Social Flashcards
Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
This sees aggression being the consequence of frustration, defined as ‘an event or stimulus that prevents an individual from attaining some goal and its accompanying reinforcing quality.
Justified and unjustified frustration
Pastore distinguished between justified and unjustified frustration, arguing that it was mainly the latter that produced anger and aggression.
Pastore found that participants expressed much lower levels of anger when a bus with an out of service message - Justified frustration
Failed to stop at a bus stop than when a bus without this message failed to stop - Unjustified frustration
Displaced Aggression
When people are frustrated, they experience a drive to be aggressive towards the object of their frustration. If it is impossible to behave aggressively towards the source of frustration, this drive is inhibited.
Dollard assumed that aggression is sometimes displaced from the source of the frustration on to someone or something else.
A Revised Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
The revised Frustration Aggression Hypothesis argued that frustration is only one of many different types of unpleasant experience that can lead to aggression.
These unpleasant experiences create negative affects in the individual and it is this that triggered the aggression rather than frustration alone. Under this reformulation of the frustration aggression hypothesis, the nature of the frustrating event is less important than how negative is the resulting affect.
Evaluation Point: Aggression is not an automatic consequence of frustration
Aggressive behaviour may be only one possible response to frustration. An individual may respond to frustration with aggression if it has been effective for them before or if they have observed it being effective in others. Rather than frustration always leading to aggression, an individual learns to produce aggressive actions and also learns the circumstances under which they are likely to be successful
