Outline and evaluate explanations of institutional aggression

Further support for the situational model comes from Folger and Starlicki 1995 who proposed the pop corn model. This was suggested as a result of the finding from prison research that even non-aggressive types can be made to behave aggressively if the situational factors demand it. Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment further supports this idea when apparently psychologically normal and amicable individuals behaved violently once placed into a ‘prison’ situation. What all these studies show is that even people who do not value aggression can become aggressive if it is the norm within the institution.

The dispositional or importational model on the other hand claims that aggression occurs within institutions because of the characteristics of the individuals within the institution. Personal and psychological characteristics are brought into the institution by the individual and these characteristics determine how much aggression each individual displays. If there are enough individuals who value aggression then this will become the norm and IA will occur. Examples of this can be found within many institutions but the police and military services have been in the news recently because of cases of IA used by the Met during the G8 summit demonstrations and the abuse of prisoners by American and British soldiers in Iraq.  In both scenarios the institution has tried to distance itself from the abuse by claiming it was down to a few violent individuals. Indeed in the case of the Abu Ghraib abuse the American General Myers said that this horrific behaviour was due to a ‘few bad apples’. Zimbardo on the other hand would argue that it was the situation that lead to these extreme examples of IA.

 Once again much of this research has been carried out within prisons and has produced much evidence to support the model. Many inmates in prisons have demographic characteristics that would seem to predispose them to aggress. Research from America by Kane and Janus 1981 shows that non-whites and younger prisoners are more likely to behave violently than other groups, they also found that those who had long periods of unemployment and low levels of education were more likely to use aggression.  Toch 1997 further supports this view by stating that ‘all prisons inherit their subcultural sediments from the street corners that supply them with clients’. This means that individuals bring their aggressive behaviour to each new setting they find themselves in. Another personal characteristic found to be of importance amongst prison inmates is drug or alcohol dependency. A Canadian study by Mills, Kroner and Weekes 1998 found inmates who had a higher level of alcohol dependency were associated with greater levels of aggression. All of this research gives credence to the idea that IA is explained by the importational model and that individuals bring their aggression with them to the institution.

There are a number of problems with this research however, the first is that much of it is correlational and therefore a direct causal link between personal characteristics and IA cannot be assumed. Also as much of the research into IA has been carried out in prisons it has a problem of sample bias as many inmates have already been shown to value aggression higher than the rest of the population. One further problem is that much of this research is culture biased as it was carried out either in western prisons or prisons run by western powers and therefore is possibly only applicable in those types of institutions.

In conclusion it is probable that both the situational and the dispositional models are needed to explain IA and that such models are rather too simplistic to explain this complex human behaviour. It is also probable that the type of institution involved would dictate which model and indeed which aspect of that model was most appropriate to explain the IA. Both the models have been found to have important real life applications and therefore be valuable but further research is needed in this complex field of human behaviour. When considering IA the aggressor/s, the victim/s and the situation must all be taken into account.

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