John Dollard Summary And Analysis

John Dollard (1900 -1980), grew up in a very modest household, with his father being a railroad engineer and his mother a former schoolteacher (M.H Olson, 2011).He received his undergraduate from the university of Wisconsin in 1922, and his PhD in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1931 (Ewen, R.B, 1998). He studied psychoanalysis at the Berlin Institute in Germany (1931-1932), and taught Anthropology at Yale University. In 1935, he became a research associate at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale, and was further appointed research associate and professor of psychology in 1948. While at Yale he wrote many books, including one of his most recognized books named Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Ewen, R.B, 1998). He retired …show more content…
If frustration is a result of the occurrence of incompatible responses at the same time, it causes what is called conflict. Conflict is a state of increased tension. As the individual gets nearer to a goal, the tendency to approach the goal strengthens, this is referred to as gradient of approach. The tendency to avoid a negative stimulus strengthens as the individual comes closer to the stimulus is the gradient avoidance. A person is in an approach-avoidance conflict when oppositions between approach and avoidance tendencies, is aroused simultaneously by the same situation or thing. Avoidance-avoidance conflict occurs when there are two competing avoidance responses. Approach-approach conflict occurs when an individual must choose between two or more equally desirable options. In a situation where each alternative has both positive and negative qualities, double approach conflict …show more content…
For example, a person takes out his frustration from work on someone in the home. Displacement commonly concerns anger and frustration, but can also concern other feelings and impulses. It plays a role in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger and guilt are displaced and projected onto another. The scapegoated person is then persecuted with a conduit for his uncomfortable feelings, and pleasurable feelings of piety and self-righteous indignation.
Frustration aggression hypothesis, infers that aggression is the result of blocking, or frustrating, a person’s efforts to attain a goal. This hypothesis is induced from common sense observations, clinical case histories, experimental investigations, sociological studies, and results of anthropological field work. This hypothesis enables one to be attentive to certain command characteristics in several observations from these historically fields of knowledge and therefore to take one modern first step toward unification of these