Aggression

Subject classification: this is a psychology resource.

Completion status: this resource is ~25% complete.

This page is intended to help people to learn about the psychology of aggression. Feel free to contribute.

Aggression is a behavior aimed at harming others physically or psychologically.

Examples

This section provides some examples of different types of aggression. Feel free to discuss each one further and also to create new examples. discussed further.

Cyberbullying

Aggression is not necessarily physical or direct. Bullying, for example, can take place not only in the playground (where it may be direct (overt) or indirect (covert, e.g., spreading rumours with an intent to negatively influence a person's social status), but also via electronic mediums, such as mobile phones and the internet.

Fighting

Fighting is an aggressive way to exert power and influence.

Rioting

Rioting usually involves aggressive, chaotic crowd behaviour directed towards authorities.

Genocide

Mummified Rwanda genocide victims.
Foto Sascha Grabow

Mummified victims of the Rwandan Genocide (1994) at Murambi Technical School. Genocide is an example of violent interpersonal aggression undertaken collectively by human ethnic and/or cultural groups in an effort to systematically kill members of other ethnic/cultural groups.

Social learning

According to Social Learning Theory, aggression is learned, as are other social behaviours.

Street fight

A fight is an example of interpersonal aggression. This face-to-face verbal and physical fight took place between some human beings on a street in Beijing, China, August 18, 2007, and attracted several onlookers, including a passer-by with a camera. You can see some more photos of this incident on flickr.com.

War

War involves persistent, intentional, collective aggression between groups, such as nations, who attempt to exert power and influence through use of military weaponry, but often also via political, economic, and social strategies.

See also

Search for Aggression on Wikipedia.

• Aggression keywords
• Aggression (Lecture)
• Prejudice

External links

Girard's mimetic/scapegoating model of community violence

• Thinking About Violence In Our Schools (Kort & Williams; musenet.org)
• Cogitating About Communication In Our Connectedness (Kort; musenet.org)
• Worrying About Wheel-Warring In Our WikiWoe (Moulton; wikipediareview.com)