Zimbardo termed this the ‘Lucifer Effect’ which refers to the power of the situation to make ordinary people act in aggressive ways. The situation may result in an increase in aggression through a change of power and status of those in the institute, feelings of helplessness in the victims of violence and deindividuation of both parties.
This is similar to the Deprivation model which suggests that aggression can occur due to lack of freedom, control, privacy and security. It can be used to explain why prions are aggressive environments, as inmates are also deprived of heterosexual relationships. Inmate’s then express their frustration through violence towards staff who are seen as the controllers who cause the deprivation. This model clearly rejects the arguments that inmates personalities are the cause of violence or that they have been imported into the prison environment.
Jiang et al found the deprivation model was effective explaining inmate violence towards staff, as prisoners with the most restrictive regimes had the highest levels of violence.
Wilson found real life evidence to support the deprivation model. Levels of violence decreased as a result of changing deprivation conditions. This shows a direct link between deprivation conditions and aggression and thus supports the model.
McCorkle et al found that overcrowding, lack of privacy and lack of meaningful activity increased levels of peer violence supporting the deprivation model.
However, Nijman found that increased personal space did little to decrease levels of violent incidents meaning there are other factors that lead to aggression.
This research is not without fault. Primarily, the sample is biased as it used people who are already in prison and fails to account for why not all inmates are aggressive in this environment, thus the application of this theory lies short. According to this model, prisoners should only be aggressive to staff as they are the controllers, not other inmates but this isn’t always the case.
It is perhaps more plausible to attribute institutional aggression due to a combination of situational and dispositional cues. The violence in Abu Ghraib were explained by a few bad apples suggesting that the aggression comes from the individual rather than the environment. This approach is more likely to explain why there are individual differences in aggressive behaviour displayed in institutions, which the situation approach cannot account for.
The majority of this research is based on prison environments and this is not a represented population or environment to use theories to explain all aggressive behaviour in institutions and therefore lacks population validity and ecological validity. Consequently, much of this research is androcentric focussing only on male prison population and fails to account for aggression in females presenting a gender bias.
It is very difficult to isolate specific factors such as attributing aggression to situational or dispositional cues. Therefore, this makes application of these explanations and their findings difficult to real life. It is reductionistic to assume that one of these is the sole reason for aggression.
These explanations for institutional aggression undermines the influence of the biological approach. Although dispositional explanations emphasises the role of the individuals this is descriptive rather than explanatory. For instance, the well-established link of testosterone and aggression. As a result these explanations can be criticised for being too simplistic and therefore cannot account for all aggression and would benefit from a combination of approaches.
Furthermore, attributing aggression to depositional cues removes responsibility form the individual and limits their sense of free will over their actions. This is seen as a deterministic view of aggression in institutions.
To conclude, there are several models that are able to explain different aspects of aggression in institutions however, there is not a model that is able to accurately explain all aspects of institutional aggression. Therefore a multi-modal approach that includes all factors such as importation, situational and dehumanisation, would be a more valid explanation.
by
ellouise1997hotmailcom (student)
