The third segment of my book; The Social Animal deals with two completely different topics, self-justification and human aggression. Throughout the book, author Elliot Aronson provides the reader with examples and experiments conducted by psychologists to determine how humans justify their actions and where our aggression comes from and what influences such harsh behavior.
Humans are always reaching out to get the right answer for everyday decisions they face. These everyday decisions could be ones based off their actions, beliefs, and feelings. Whether it comes to buying a certain type of car, or choosing a university to attend, people are always trying to convince themselves if it was a logical, reasonable thing to do. The questioning we have about our actions is known as self-justification. Most humans try and convince themselves that it was the “right” decision and not the “wrong” decision. The book continues on and starts to talk about a theory of human motivation, which is called the theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory is defined in the book as “a state of tension that occurs whenever an individual simultaneously holds two cognition's.” An example provided by the book helps explain this theory better by relating it to a life experience:
“Suppose a person smokes cigarettes and then reads a report if the medical evidence linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer. The smoker experiences dissonance. The cognition “I smoke cigarettes” is the dissonant with the cognition “cigarette smoking produces cancer.”
The example above is an example of cognitive dissonance. In a situation like this one will try to reduce dissonance to convince them into believing that it is okay to smoke cigarettes. Some ways of this is telling yourself, intelligent people smoke and by this, a smoker will convince themselves that it cant be all that dangerous. By reducing dissonance, we as humans try to maintain a positive image towards ourselves. Also, with cognitive dissonance, people will often focus on the positive aspects of choices they make and degrade the characteristics of the unchosen alternatives.
The next segment in my book is dealing with human aggression. Aggression is an intentional action aimed at doing hard or causing pain. There are two types as aggression identified. First is hostile aggression, that is, an act of aggression stemming from a feeling of anger and aimed at inflicting pain or injury. Second is instrumental aggression, that is, there is an intention to hurt the other person, but the hurting takes place as a means to some goal other than causing pain. As humans in our natural state are gentile creatures and our aggression is causes by a restrictive society that forces us to become hostile and aggressive. Aggressive behavior was tested to determine if one is born with an aggressive attitude or if one develops it growing up. Results conclude that aggressive behavior can be modified by experience; aggression does not need to be learned. Some factors that affect aggression are neurological and chemical causes. There is an area in the brain called the amygdala, associated with aggressive behaviors in humans. When stimulated docile organisms become violent. Also related to this is a male hormone called testosterone. An injection of this hormone will increase aggression. Pain and discomfort are also factors that cause aggression. An example of this is when subjected to sharp unexpected pain, we tend to lash our and the nearest target. Also related to this is temperature. Stated in the book, riots are more likely to occur during hot days than during cold days. A third factor to aggression is frustration. If an individual becomes frustrated at something they are doing, this will increase the probability of an aggressive response. A final factor in aggression is mass media. A study proved that the more violence individuals’ watch on TV as children, the more violence they exhibit years later as teenagers and young adults. We can find this is violent TV shows, movies, and video games.
