Su Chen Wen

• Social scientists have turned increasingly toward motives, reasons, and causal factors that may be operative both in individual human beings and in social collective
• Even though people are not immediately aware of them and do not become consciously aware of them except as a result of scientific observation and methodical analysis

• Why do individuals behave aggressively ?
• Why do states and other groups or actors wage wars ?
– Macrocosmic and Microcosmic
– Psychological
– Multiple explanatory factors

• Conflict has an inside and an outside dimension.
• It arises out of the internal dimensions of internal dimensions of acting singly or in groups, and also out of external conditions and social structures.
– Sociobiology
– Sociobiologists

• The frustration-aggression school has attempted to move from the individual to the social level more by logical inference than by experimentation.
• Frustration-aggression patterns are culturebound, the socialization of aggression takes place in all human societies, attenuating hostile action among members of the in-group by directing aggressive impulses against out-groups.

• “Intolerance of ambiguity”
• “Nationalism” certainly contains strong and unmistakable psychological ingredients.
• “Escape from freedom”

• Bandura has shown that the conversion of socialized individual into effective military combatants requires a carefully conceived and executed training program
• Frustration-Aggression-Displacement syndrome.

• Should not discount too much the role of psychological factors in the onset and conduct of war.
• Leaders and citizens alike form their attitudefriendly, hostile, or indifferent-about the world, foreigners, and other nations and cultures through a complex process of psychosocial development from youth to old age.

• Kenneth Bouding, the behavior of complex political organizations is determined by decisions that are in turn the functions of the decision maker’s image.
• The images of decision makers are more important than the images of the masses.
• According to Boulding , the folk-image is a mass image, share by rules and ruled alike.

• The notion of mirror images became popular during the Cold War and was based on the assumption
• the people of two countries involved in a prolonged hostile confrontation develop fixed, distorted attitude that are really quite similar.

• The key microcosmic concept developed by biologists and psychologist for the explanation of conflict is aggression.
– Hostile aggression
– Instrumental aggression
• “Social labeling process”, that is , on social judgment that determine which injurious or destructive acts are to called “aggressive”.

• Konrad Lorenz, aggression is an instinct, which under natural conditions helps to ensure the survival of the individual and the species.
• The typical aggressive instinct, he says , occurs among members of the same species, not between members of different species.
• It is intraspecific rather than interspecific, and it is best illustrated by the tenacity with which a fish, mammal, or bird will defend its territory against others of its own species.

• Most psychologists today trace individual aggression to some form of frustration.
• “Aggression is always a consequence of frustration” and that frustration always leads to some form of aggression.
• “Frustration-Aggression Theory” appeals to the common sense of most people, who know from personal experience that they have at time felt aggressive urges after being frustrated.

• Social psychologist often point out the expression of aggression within a society may be either covert or overt.
• Scientists may develop culturally acceptable ways of either reducing or working off aggressive impulses.

• This chapter has shown how complex are the biological and psychosocial foundations of politics.
• However important first-image causes of war may be –and no one denies their importantwe may never completely understand the factors that operate, consciously or unconsciously , and personal level.