Are men more aggressive than women? PDF

Preview

Summary

This is an essay which includes a possible psychological experiment which could be used to test the question, plus a literature review of the question...

Description

There are many ways of discovering how people think, behave and relate to each other. As a researcher, suppose that you have been presented with the following claim: -

Men are more aggressive than women

How would you go about trying to establish if the claim might be true? Write an essay describing what you could do to investigate the claim, and indicate to what extent it would be a good test of the question.

Aggression can be defined as feelings of anger which results in violent behaviour, with the intent to harm another individual either physically or verbally. For example, physical aggression would be someone punching or kicking another person, and verbal aggression would be emotional abuse, manipulative behaviour and insulting someone. More recently the concepts of direct and indirect aggression have been distinguished – direct aggression consists of both physically or verbally harming someone and indirect aggression can consist of social exclusion and gossiping. It is mostly believed in society today that men are more likely to carry out physically aggressive acts and women use more verbal/indirect aggression. Social psychologists have carried out much research to find to which extent this belief is true.

The most prominent area looked into is that of differences in aggression in male and female children and heterosexual relationships, but there are also cultural/societal differences that males and females experience, biological sex differences and evolutionary causes in aggression between sexes. In one study, Archer (2000) found that in heterosexual relationships, women were actually more likely than men to use physical acts of aggression when arguing, although men were more likely to inflict an injury on their partner through violence. Archer (2004) also wrote a meta-analytic review of sex differences in aggression, which assessed whether findings from laboratory studies could generalise to real-life occurrences. He notes that in some early narrative reviews of sex differences in children’s aggression, there was a common notion that males are more aggressive than females (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1975). However, in a meta-analysis by Teiger (1980), there were no sex differences in aggression found in children below the age of 6 so it was concluded that men were not more aggressive than women.

Psychological research usually indicates that males are more aggressive than females, but there have been a few researchers looking into whether females ever show more aggression. The social learning theory suggests that aggression is actually a learned behaviour rather than it being biological or innate. This can be learning from people around you such as family and friends or the media including the news, television and internet. Snethen and Puymbroeck (2008) suggested that girls are increasingly becoming the main perpetrators of physical aggression and use the social learning theory to explain that as society is coming to accept physically tougher girls in a society immersed in violence, violent girls have become a consequence.

Lagerspetz, Bjorkqvist, and Peltonen (1988) focused on the use of indirect aggression in their study of 11-12-year-old males and females. In the article, they write that they used information from 4 schools in Turku, Finland, including 89 girls and 79 boys. This is quite a small sample which was only carried out in one area, making it difficult to generalise the results about aggression to the wider population and other cultures. In addition, the sample only consists of 11-12-year-old males and females in 5th grade, and studies have shown that there is a large age difference in aggression. For example, when looking at 4th and 8th graders amounts of aggression, Kozina (2012) found there was much more aggression exhibited in the 8th graders. Hence, it is difficult to generalise the results of the study in Finland even to children 3 years older than 5th graders, let alone adolescents, adults and elderly people.

All children from the study rated themselves and their peers with a group test, which involved asking the children ‘what do they do when they are angry with another boy/girl in class?’ and ‘what do I do when I am angry with another boy/girl in class?’. A four-point scale was given to answer on (0 = not at all, 1 = somewhat, 2 = rather much and 3 = a lot) but it is quite unclear as to how this scale would link to the above questions, making it confusing to read about and possibly difficult to replicate in another study. The test also lasted 50 minutes of answering the same above questions repeatedly, so the children could get bored of answering, which consequently leads to inaccurate answers and a lack of internal validity. Results of this study indicated that the females were more indirectly aggressive than the males, but the males showed more direct aggression such as physical violence and cursing. These results suggest that it is possible to come to the conclusion that males are more physically aggressive; but females are indirectly more aggressive.

Sex differences in aggression may exist due to the different ways men and women cope with anger. Frodi and Berkowitz (1977) indicated that usually, men express more aggression when they are provoked physically by another man compared to being provoked by a woman.

Reasons as to why males may exhibit more physical aggression towards other men can be explained using the evolutionary theory. Sexual jealousy is a large part of the evolutionary theory and is defined as a type of jealousy in sexual relationships; it is a mechanism commonly thought to be used by males so that they can stop their partners from committing adultery and prevent cuckoldry (raising other males’ offspring). Daly and Wilson (1988) carried out a meta-analysis of 8 studies about love triangles which resulted in same sex murders, finding that there was a massive difference in male and female aggression; 92% of the murders committed were by a man killing another man and only 8% of murders were carried out by a woman killing another woman. This indicates that in extreme examples, men are more aggressive than women.

The study I am going to carry out will be to investigate whether men are truly more aggressive than women, and my hypothesis is that men will exhibit more aggressive behaviour. The rationale for my experimental research is that there seems to be somewhat of a lack of studies on differences in aggression between men and women of certain ages; most studies have focused on children and use methods that don’t elicit raw aggression. Thus, my aim is to get the participants to generate aggression as close to real life as possible but in an ethical way as described in the procedure section.

Method Design I will be using an experimental design that will take place in a laboratory setting. The independent variables will be whether the participant is male or female, and the dependent variable will be the amount of aggression shown by the males and females taking part.

Participants There will be 50 male and 50 female participants of a mixed ethnicity who are currently studying their first, second or third year of Psychology at the University of East

Anglia (UEA). The ages will be between 18-21. The sampling method I am going to use is random sampling; this will be done through a computer-generated randomiser on Microsoft Excel to select 50 males and 50 females from the school of Psychology at the UEA.

Materials I will be using 10 computers with the video game ‘Call of Duty’ (CoD) which is a multiplayer first person shooter game, the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992), a consent form and a self-made tally chart where I can record whether aggression is shown by either sex.

Procedure Firstly, I will split the 50 male and 50 female participants into 5 groups so that there are 10 males and 10 females in each group, making it easier to study their aggression. The first group of 20 participants will enter a room to be handed a consent form which lets them know what the experiment will entail, that they have the right to withdraw at any point of the experiment and that I will give them anonymity. I will then assign one female and one male to each computer and tell them they are going to play CoD against each other for 30 minutes. During the time in which they play the game I will be studying their behaviour by using my tally chart. The tally chart has two headings in the columns, ‘men’ and ‘women’, and the rows have type of aggressive behaviour such as ‘slamming hand onto desk’, ‘swearing’, ‘shouting’, ‘insulting other person’ and ‘getting up from seat’. I will walk around the room to each pair several times and put a tick next to any aggressive behaviour I witness for both men and women.

After the 30 minutes of playing have finished, I will ask the participants to fill out the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire, which includes statements such as ‘given enough provocation, I may hit another person’ and ‘I have trouble controlling my temper’. For each statement on the questionnaire, participants will use a 5-point scale (extremely uncharacteristic, somewhat uncharacteristic, neither uncharacteristic or characteristic, somewhat characteristic and extremely characteristic) which allows them to express how much they agree or disagree with the statement. I will ask if they could write whether they identify as male or female so when I collect the questionnaires, I can know which ones belong to each sex. This process will be repeated until all 100 participants have taken part in the study.

Following the study, I am going to count up from the tally chart how many aggressive acts were made by men and women. This will hopefully show the difference between male and female aggression in reaction to stressful and competitive situations. I will separate the questionnaires by male and female, and work out their total aggression scores from what they fill out. This will indicate their level of physical and verbal aggression. If my hypothesis is correct, men will score higher on the aggression questionnaire and will show more aggressive signs whilst playing CoD.

In order to cover different levels of analysis such as ideological with this experiment, I could set up the study specifically for people of a certain culture or religion to see whether men are more aggressive than women in those circumstances. Bergmuller (2013) reported that there is a difference in levels of aggression between individualistic and collectivist cultures, and since I am carrying out the experiment in an individualistic culture, results may not generalise to other cultures.

The study I have described would be a clear and simple way to distinguish levels of aggression from men and women, by simply comparing whether they show more aggressive behaviour than the other sex and whether they score high or low for aggression on the BussPerry Aggression Questionnaire. The use of CoD is appropriate as recent studies have shown that competitive activities like this game can influence aggressive behaviour (Adachi & Willoughby, 2013). Therefore, the study will be able to indicate whether men or women are more aggressive by showing which sex elicits the most aggressive behaviour. However, I may find it difficult to record all behaviours shown in the room as there will be 20 people to watch – so I could miss valuable information for the study.

Studies have looked into the validity and reliability of the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire and found it has ‘moderate to high internal consistencies’ and ‘some degree of construct validity’ (Harris, 1997) which means that using it in my study should generate accurate results. However, since I will be present in the room with all participants and they will be able to see each other, this could create some social desirability where the men and women will act in a way that they deem is appropriate and therefore would not provide accurate aggression scores. Similarly to this, observer effects could take place – the

participants may act a way in which they think I want them to, which again could change their real levels of aggression shown.

The sample size is large enough to get enough results to see whether men are more aggressive than women; however, as they are all university students their results may not generalise to other age groups, meaning there might be a lack of external validity. Older generations may not be familiar with new video games such as CoD, so if they were put through this experiment they may not be as interested in the competition behind it and generate no signs of aggression.

An advantage to carrying out the study as a laboratory experiment is that I will be able to control for other physical extraneous variables that could otherwise influence their aggression levels, giving it high internal validity. However, I will not be able to know whether an event has happened before the participants start the experiment which is something I cannot control for. There may also be an issue of boredom; participants could stop caring about their answers on the questionnaire and answer incorrectly which will create invalid results.

Overall, the majority of recent research has indicated that there are similar levels of aggression between men and women; men use more direct aggression and women use more indirect aggression.

References Adachi, P. C., & Willoughby, T. (2013). Demolishing the competition: the longitudinal link between competitive video games, competitive gambling, and aggression. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 42, (7), 1090-1104

Archer, J. (2000). Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: a metaanalytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, (5), 651-680.

Archer, J. (2004). Sex differences in aggression in real world settings: a meta-analytic review. Review of General Psychology, 8, (4), 291-322 Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bergmüller, S. (2013). The relationship between cultural individualism, collectivism and student aggression across 62 countries. Aggressive Behaviour, 39, (3), 182-200.

Berkowitz, L., & Frodi, A. (1977). Stimulus characteristics that can enhance or decrease aggression: associations with prior positive or negative reinforcements of aggression. Aggressive Behaviour, 3, (1), 1-15.

Buss, A. H., & Perry, M. (1992). The Aggression Questionnaire. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, (3), 452-459.

Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter

Harris, J. A. (1997). A further evaluation of The Aggression Questionnaire: Issues of validity and reliability. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 35, (11), 1047.

Kozina, A. (2012). Age and gender differences in aggression of Slovene elementary and secondary school students. Psihološka Obzorja, 21, (1), 19-28.

Lagerspetz, M. J. K., Bjorkqvist, K., & Peltonen, T. (1988). Is indirect aggression typical of females? Aggressive Behaviour, 14, (6), 403-414.

Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1975). The psychology of sex differences. Stanford: Stanford University Press; London; Oxford University Press.

Tieger, T. (1980). On the biological basis of sex differences in aggression. Child Development, 51, (4), 943-963. Snethen, G., & Puymbroeck, V. M. (2008). Girls and physical aggression: Causes, trends, and intervention guided by Social Learning Theory. Aggression and Violent Behaviour, 13, (5), 346-354....