The interplay of Nature and Nurture
After having heard of extreme forms of aggression as the World War II, you’d like to believe that aggressive behavior and violence would not have prevailed. But as noted, the homicide rates have in fact increased in the United States, particularly. Social psychologists have ever since been doing research over the years to find the source of aggression observed in human behavior and how can it be controlled, if not completely eliminated. One most common scenario where aggression is seen is road rage. People tend to get frustrated and violent very easily while driving in difficult conditions. When you have been driving around the parking lot searching …show more content…
Hostile aggression makes the person act aggressively towards another person to harm him/her and it is not goal-oriented or planned. When behavior is forced upon someone to cause harm/damage or destroy something, it is called violence. This essay consists of the different ideologies of the source of aggression, transcending from the evolutionary and biological theories to the socio-environmental influences and how it has come to change people’s attitudes.
There are several theories that suggest that there is a nature and nurture aspect of aggression. Aggression in the books of Ethology can be explained by Konrad Lorenz’s book On Aggression (1966) in which he explains the idea that human beings have innate aggressive traits that can be stimulated by external stimuli. Behavioral psychologists advocate that some predispositions of aggression are shared with lower animals that may have inherently been transmitted. The aforementioned can also be explained by observing animal behavior in their wildlife habitat. Animals find ways to survive in their dwelling spaces competing with their kind over food and shelter. This justifies the inherited tendencies in us as a means of self-defense (“Survival of the fittest”). In the Twentieth century, Sigmund Freud put forward the notion that