Page 296 - The Social Animal

278 The Social Animal

Similarly, the mere presence of an object associated with aggres-
sion can serve as a cue for an aggressive response. In an experiment, 67
college students were made angry: Some of them were made angry
in a room in which a rifle was left lying around (ostensibly from a
previous experiment) and others in a room in which a neutral object
(a badminton racket) was substituted for the rifle. The students were
then given the opportunity to administer some electric shocks to a
fellow college student. Those individuals who had been made angry
in the presence of the aggressive stimulus administered more elec-
tric shocks than did those made angry in the presence of the bad-
minton racket. This is another example of priming, first encountered
in Chapter 4; in this instance, certain cues associated with aggression
act to increase a person’s tendency to aggress. These studies point to
an opposite conclusion from the slogan often seen on bumper stick-
ers—“Guns don’t kill people, people do.” As Berkowitz puts it, “An
angry person can pull the trigger of his gun if he wants to commit
violence; but the trigger can also pull the finger or otherwise elicit
aggressive reactions from him, if he is ready to aggress and does not
have strong inhibitions against such behavior.” 68
One aspect of social learning that tends to inhibit aggression is
the tendency most people have to take responsibility for their ac-
tions. But what happens if this sense of responsibility is weakened?
69
Philip Zimbardo has demonstrated that persons who are anony-
mous and unidentifiable tend to act more aggressively than persons
who are not anonymous. In Zimbardo’s experiment, female students
were required to shock another student (actually a confederate) as
part of a “study of empathy.” Some students were made anonymous;
they were seated in a dimly lit room, dressed in loose-fitting robes
and large hoods, and never referred to by name. Others were easily
identifiable; their room was brightly lit, no robes or hoods were used,
and each woman wore a name tag. As expected, those students who
were anonymous administered longer and more severe shocks. Zim-
bardo suggests that anonymity induces deindividuation, a state of
lessened self-awareness, reduced concern over social evaluation, and
weakened restraints against prohibited forms of behavior.
Because it was part of a controlled laboratory experiment, the
kind of aggression displayed by subjects in Zimbardo’s research pales
in comparison with the wild, impulsive acts of violence typically as-
sociated with riots, gang rapes, and vigilante justice. Nevertheless,