Social Psychological Theories of Aggression: The Big Brother Assignment

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Social Psychological Theories of Aggression: The Big Brother Assignment

With increasing violence in the Big Brother House I have been asked to create a report that explains this violence occurring in the Big Brother House in terms of two or more social psychological theories.

In general the violence in the big brother house is escalating and theories need to be brought to the attention of the media bosses in order to explain this aggression.  The violence does not need to be stopped as the house mates are not breaking any of the Big Brother rules behaving in this manner.  Violence on this show can not be viewed as a negative aspect as it increases the number of viewers.  However it does need to be explained logically.

One explanation could be the Social Learning Theory.

In order for such learning to take place a person must observe persons behaviour and imitate this in the future.  The concept of identification is also important as the individual is more likely to imitate some he/she identifies with, in this case it could be another house mate or perhaps previous contestants on the Big Brother show.

For this there are three stages

  • The Registration Stage, where the observer must pay attention to the model.  The observer’s attention is influenced by characteristics of both the observer and the model.
  •  The Storage Stage is when the observer may code and organise the information in relation to any reinforces present, past experiences, expectation, relevance etc…
  • And finally the Retrieval Stage is when the reinforcers determine whether the behaviour is imitated and the observer’s performance will be dependant on the person’s ability to perform the act.

From this one idea would be that these contestants are just mimicking other house mate’s actions.  This is one an idea but I believe it is that the new house mates are mimicking other years Big Brothers contestants.  This is due to the fact that if you want to go onto Big brother you would like to become famous, and most of the time the most aggressive, avoidant, destructive contestants are the ones who get the most air time and incidentally are more widely known in society thereafter. There are many studies that support this view, of which one of the most astounding is that of Bandura et al ’63 which was based on two groups of children where an experimental group observed an adult play aggressively with a 5 foot inflatable doll.  The control condition observed an adult play properly in the room ignoring the doll completely.  The findings from this study showed that the children from this experimental group showed significantly more verbal and physical acts of aggression than the control group, supporting evidence that they imitated the behaviour of the role model.  On the other hand the children could have just copied the adult’s actions as it is a novel situation, or were unsure of how to play with the bobo doll and just followed the adult’s actions.  Also with young children it would be hard to generalise the findings to adults, in particular our contestants.

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Not entirely supporting the views of learning, Bandura’s study shows learning still could be a contributing factor.  This is because there are still many other ways of learning to be aggressive, for example learning from society, your family, and more often than not, the media.  One attempt at showing how behaviours could be learnt from the media is from Manstead et al ’95 in which he outlines these five variables;

  1. If the observed behaviour is thought to be real it is more likely to be imitated.
  2. If viewers identify with the aggressor then they are more ...

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