Page 312 - The Social Animal

294 The Social Animal

his little sister in the future. In short, a counteraggressive value would
have been internalized. He would have convinced himself that, for
him, hitting someone is neither desirable nor fun.
This general notion has been applied with some success in the
real world of the schoolyard. Dan Olweus, 105 working in the Norwe-
gian school system, was able to curtail the frequency of bullying
behavior by as much as 50 percent by training teachers and admin-
istrators to be vigilant to the problem and to take swift but moder-
ate punitive action. Taken as a whole, this research indicates that
children who have not yet formed their values are more apt to de-
velop a distaste for aggression if the punishment for aggressive ac-
tions is both timely and not terribly severe.

Punishment of Aggressive Models A variation on the
theme of punishment involves punishing someone else. Specifically,
it has been argued that it might be possible to reduce aggression by
presenting the child with the sight of an aggressive model who comes
to a bad end. The theory here is that individuals who are exposed to
this sight will in effect be vicariously punished for their own aggres-
sion and accordingly will become less aggressive. It is probable that,
in our nation’s past, public hangings and floggings were arranged by
people who held this theory. Does it work? Gross data from the real
world do not support the theory. For example, according to the Pres-
ident’s Commission on Law Enforcement, 106 the existence and use
of the death penalty does not decrease the homicide rate. Moreover,
on the level of casual data, the mass media frequently depict aggres-
sive people as highly attractive even though they are eventually pun-
ished. This tends to induce individuals to identify with these violent
characters.
The evidence from controlled experiments presents a more pre-
cise picture. Typically, in these experiments, children watch a film of
an aggressive person who subsequently is either rewarded or pun-
ished for acting aggressively. Later, the children are given an oppor-
tunity to be aggressive under circumstances similar to the ones shown
in the film. The consistent finding is that the children who watched
the film in which the aggressive person was punished display signif-
icantly less aggressive behavior than the children who watched the
film of the person being rewarded. 107 As mentioned previously, there
is also some evidence to indicate that the kids who watched an ag-