![]() It is now widely recognized that an attack can at times be carried out in hope of fulfilling some nonaggressive desire, such as for greater approval by one’s social group. The second part of the formulation, stating that all aggression is ultimately traceable to some prior interference with goal attainment, is largely disregarded these days. Nevertheless, he argued that the nonaggressive responses to the frustration will tend to weaken, and the instigation to aggression strengthen, as the thwarting continues. Moderating the first proposition in the Yale group’s sweeping analysis, in 1948 Neal Miller acknowledged that people prevented from reaching an expected goal might well have a variety of reactions, not only aggressive ones. Few psychologists today accept both parts of this broad-ranging formulation. The team then went on to contend not only that every frustration produces an urge to aggression but also that every aggressive act presupposes the existence of frustration. Aggression, in turn, was regarded as a behavioral sequence whose goal was the injury of the person to whom it was directed. The Yale group took care to define frustration clearly, not as an emotional reaction but as a condition interfering with the attainment of an anticipated goal. The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis and Its Modifications This particular analysis will focus on highlighting many of the theoretical issues involved in determining the role of frustrations in the generation of violence. This general conception, widely known as the frustration-aggression hypothesis, was spelled out much more precisely in 1939 by John Dollard, Leonard Doob, Neal Miller, and several other psychologists, all at Yale University. Before he developed the notion of a death instinct, he proposed that aggression was the primordial reaction when the individual’s attempt to obtain pleasure or avoid pain was blocked. Sigmund Freud had a similar view in his early writings. He maintained that an instinct to engage in combat is activated by any obstruction to the person’s smooth progress toward his or her goal. William McDougall, one of the first psychological theorists to be explicitly labeled a social psychologist, espoused this idea at the beginning of the 20th century. For a good many students of human behavior, the main reason why people become aggressive is that they have been frustrated.
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