 This is part two of Lecture 12. So we've now seen that there are several theories that can help us explain why people behave aggressively. And the bottom line is this. All people, all human beings have the capacity to become aggressive. Aggression is always sort of an option, something that we can demonstrate. Of course there's individual variations in the amount of aggression that people use, but it's something that all people can at times experience and also demonstrate. The crucial factor is, of course, and there we have it again, is the situation that people find themselves in. The situation really determines whether, when and where we express our aggressive tendencies. So let's now zoom into the situation. And we're going to start by talking about culture, because culture plays a major role in aggression. There's a big, huge variations across cultures in the levels of aggression. Some cultures are very aggressive and others are way less aggressive. And if a culture is very aggressive, we mean that it's basically societally appropriate to demonstrate aggression. Aggression is something that is just uncaptured in that culture. One very violent and very aggressive country is the United States. The United States is a very aggressive country. Also if you compare it to similar other countries like Canada, Australia, Western Europe, the United States is a very aggressive country. But also within the United States there's lots of variations in aggression, regional differences. And this basically has to do with a difference in culture of honour. So if there's in the southern parts of the US, there's this honour culture. And an honour culture is basically a sort of a social norm that condones and sometimes even encourages responding to insults with aggression. So it's very societally appropriate that when someone insults you, especially if you're male, then you should respond in an aggressive way. And if you don't do it, people laugh at you, this is ridiculous. If you don't show aggression, if you're being provoked. And provocation in itself is also a situational cue to become aggressive. Everybody, if you're being provoked, if someone pushes you or says something mean or you feel treated unfairly, we all become a little bit aggressive. So that's natural. But in a combination of a culture in which the norm states that you should behave aggressively as a response to being provoked, then this is even more so the case. So here you see in this graph, you see the results of a study in which a research participant was walking down a narrow hallway and a confederate bumped into this research participant and started calling them names. So let's imagine you're, for example, in a train or something, you're walking there and somebody bumps into you and also starts to provoke you and say very mean things. Then the researchers were interested in the response of the participants. So if this happens to you. And there were two things that they were interested in. It was the aggressive behavior. So is the participant behaving aggressively? And also what is going on with their testosterone levels? Are testosterone levels going up after being provoked or not? And they had two types of participants. They had Northern Studies students and Southern students. So they were basically born and grew up in either a culture of honor or not in a culture of honor. And you see a huge variation in this culture, the place in the region where they came from on both their behavior as well as their testosterone levels, showing that Southern students that grew up in a culture of honor were way more likely to aggress. You see almost about 80% I would guess from this graph of the students behaved aggressively and also that testosterone levels really increased a lot. So you see that even biochemically we respond differently as a response to the culture where we grew up. So that's one factor that is really important culture. A second factor is something that I think a lot of people don't realize is heat. If it's very warm, we become more aggressive. So warm temperatures and this is shown in many studies are actually related to with a higher likelihood for a violent crime. So here you see that if you hear on the on the X axis, you see the departure from the average local temperature. So if it's really compared to normal temperatures getting really hot outside, there's more violent crimes compared to when it's colder than usual. Also higher temperatures are associated with more physical attraction, more murders, more rapes, more riots. So across the board, the society gets more violent when heat increases. And this is actually a hidden risk factor of climate change. And this is something that researchers are really worried about because of course the temperature is going up for everyone. And we see that this is associated with with more more aggressive aggressive behavior in society. Also, of course, with climate change, not only the heat goes up so it gets warmer outside, but also the other circumstances gets worse. So we see that people become generally more uncomfortable and they experience more dangers. They become they have less resources and these are all risk factors of aggression. So just as heat, another factor that is associated with aggression is pain. And this is basically sort of similar to heat. If you're very uncomfortable, if you experience physical pain, then we are we are just have the tendency to basically lash out. So if we experience discomfort, then we are more likely to behave aggressively. And this is, for example, shown in a study in which participants were asked to place their hands in water. And in one condition, this water was really, really cold, like painfully cold. And for the other group of participants, the water was at room temperature. So they were asked to have their hands in this bucket of water. You can do so for a couple of seconds. That's perfectly fine. But if you go on a little bit longer, then it gets really painful. And then while they were having this hand in a bucket of water, they were giving the opportunity, the option to hurt a stranger by delivering harmless, but still painful electrical shocks to other participants. A person they didn't know. So it was didn't make any sense to do so. There was nothing to gain, but they were just giving the option to aggress. And then the results show that participants that were in pain, having their hand in this ice water, were more likely to use this option and behave aggressively. Then it's important to note that this is not only the case for a physical pain. It's also the case for psychological pain. We know that if people psychologically suffer, especially if they feel lonely, if they feel excluded, they are way more likely to use aggression. And sometimes even very extreme forms of aggression. So here you see a map of the United States with high school shootings across the United States. And this is a map since 2009, where the very famous shooting at Columbine High School took place. And high school shootings is still something that is happening a lot in the U.S. And these are, of course, shootings that are done by students. And at high schools, oftentimes very lethal, killing many other students, also often killing themselves after this act. Extreme forms of violence and aggression. And if you look at all these school shootings, and these are 37 high school shootings since 2009, you definitely do see a pattern. And in general, what you see is that actually all of these murderers are males. So this is in line with what we saw in the first part of the lecture, that males are more likely to commit murders than females. So in this case, it was only males. And all these males had some kind of grievance. Most of the time, they were loners, they had very poor social network. A lot of them were bullied, a lot of them were socially excluded from the group. And sometimes there's even, and this is something that happens a lot, that other children that did survive the attack sometimes didn't even know that this kid was at their school because they felt like they were so invisible. And these were people that were really experiencing extreme forms of psychological pain, which is of course in no way an excuse for their behavior, but it can explain. And it's also sort of something that we should be very aware about, that having undergoing like this social exclusion and bullying can have very serious consequences, not only for the individual, but also for the group that this person lives in. Of course, one factor that all these people also have in common is having access to guns. In the United States, it's really easy to, or really easy, relatively easy to get your hands on a gun, which might also explain why the United States is such an aggressive country because we know that having a gun around makes people more violent and more aggressive. This is called the weapons effect. So also if you, for example, have a flag of a gun in your room, this will affect your behavior. And this has also been studied in having participants do certain tasks and then just having sort of a poster of a gun present that increased their violent tendencies. It's also demonstrated in a study in which college students were first made angry. So they were provoked in a way. And then they were taking place in a room in which there was either a gun lying around. It was not an actual gun, it was a fake gun, but still it was lying around there. Or just another object, a sort of more neutral object. And then they were given, again, they were given the option to hurt another person. And here you see what happened. So here you see, again, they were given the option to deliver shocks to another participant. And if there was a gun in the room, they were way more likely to apply these shocks and also give these shocks for a longer period of time. So this is something that's very important to keep in mind, that just seeing guns already increases violent thoughts and also aggressive behaviors. So the next factor that's also something that's very interesting and studied a lot is media. Because of course in the media there's also guns, a lot of guns, and also a lot of aggressive behaviors. And research actually shows that by the age of 18, American kids have seen 200,000 violent scenes of which 40,000 murders. They were basically, they were seeing murders all the time at television at a very, very young age. And if you look at some other figures in a lot of television programs, the majority of television programs actually contain violence. It's often connected to humor, violence and humor. A lot of times the perpetrators are attractive people, so very nice models. And in the majority of the cases the violent acts or the crimes go unpunished. So this basically gives the viewers indirectly a message that violence and aggression is very normal, it's conducted by attractive people, it's funny and it will go unpunished. So this is basically something that we are learning while we're watching television. So will this also actually lead to more aggressive behavior? And there's quite some research done on that. And one of my favorite studies is a field experiment that is conducted in Belgium. And this was a study done at a mill of teenagers of a Belgian reformatory, which is a youth detention center or correctional facility. And these boys were already, you know, they were not very modest boys. They were already having these more aggressive tendencies. And before the experiment their level of aggression was measured. This is called a pre-measure of aggression. Then the boys were divided into two different groups. Both groups started to watch movies, fun for these kids. They watched five movies in total, one movie every day for five days in a row. And for one group of these boys, these were violent movies, so movies containing violence. And for the other group they were non-violent movies and they were showing these movies. And after that they were again observed and aggression was measured again. So this is called a post-measure of aggression. And the researchers were interested in differences in aggression, pre and post. So was there a difference in showing aggressive behaviors if you've seen violent movies? So let's look at the results here. And I think it's pretty, the picture is pretty clear. So the darker bars, the more orange bars is the pre-measure. So you see there's no difference there for the boys in the violent and non-violent group, which makes sense. It was just a random distribution among the conditions. And then for the boys that watched the violent movies for five days in a row, definitely their amount of aggressive behaviors increased. So you see that they become more violent after watching these violent movies. For the other group actually they become a little less violent. This difference is not whopping, but still for these boys it's interesting. So if you have them watch non-violent movies, which is actually quite rare because a lot of movies do contain violence, they become a little bit more chill and less likely to show aggression. So this is quite clear evidence that watching violent movies affect your behavior. And also longitudinal studies confirm that watching violence on TV predicts higher levels of violent behavior. Even years later, so even for children who watch a lot of violent TV, they grow up into more aggressive adults when they are later on. Of course, here's also a problem with cause and effect because it may also be the case that children that are very interested in aggression are more likely to watch aggressive movies in the first place. So they are more attracted to these violent movies. So that might also have something to do with it, but still there's also quite some experiments like the one I just showed you that really demonstrated a causal link between watching violence on TV and becoming more violent. So this is something that also I as a mother am pretty concerned about when I see my boys watching television. And this effect, this is all about watching television, pretty old-fashioned, right, who watches television these days. This effect is actually even more pronounced when it comes to playing violent video games. And the reason why this is the case is that if you play a violent video game, you're actively involved. You're the one doing the shooting. And this is actually affecting your behavior way more. So as you see here, this is sort of a summary of what happens if you repeatedly play violent video games where you are the one, for example, shooting the bad guys. You see that across the board people become more aggressive. So you see that aggressive attitudes increase, so people think aggression is more appropriate. You see more aggression in your world, so more aggressive perceptions, more aggressive expectations. You expect people to behave aggressively, more aggressive behavioral scripts, so you think that aggression is more common and more likely to occur in everyday behavior. And aggressive desensitization, which means that aggression just doesn't impact you so much anymore. You're used to aggression around you. So across the board there's evidence that this can lead to an increased aggressive personality if you play a lot of violent video games. There's a bot here because it seems that there's also huge individual differences in this effect. So it's especially the case for vulnerable children that are, for example, also exposed to violence in their social environment. So it's not the case that it has the same impact on everyone, but especially if you are already vulnerable, if you are also suffering from lower self-esteem, if you're in an environment that is hostile, that is unsafe, then your aggression can definitely increase due to this playing of violent video games. So we're nearing the end of this lecture, but we cannot stop, of course, before we talk about ways to reduce aggression because in the end, of course, we now know why aggression occurs, which circumstances aggression occurs, but we want to stop it, right? We want to live in a happy society where people don't use aggression so much. So let's see if there's ways to reduce aggression. The first way, the first idea and a very, you know, an idea that's very popular also among parents, like myself, is the idea that if a child, for example, behaves aggressively, what we should then do is punish them. So we should use aggression as a response to aggression. So do you think this helps? I hope you can, I can just hear you say the answer. Of course, it doesn't help. So it's a very natural idea that's, and something that has happened a lot, especially, you know, back in the days where spanking and using physical punishments was even more, was more normal and today that's, of course, no longer the case is actually even not legal anymore to physically punish your children. And there's many reasons for that and I think you can all guess them by now. So if you show aggressive behavior as a response to aggression, you're basically just learning your kids how to deal with aggression. So the next time someone behaves aggressively to the child, they know, hey, I know what to do. If someone punches me, I should also punch back because that's what my mommy told me. So if I get hurt, I should just hurt someone else. So no, if you model aggressive behavior, this will not help. It will only increase aggressive tendencies. So what does help? Now, this is something we actually already talked about in lecture six when we talked about cognitive dissonance. That's threats of mild punishments. So, you know, responding in a way saying, you know, this is inappropriate behavior, you shouldn't do so, please don't do it anymore. So using mild threats or mild punishments that works way better. And also what works very well is ignoring the negative behavior and trying to reinforce positive behavior, which is definitely easier said than done. I can say as a mother of three boys, it's really difficult to ignore bad behavior, but this is something that we should aspire to as parents. Okay, so what else? If you feel aggressive tendencies yourself, maybe you should just sort of blow off some steam. If you feel very frustrated, very aggressive, maybe you should, you know, watch a violent K-1 fight on television to get it out of your system or maybe a molester car at the dump somewhere. Will this help? Will this help us get rid of those feelings? It's a very popular idea. It's the idea of catharsis, that just, you know, letting it out of your system, using this aggression, using aggression as a response to aggressive impulses that should solve it. But there's a lot of research that shows it does not work. Actually, using aggression will only increase this aggressive tendencies. Also, watching aggression increases aggression, so if you watch aggression on television, you will also become more aggressive. And even using aggression towards the source of your frustration, so if someone frustrates you and you respond aggressively as a response, this will also not help. It will not help in reducing aggression. It can also lead to the experience of dissonance. So thinking to yourself, yes, I punched him, but he had it come in and, you know, you start desensitizing even more. So giving in to an aggressive impulses doesn't work, even though it's sometimes very appealing. Okay, so now we've seen a lot of things that doesn't work. What does work? Mindfulness. A mindful approach. That definitely works. So you should not, you know, ignore these feelings. You should acknowledge that you have these feelings and sort of embrace them, and then if you sort of let these feelings pass by, then you can let them go. And this is really, really hard, but it definitely, there's a lot of research showing that mindfulness is related to less aggression. So if you experience aggressive tendencies, you should make sure, sometimes it works better to first distract yourself a little bit to get rid of this very intense period of anger and try to deal with this emotion. So what else can help is writing it down, making sure you distance yourself a little bit from the experience. And then you should work on conflict resolution. So oftentimes the source of frustration is another person. And you should talk to this person about your feelings of being hurt. Also try to take responsibility for your side of the conflict and, yeah, try to work it out. And what we also know is that you should actually start from a very young age helping children to deal with their feelings of frustration and anger. And there's actually experiments done in primary school children in which they are taught how to deal with feelings of anger. And this works very well in developing these skills of empathy and these skills of sort of reducing aggression and letting go of feelings of anger. So this is the end of the lecture. I hope you enjoyed.