is in.
Ethical issues
-Research into institutional aggression is socially sensitive as it can impact lives of prisoners.
-Research that suggests aggression in institutions is caused by a poor environment can lead to increased spending on facilities, however if evidence is found for dispositional factors it can be used by politicians as an excuse to cut spending on prisons.
-In reality, there has been more research to suggest dispositional factors have a larger role to play.
-This could also be highly damaging as in some countries where prisons have a majority of ethnic minorities in certain prisons, and research in said prison could lead to findings with harmful implications on the ethnic minorities studied.
Zimbardo(Aggression AO3)
-Zimbardo’s Stanford prison study supports the idea that institutional aggression is situational.
-Zimbardo’s findings have been established to be situational as he has each participant screened before hand for mental health issues, none of which found any issues.
-This suggests the aggression found in the Stanford prison study was solely down to situational powers.
Interactionalist model
-An interactionalist approach may be much more suitable for aggression in institutions.
-Evidence for exclusively dispositional or situational factors may be misleading, instead it could be that when a prisoner is brought into a poor environment with those underlying dispositional aggressive urges they may feel it is more necessary to demonstrate more of those aggressive behaviours.
-They may feel it is more necessary to be more violent in prison due to a lack of resources and a feeling of a need to complete, or all the other inmates being aggressive and feeling the need to respond equally in order to survive.
