One of the great adaptive features of our species is our capacity for learning, our ability to develop new responses to particular situations on the basis of our experiences in the world. But this capacity also means that much of our propensity for aggression is something that we learn. Some learning of aggression is based on operant conditioning. Beginning in early childhood, we all engage in some aggressive acts such as biting, hitting, shoving, kicking, verbal aggression, and so forth. The more these aggressive actions are reinforced in particular situations, the more frequently an individual will turn to additional aggression in similar contexts (e.g., Geen & Pigg, 1970; Geen & Stonner, 1971; Loew, 1967). In other words, if these actions garner desired attention or specific rewards, or if they alleviate negative feelings, they will become more likely (Dengerink & Covey, 1983; Geen, 2001). If Taylor hits Tim to get his lollipop, Taylor’s aggression will be reinforced if the consequence is successfully enjoying a tasty lollipop. If a child is hassled and made fun of by other kids, but finds that aggressive action alleviates the hassling, the child is likely to learn that physical aggression is a way to get relief from being bothered by others. And in gang subcultures, members may win admiration for engaging in violence (Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967).

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On the other hand, if aggressive actions do not lead to rewarding experiences, or if they lead to unpleasant experiences, the likelihood of aggression should be reduced. However, punishment does not inhibit actions nearly so well as rewards encourage them. And in some cases, attempts at punishment may actually be reinforcing because they inadvertently bring desired attention to the child. This can occur with adults as well. Throughout history, outlaws such as the bank robber John Dillinger, depicted in the movie Public Enemies, gained attention, publicity, and even fame for their violent actions (Brown et al., 2009).

There is another reason one’s own aggressive actions tend to encourage more aggressive actions. When people act aggressively, they can feel dissonance or guilt, which leads them to shift their attitudes to justify their actions. Martens and colleagues (2007) showed that the more pill bugs participants were instructed to kill by dropping them into what they thought was a bug-killing machine (see FIGURE 12.8), the more such bugs they voluntarily chose to kill during a subsequent free time period. Interestingly, this escalation of killing occurred only in people who believed there was some similarity between bugs and humans and therefore were likely to feel guilty about those first bugs they killed. This process of escalating killing mirrors many historical examples in which initial acts of aggression are followed by more severe acts of aggression later (Kressel, 1996).

In addition to learning to aggress through their own actions, people also learn to aggress by watching the actions of others. Humans have a great capacity for imitation and observational learning (Bandura, 1973). Indeed, most children probably learn more about aggression from electronic media sources, from watching their parents and peers, and from their cultural upbringing than they do from their own actions. So let’s take a careful look at how the electronic media, family life, and culture contribute to aggression.

A large body of research shows that exposure to violent media increases the prevalence of aggression in a society (e.g., Bushman & Huesmann, 2010). In fact, the relationship between exposure to media depictions of violence and aggressive behavior is stronger than many other relationships that are considered very well established, including, for example, the extent to which condom use predicts likelihood of contracting HIV and the extent to which calcium intake is related to bone mass (see FIGURE 12.9) (Bushman & Anderson, 2001). Despite this evidence, violent content is pervasive in modern television programming, films, and video games and on the Internet (Donnerstein, 2011).

Bushman and Anderson argued that one reason these research findings are largely ignored is that violent media are very popular and therefore profitable. Consequently, news media outlets, which often are connected to the businesses that gather these profits, tend to be biased in their reporting of the evidence. To illustrate the profitability of film violence, as this textbook goes to press, all of the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time worldwide feature violence and weapons: Avatar, Titanic, Marvel’s The Avengers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Iron Man 3, Frozen, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises (Box Office Mojo, 2014). You may be thinking, “Wait, what about Frozen?” Well, although it may be the least graphically violent of these ten, this animated children’s film features fistfights, a battle with crossbows, and a knife fight. Similarly, the most popular show on American television is NCIS, which typically begins with a murder and proceeds from there. The list of popular violent television shows also includes CSI, Law and Order, and their multiple spinoffs, not to mention The Walking Dead, True Blood, Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad. The current most popular video game series include such violent offerings as Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Combat, and Left for Dead. Given that the average American 12-year-old spends more time consuming media than attending school (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010) and that the average American adolescent has seen approximately 200,000 acts of violence on television (Strasburger, 2007), young people have plenty of opportunities to learn how to be aggressive.

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What Is the Appeal of Media Violence?

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.

—Dave Barry (1966)

Why is violent entertainment so popular? From the evolutionary perspective, it’s likely been adaptive for humans to be innately vigilant to viewing, and physiologically aroused by, instances of violence (e.g., Beer, 1984). As the old journalism cliché goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” If there is potential danger, we want to know what, where, how, and why. And well we should, so that we can prepare for fight or flight. The entertainment industry takes advantage of these innate tendencies. Although people don’t like it directed at themselves, they do enjoy seeing violence in movies on TV or enacting it in video games—where they are not in any real danger (McCauley, 1998). This is especially true of people who are high in sensation seeking or who feel bored (Cantor, 1998; Tamborini & Stiff, 1987).

The other easy way to make viewers excited is with sexually appealing images, another feature of much popular entertainment, as Dave Barry noted. But in American culture, younger viewers are shielded much more strictly from sexual content than they are from violent content. For example, in movie ratings a single exposed penis or breast guarantees an R rating, whereas massive amounts of killing can now be found in many PG-13 movies. Back in 1985, PG-13 movies had about the same amount of gun violence as did G-rated movies; but since 2009, levels of gun violence in these adolescent-friendly PG-13 pictures now match or even exceed those in R-rated films (Bushman et al., 2013).

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Another basis of the appeal of violent media is the portrayal of heroic victories over evil and injustice (e.g., Goldstein, 1998; Zillmann, 1998). One of the first violent American TV shows, The Adventures of Superman, expressed this very succinctly: Superman fights for “truth, justice and the American way.” For American children watching that show, what could be better than that? Identifying with such heroes may provide a boost in self-esteem, a sense of control over threats, and a feeling that good triumphs in the end (Cantor, 1998). And these feelings may be especially strong when you yourself are the hero, as is typically the case for players of violent video games (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010).

The Basic Evidence for Violent Media’s Contributing to Aggression

You may be thinking to yourself, “Well, I watch a lot of violent entertainment and play video games, and I don’t go around hurting other people.” As we noted earlier, aggression is not caused by any one factor in isolation but results from particular combinations of coexistent causal factors. Let’s examine the evidence that exposure to media violence is one of those causal factors.

Research has shown clearly that the more violence an individual watches, the more aggressive that person is (e.g., Singer & Singer, 1981). Of course, this finding is merely a correlation and so could mean either that violent entertainment causally contributes to aggression or that viewers who like aggression are more likely to watch violent entertainment. Longitudinal evidence (i.e., studies that follow people over time) suggests that the former causal pathway provides the more likely explanation (e.g., Huesmann et al., 1984, 2003; Lefkowitz et al., 1977). The more violent programs an individual watches as a child, the more likely that individual is to be violent up to 22 years later as an adult. In contrast, level of aggressiveness as a child does not similarly predict interest in watching violent programs as an adult. Similar findings are emerging for violent video-game play as well (e.g., Anderson et al., 2008).

The best way to assess a causal effect of exposure to violence on aggression is to conduct field studies and experiments in which some participants are randomly assigned to watch violent or nonviolent content (e.g., Berkowitz, 1965; Geen & Berkowitz, 1966). The findings of many such studies show that exposure to media violence through watching videos or playing video games increases aggression (Bushman & Huesmann, 2010; Geen, 2001). Let’s consider two examples that illustrate these effects.

In a home for juvenile delinquent boys, Leyens and colleagues (1975) had boys in two of the cottages watch five nights of violent movies. Boys in two other cottages watched five nights of nonviolent movies. The boys were observed each night for frequency of hitting, slapping, choking, and kicking their cottage mates. The boys who watched the violent films engaged in more such aggressive behavior than those who watched the nonviolent films. In another study, Konijn and colleagues (2007) randomly assigned Dutch adolescent boys to play a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes and then play a competitive game with another study participant. The winner got the privilege of blasting the loser with noise at a volume of their choosing, ranging from a tolerable 60 decibels to a potentially hearing-damaging 105 decibels. The adolescents who played the violent video game chose potentially harmful noise levels more often.

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It’s important to note that the majority of these laboratory experiments show these effects of violent media primarily when participants are frustrated or provoked (e.g., Geen & Stonner, 1973), and for viewers who are generally above average in aggressive tendencies (e.g., Anderson & Dill, 2000; Bushman, 1995). So your likely self-based observation is correct. Exposure to violent media doesn’t promote aggression in all viewers or all the time. But it does so in people experiencing hostile feelings or who are generally predisposed to such feelings and to reacting to them with aggression (e.g., Geen, 2001).

How and Why Does Watching Violence Contribute to Aggression in Viewers?

The next questions concern how and why violent media have these effects. Social learning theory and research provide some important answers (Bandura, 1973). People tend to imitate the behaviors they observe in others and learn new behaviors from them. As the Bobo doll studies showed (chapter 7), frustrated children who observed an adult model attacking a Bobo doll became more aggressive toward the doll, often in the same specific way that they saw the adult aggress. They also aggressed more if they identified with the adult model and if they observed the model being rewarded for his or her aggression.

Many subsequent experiments, with both children and adults, further support the role of social learning in the effects of observed violence in general, and violence portrayed in films and video material in particular. The more study participants identify with the character they see engaging in filmed violence, the more they are likely to aggress (e.g., Perry & Perry, 1976; Turner & Berkowitz, 1972). In addition, filmed violence is more likely to be imitated if the violence is rewarded rather than punished, if it seems justified rather than unjustified, and if the harm caused by the aggression is deemphasized or sanitized (e.g., Donnerstein, 2011; Geen & Stonner, 1972, 1973). The common television and film scenario in which the hero uses weapons to defeat the villains fits these conditions perfectly: The likable protagonist, easy to identify with, engages in aggression that is justified and leads to a rewarding outcome. Bushman and Huesmann (2010) suggest that these conditions are even more common in violent video games in which the gamer’s character is him- or herself the hero who is rewarded for aggression.

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Further evidence of the effects of media violence is provided by instances in which very specific forms of violence depicted in films have been imitated in the real world. In just one of many examples, in 1971, Stanley Kubrick’s disturbing, ultraviolent, dystopian science-fiction film classic A Clockwork Orange opened in British theaters to great controversy. After its release, the British press chronicled a series of copycat crimes, including the beating to death of a homeless man, leading Kubrick to ban the film in the United Kingdom in 1973. In one scene from the film, a gang of teens rape a woman while singing “Singin’ in the Rain.” Shortly after the film was banned, a gang of British teens raped a teenage girl while singing the same song (Travis, 1999). Social Psych at the Movies discusses another historically important film that inspired violence.

The sociologist David Phillips (1979, 1982) demonstrated a similar imitative tendency by examining frequencies of suicides and car accidents in communities following exposure to news coverage of real-life celebrity suicides and fictional soap opera depictions of suicides. He also examined homicides after highly publicized heavyweight boxing matches (Phillips, 1983; Phillips & Hensley, 1984). In all of these cases, he found significant increases in suicides and homicides a few days after these media depictions. The more these events were publicized in a community, the greater the increase in corresponding violent actions.

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Another noteworthy effect of violent media is that the more violent television people watch, the more they believe that violence is common in the real world (Gerbner et al., 1980, 1982). This sense that the world is unsafe also may contribute to aggressive propensities by increasing a sense of threat and encouraging the idea that aggression is normative. Furthermore, the more children and adults watch media violence, the less they become disturbed by it and the more they become tolerant of it (Drabman & Thomas, 1974; Linz et al., 1989; Thomas et al., 1977). One recent study from the social neuroscience perspective showed that playing a violent video game leads to a reduced physiological reaction in the brain called the P3 response, which indicates a lack of surprise in response to viewing aggression. Furthermore, this neural desensitization helps explain why violent video games tend to increase aggression (Engelhardt et al., 2011). The lower participants’ P3 response to violent stimuli, the more aggressive they were when administering noise blasts to an opponent.

Of course, none of these findings implies that exposure to media violence always increases aggressive tendencies, but it causes such tendencies to be more likely in the short term by making hostile feelings, violent thoughts, and scripts temporarily more accessible (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Berkowitz, 1993; Bushman, 1998; Bushman & Geen, 1990; Bushman & Huesmann, 2006). As the line of work starting with Berkowitz and LePage (1967) showed, when people experience hostile feelings along with violent thoughts, they are more likely to choose aggressive as opposed to nonaggressive ways to deal with those feelings.

In sum, both theory and research suggest the following disturbing conclusion. If 10 million people watch a violent television show or movie, play a violent video game, or listen to violent music lyrics, the majority surely won’t be moved to engage in aggression. However, just as surely, a minority of them—those with hostile feelings or dispositional aggressiveness, or both—will be. And even if that minority were a mere one tenth of 1% of the viewing or gaming audience, that still would be 10,000 people moved by violent media toward engaging in aggression.

As we’ve considered the cultural perspective throughout this book, we’ve seen how culture shapes our values, beliefs, and behavior. Aggression is no exception. As we grow up, we are socialized with particular expectations and into particular roles. Along the way, we also learn how, when, and to what extent aggressive behavior is an acceptable or normative response to certain situations. Some cultures, and subcultures, may socialize us to “turn the other cheek,” whereas others emphasize an “eye for an eye” or not backing down from a fight. Cultures further teach us what responses are appropriate in different situations of frustration or insult. Culture thus has a profound influence on not only the extent of aggression but also the form it can take. We see this influence when we compare national cultures as well as regions and cultural subgroups within a nation.

Comparing National Cultures

Across nations, we find striking differences in prevalence of serious acts of aggression. In the United States, for example, one murder occurs every 31 seconds. This dwarfs the murder rates in other industrialized nations such as Canada, Australia, and Great Britain and is approximately double the world average (Barber, 2006). Although some countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia have higher rates, much of the violence in those nations is between groups and results from political instability, whereas violent crimes in the United States tend to be committed by individuals against other individuals. Americans have a stronger tendency than people of many other nations to resort to aggressive solutions to interpersonal conflicts (Archer & McDaniel, 1995).

As we noted earlier, the high murder rate in the United States stems in part from the ready availability of firearms (e.g., Archer, 1994; Archer & Gartner, 1984). Firearms not only prime aggression-related thoughts, they also increase the lethality of violence. People looking to aggress will use whatever is available. Aggression by firearms leads to death one in six times; aggression by knife, one in thirty times (Goldstein, 1986). Consider the Norwegian shooting spree described at the outset of this chapter. The killer would have done far less harm if he hadn’t been able to obtain semiautomatic weapons.

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In trying to understand how and why cultures differ in aggression, some researchers focus on individualism versus collectivism. As we first discussed in chapter 2, individualistic cultures place greater value on independence and self-reliance, whereas collectivistic cultures place greater value on cooperation and maintaining harmonious relationships with others. Perhaps as a consequence, individualistic cultures tend to have more interpersonal aggression than collectivistic cultures. For example, the United States is more individualistic than Poland, which in turn is more individualistic than China. These differences in individualism mirror the rates of aggression and violence. The United States has more aggression and violence than Poland, which in turn has more aggression and violence than China (Forbes et al., 2009). Nevertheless, there are many exceptions. Some fairly collectivistic African and Latin American cultures have homicide rates considerably higher than the more individualistic United States. There is no single or simple set of variables that can account for a given nation’s record of violence.

Comparing Subcultures Within Nations

Cultures of Honor

Research on regional variations in a culture of honor suggests that the answer might be yes. In places that have a culture of honor, people (especially men) are highly motivated to protect their status or reputations. Daly and Wilson (1988, p. 128) describe it this way:

A seemingly minor affront…. must be understood within a larger social context of reputations, face, relative social status, and enduring relationships. Men are known by their fellows as “the sort who can be pushed around” or “the sort who won’t take any shit,” as people whose words mean action, or as people who are full of hot air, as guys whose girlfriends you can chat up with impunity or guys you don’t want to mess with.

Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett (Cohen & Nisbett, 1994; Nisbett, 1993) have documented a strong culture of honor in the southern and western United States. For example, homicide rates among White men living in rural or small-town settings in those regions are higher than corresponding rates in similar settings in other regions of the country. Southern White men are also more likely than northern White men to believe that lethal violence is justified as a means of defending life, family, property, or reputation after they perceive it as impugned. The culture of honor extends even to names of towns and businesses. More town and business names in the South conjure up images of battle and violence than in the North (Kelly, 1999). If you’re driving across Delaware, New Hampshire, or New Jersey, you might happen to spot Woodlawn Kennels, Crenshaw Church, or a town called Tranquility. But in Texas and Alabama, you might drive past Battle Ax Church, Gunsmoke Kennels, or a town called Warrior.

Recall the example of someone bumping into you in a hallway and then cursing at you for being in his way. Cohen and his colleagues (1996) put unsuspecting male college students from either the North or the South in that very situation. Students from the North did not have much of a reaction to the insult, but students from the South showed comparative increases in aggressive feelings, thoughts, and physiology. They were more likely to think their masculine reputations were threatened and were more upset and primed for an aggressive response, as indicated by higher levels of cortisol, testosterone, and aggressive cognitions. They were also more likely subsequently to engage in dominance-affirming behavior to restore their honor after this perceived slight. In one study, they were also slower to move out of the way when walking toward another confederate in a narrow hallway through which only one person could pass at a time (see FIGURE 12.10). And this person was 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 250 pounds—no small dude!

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Why did the culture of honor develop primarily in the South and West? Cohen and Nisbett (1994; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996) theorize that the answer goes back to the environmental and economic conditions in the places the American settlers came from and in the regions where they settled. Many southern settlers came from pastoral, herding societies, such as Scotland. Other settlers, who migrated to the arid western regions of the country, became economically more dependent on cattle ranching and sheepherding than on farming. In contrast, the North largely was settled by farmers and developed a more agricultural, as opposed to herding, economy. Because people from a herding-based culture are more vulnerable to having their livelihood (e.g., livestock) rustled away, norms developed whereby men cultivated a rough, tough affect, responding harshly and violently to even the smallest threat or slight. These aggressive responses were intended to discourage theft of their means of sustenance. In contrast, because it is more difficult to steal a whole crop than a single sheep, such norms did not develop in the more agricultural North.

In addition, because much of the South and West remained frontier land with widely scattered, less effective law enforcement, it became even more important to protect one’s own property. As a result, norms for retributive justice are thought to have developed in the South and West more vigorously than in the North. Similar perceptions and reactions have been observed among participants from Brazil and Chile (Vandello & Cohen, 2003; Vandello et al., 2009), whose cultures also emphasize honor and which have an economic history of herding, but not among Canadians, who are more neutral with respect to honor.

Although these economic and environmental conditions no longer apply, the culture of honor persists, reinforced by institutional norms and scripts of action that people learn through socialization processes and extending to their attitudes and behavior. People from the South have a more lenient attitude toward crimes—even murder—when they believe the perpetrator is acting to protect honor, for example, killing to defend his family (Vandello et al., 2008). Indeed, when employers were sent a job application from a fictitious applicant who admitted that he had impulsively killed a man who had an affair with his wife and then publicly taunted him about it, southern employers responded more sympathetically than those in the North (Cohen & Nisbett, 1997). However, no such differences emerged with respect to an applicant who admitted stealing a car because he needed the money. Not just any aggressive or criminal action is considered more acceptable, but specifically those that involve matters of honor.

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Protecting One’s Status

Although cultures of honor might initially develop in societies focused on herding, low-status compensation theory suggests that the larger status disparities—that is, an unequal distribution of wealth—found in herding societies account for the link between cultures of honor and aggressive proclivities (Henry, 2009). In other words, herding cultures tend to have greater status disparities between the haves and the have-nots, leading lower-status men to become especially sensitive to status threats (e.g., insults). People with high status are not similarly bothered by status threats because they have various material signs of their status (e.g., the luxury car, the nice house). Across 92 different countries—from Mongolia to Finland—P. J. Henry found that the greater percentage of pastureland a country has, the higher the murder rate. But this relationship between pastureland and murder rates was explained by status disparities. More pastureland is associated with greater status disparities, which in turn are associated with higher murder rates. Thus the culture of honor involves protecting not only one’s resources but also protecting one’s status and sense of self-worth.

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Gangs

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The ideas of a culture of honor and the protection of tenuous self-worth can help explain gang-related violence. In 1967, Wolfgang and Ferracuti developed the very similar concept of subcultures of violence to explain inner-city gang-related violence. The FBI’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment estimates that approximately 1.4 million people belong to 33,000 different gangs across the United States. Perhaps due to the appeal of the sense of status and power it may offer, gang membership is particularly high among Hispanic-Americans (46% of all gang members) and African-Americans (35%) relative to Euro-Americans (11%) (National Gang Center, 2011). In some communities, gangs are estimated to perpetrate an average of 48% of violent crime and up to 90% in certain jurisdictions (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2011). A number of factors contribute to gang-related violence, including the strain of poverty and the attempts by poor teenagers to exert some kind of control over their lives through delinquency (Goldstein, 1994). But it is also important to consider the subcultural norms and expectations that develop within economically disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods, which sociologist Elijah Anderson (2000) has dubbed “the code of the street.” In this subculture, violence and aggression are means of maintaining one’s honor and status. The code of the street sets up the rules for being someone of value not to be trifled with. Social Psych Out in the World takes a closer look at an example of gang violence in the African American community.