Lab Models of aggression Flashcards
Lab tests
Teacher/ Learner
Invented by Buss, 1961 – Participants playing the role of a teacher to another (fake) participant (in another room) and uses electric shocks to “punish” incorrect answers.
Cover story - Research is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The intensity and duration of the shock given to the learner following an incorrect response are left to the discretion of the teacher, and are examined as alternative measures of aggression.
-Given that aggression is defined as behaviour which has the intent to do harm, a question is raised as to effects of the cover story used in the teacher/learner paradigm.
-If subjects believe and act according to the cover story, then their goal is not to harm, but to teach.
Lacks construct validity - Subjects may believe that they are teaching the learner, while experimenters believe subjects are motivated to harm others by their aggressive behaviour, it’s not measuring what you think (Orne, 1962)
-Positive correlation has been found between self-ratings of altruism and the intensity of shocks administered to the learner (Baron & Eggleston, 1972).
Thus, the greater the desire to help the learner, the greater the level of shocks they administered
Essay
Berkowitz, Corwin, and Heironimus (1962).
Subjects and a confederate are asked to write short essays and are then asked to evaluate each other’s essays by delivering electric shocks.
Subjects are required to give at least one shock to the confederate, but are given the choice to give up to 10 shocks.
The confederate first evaluates the subject’s essay and can be programmed to give any number of shocks.
Subjects are then asked to evaluate the confederate’s essay, which is prewritten and is the same for all subjects.
Typically, subjects give the confederate an evaluation that is similar to the one given to them.
The measure of aggression is the number of shocks delivered by subjects.
-different rooms so that any noxious stimulus that is administered is done at a distance.
However, aggressive episodes in real life typically, involve close proximity and bodily harm involves physical contact between harm-doer and victim.
-Milgram (1963) found that research participants required to place the hand of a confederate on a plate that delivered noxious stimulation were quite reluctant to do so. Of course, we would want to investigate both kinds of situations, but if only one is the focus of research it would have to be concluded that the experiments under-represent the construct of aggression.
Competitive Reaction Time Game
Taylor (1967)
Subjects are paired with a confederate and are told they should react by pushing a telegraph key when a signal light is turned on.
The person who reacts more slowly loses on that play of the game and receives a shock.
The intensity of shocks that the other player will receive if he loses is preset by each player before the game.
There is no opponent and the series of wins and losses were standardized as a means of provoking
aggression in the participant
No cover story - responses of subjects can more plausibly be interpreted as intending to harm the
other player.
- Construct validity enhanced by findings that subjects identified as highly aggressive in everyday life set higher shock levels for the other player and tended to be unresponsive to changes in settings by the other player.
- Nevertheless, like the other paradigms the focus appears to be on defensive reactions to unprovoked attacks by another person.
It is argued that the first three paradigms under-represent the construct of aggression because they deal only with situations of retaliation and because research participants are given no choice other than physical forms of harm-doing as a means of responding to attacks
Bobo Modeling Paradigm
Bandura, 1961/63
Typically, young children are given the opportunity to observe an adult, who approaches Bobo and makes hostile comments, hits, throws, pucnhes and kicks Bobo.
In some instances, another person enters the room and rewards the model for good behavior with a candy bar. “frustration phase”. The children are then placed in a room with the same props and their behavior is observed.
Children imitate an adult model’s aggressive behavior if reinforced.
Hicks (1968a), children observed a model receive praise, condemnation, or no evaluation from another adult for aggressive behavior directed toward Bobo. The children exhibited the most imitative aggression when the model had been praised and showed the least imitation when the model had been condemned
Is the child’s imitative behavior “aggression.”?
-Tedeschi, Smith, and Brown (1974) aggressive response is either a behavior that does harm or behavior where harm was intended. There are no reports in the literature of any damage done to Bobo either by models or by children.
-The Bobo doll springs back upright when it is hit and there is a strong possibility that the children saw it as a game rather than anything else. There is no intent to harm in rough and tumble play and there is no evidence that young children intend to harm Bobo in the experiments. Therefor it is questionable whether the behavior studied in Bobo modeling experiments is aggression.
Point Subtraction
Aggression Paradigm
Cherek, 1981
Participants are seated at a computer and told that
pressing a particular button will earn them a sum of money (usually 10 cents or equivalent). Alternatively, they can press a second button to deduct the same sum from another participant supposedly playing the same game in a different room.
An on-screen counter displays their running total, and allows them to see when their opponent has deducted 10 cents from their pot. In fact, subtractions are made on a predetermined basis by the computer. The outcome (aggression) variable is therefore simply the number of presses of the participant’s own subtraction button
+participant is not forced to respond aggressively (they could simply continue hitting their earn button),
-no non-aggressive way to interact with the opponent.
-The problems of (apparent) distance between aggressor and target, are found here, too.
Hot Sauce Paradigm
Lieberman et al. [1999]
Hot chili sauce administration is used as a measure of physical aggression.
In this procedure participants are required to determine the amount of hot sauce to be (purportedly) consumed by another person who allegedly does not like spicy foods and who has provoked the participant beforehand, usually by giving them a noxious juice sample,
+less likely to be interpreted as competitive
+ecologically valid as spicy food has been used in real world assaults [BBC News, 2001] and child abuse cases [Galletta, 2002].
+Convergent validity - correlation between amount of hot sauce and both the overall and physical aggression scores on the Buss and Perry [1992] Aggression Questionnaire.
- During debriefing that they allocated large amounts of sause because they did not like the target - vague! A more detailed analysis of motives would provide stronger evidence for the validity of this measure to assess intentional harm of another person.
- Retaliation
Bungled Procedure Paradigm
Russell et al. [1996, 2002]
Participants are given the opportunity to shoot at a human target with a pellet or paintball gun.
Aggression is operationalised as the power of the gun chosen multiplied by the number of pellets elected to be used to shoot at the target.
In reality, participants never actually shoot at the target, as they are told that there has been a mistake, that they are in fact in the control condition, and that they are not therefore required to shoot at the target.
Face validity, as many real world violent acts, such as homicide, involve firearms.
Not provoked beforehand, so responding under these conditions could be regarded as proactive (instrumental) aggression.
-only allows assessment of potentially aggressive intentions, as the actual aggressive behaviour never takes place.
-Participants perceive their behaviour as aggressive or are motivated by the desire to harm another person?
It was found that participants perceive this task as an entertaining - more important predictor of the supposedly aggressive responses than personality and other aggression measures.
-There was no relation between the physical aggression scale of the Buss and Perry [1992] Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) and the aggression measure.
-Real visible person, so many of the problems of distance between aggressor and victim are avoided.
However, protective gear and this could convey to participants that being shot at does not really cause any harm. Just as a Bobo doll is designed to be bashed, protective gear seems designed to be shot at. Participants are thus much more likely to regard their behaviour as play aggression or rough-and-tumble-play.
Experimental Graffiti
Norlander et al.’s [1998]
Attempt at a face-valid aggression paradigm that uses a
real-world behaviour as its outcome variable: physical damage to another’s property.
Unlike the paradigms discussed above, which focus on direct aggression (albeit often at a distance),
this method elicits an indirect form of aggression.
For example, damage to property has been found to be used aggressively by prisoners [Ireland, 1999] and spouses seeking revenge for infidelity [Archer, 2001].
Participants perform two tasks. First, they are provided with an illustration of ‘‘Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Paradise’’ and instructed to draw upon it. Judges then rate the amount of ‘‘graffiti’’ thus added, the degree of destruction caused, and any aggressive or sexual content.
Next, participants are provided with an illustration of ‘‘Samson and the Lion’’ (chosen for its ‘‘strongly aggressive character, which is intended to provoke
participants to exhibit aggressiveness’’ and instructed to tear apart the illustration into a number of pieces. Participants are then instructed to place all the pieces in an envelope that is half the size of the illustration. There is no time limit and the number of pieces produced is monitored as a dependent variable.
-discovered that women scored higher on elaboration than men, which made these authors wonder whether, at least for the female sample, scrawling graffiti was a creative expression. Do participants necessarily regard their behaviour as intentionally harmful to someone’s property?
Critisisms
Aggression is a particularly difficult phenomenon to study in the laboratory. It consists of behavior that most people evaluate as morally bad. They will not spontaneously
engage in nonstandard behavior (Adair, 1982). This is an important reason why experimenters provide cover stories. We would want research participants to generate their own reasons for harm-doing behavior and that actors believe that they are not under the surveillance of a third party (i.e., the experimenter). Ideally, such a paradigm should allow aggression to emerge spontaneously (proactive aggression) as well as following provocation (reactive aggression).
A shortcoming of laboratory aggression research is that it has maintained its distinct stimulus-response character. According to the General Affective Model of Aggression [Anderson et al., 1995] and the Cognitive Neoassociationist Model of Affective Aggression [Berkowitz, 1993} affect (e.g., anger, fear) and cognitions (e.g., hostile thoughts)
play important roles in mediating the relationship between any external stimulation (provocation, frustration, pain) and one’s behaviour (aggression). However, these are ignored in lab models
It’s not clear whether the negative affect that is produced by the provocations is maintained throughout experiments, as affect is only being measured straight after the provocation, but not prior to, during, or just after retaliation.
In summary, all the aggression paradigms discussed here have strengths and weaknesses.
The most common weakness are the cover stories used to disguise the real purpose of the studies, which often leads to serious confounds, such as changing the participants’ perceptions of the ‘‘aggressive’’ behaviour into either prosocial behaviour (such as teaching) or competitive behaviour (which may be superficially aggressive, but which involves no desire to just harm).
