Aggression

6 Pages 1618 Words

The title of this essay asks a question that cannot be easily or directly answered. One of the reasons for this is that aggression can be looked as measurable, that is, how much an individual would want to hurt another. For example, if an instructor hits a student because he was disruptive in class, and the student's father learns about the incident and later comes to school and punches the instructor, once could conclude that both the teacher and the father showed aggressiveness. However, one could also say that while the instructor was naturally aggressive, the source of the father’s aggression was from frustration, or environmentally caused.
In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher, argued that aggression was caused by the society that an individual lived in, which would mean the cause is of an environmental nature, and not innate. However, psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Konrad Lorenz argued the idea that aggressiveness is innate and cannot be avoided by individuals. (David G. Myers, P 385).
In effect, aggression was categorised into two different forms by a psychologist named David Buss in 1961. The first category is angry aggression and the second, instrumental aggression. In the case of angry aggression, the objective of the aggressor is to directly harm the victim individual. With relation to this, he describes that a degree of pleasure and satisfaction is felt or achieved by the aggressor in inflicting pain and harm to a victim and that the reason for this phenomenon has not yet been explained. In the case of instrumental aggression, the objective of the aggressor is not to directly harm the victim individual, but instead to ensure some degree of welfare. A good example of this would be peacekeepers in military, who would use aggression against ‘the enemy’ to ensure that war ends as soon as possible and people who are indirectly involved in the war would not be harmed. Furthermor...