January 7th, 2009

I remember studying aggression in hockey in university (I am not kidding: I took a sociology course called Hockey in Canada at SFU!)

There were several theories of aggression that we looked at, but only three that I can remember:

  1. People have an innate desire to be aggressive as a survival skill. Remove all the animal and we are nothing more than flora, waiting to be chopped down for firewood. Aggression makes us stronger and better able to survive the harsh nasty world.

  2. Aggression is suggestive to others and addictive to ourselves. We act aggressively when we see aggression in others, and the more we get that adrenaline rush that accompanies aggression, the more we crave it.

  3. Agression arises out of frustration from us not getting what we need (want). I can't remember why this is different from (1) above.

In any case, we used to sit around and discuss these theories as though they were mutually exclusive until someone finally asked the "well duh" question to our instructor: "Why can't human aggression be a combination of all these?" And that made a lot of sense to me.

One other thing: There are many breeds of the same species of animals (dogs, horses, cats, etc.) that show different levels of aggression; e.g., nobody expects a yellow lab to try and rip your throat out, but nobody is surprised when a pit bull attacks a child. The fact that these different levels of aggression are part of breeding would suggest that aggression in at least animals is a genetic trait ... or at least partially genetic. If that is the case, then it would not be hard to argue that humans are perhaps partially genetically pre-disposed to aggression (based on the observation that we are aggressive) in addition to the other three above.

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