Theories And Experiments Of Impact Of Social Prejudice On Aggressive Behavior: Study On The Cognitive Processing Mechanism

In recently years, with terrorism, school shootings, war and other violence be more and more frequently in the world, the formation of aggressive behavior and individual characteristics of cognitive processing toward the aggressive information has become one of the hot fields in the social psychology. There were six theories that, including Social Learning Theory, Social Information Processing Model, Excitation Transfer Theory, Cognitive Neo-Associationism Theory, Script Theory and General Aggression Model, have focused on explaining the mechanism of aggression formation that to taking personality characteristics and environmental factors as the main influent factors from different aspects. Recently, researchers such as Duckitt and Fisher(2003), Kreindler(2005), Parrott and Zeichner(2005), and Thomsen, Eva and Sidanius(2008) found that social prejudice, which be defined as the cognitive bias and negative attitude that based on the group classification during the socialization of individuals, also has the high correlation with aggressive behavior. However, there were inconsistent arguments and explanations for the causal effect of the relationship between social prejudice and aggressive behavior, and few related studies were failed to provide the convincing confirmation for them. Therefore, exploring of concentrated on the substantial relationship between prejudice and aggressive behavior should be improve and expand from the much broader perspective.Based on the interviewing of related literatures review and related studies, the present dissertation systematically disscussed the influence of social prejudice on the aggressive behavior triggered as well as on the cognitive processing bias with selective attention bias, memory accessibility and hostile attribution bias of aggressive information by operating the explicit and implicit social prejudice and combining with various aggressive manifestations such as interpersonal aggression, indirect intergroup aggression and overt intergroup conflict. In the concrete procedure of studies, the present dissertation put forward the theoretical model and corresponding five hypotheses of the mechanism between social prejudice and aggressive behavior, with integrated into other variables that closely related with to aggression formation such as Personal trait aggressivity, Group identification and Intergroup threat firstly. And then tested the hypotheses in the serial experiments with choosing the AIDs/Gay prejudice, social anti-foreignism and Doctors-Patients prejudice as the exemplars of social prejudice and choosing the index of Competitive Reaction Time task, Emotional Stroop task, Lexical Decision task and Story Completion Protocol as the experimental dependent variables. The finding of the present dissertation showed that as following:(1) For the formation of the interpersonal aggressive behavior, social prejudice variables played a more significant role than individuals'trait aggressivity. Specifically, when highly degree explicit prejudice subjects hold or their implicit prejudice be primed, social prejudice exerted the main effect to the index changed of aggressive behavior; otherwise, the degree of individuals'trait aggressivity caused the significant difference of individuals'aggressive reaction(2) For the formation of the indirect intergroup aggressive behavior, social prejudice variables still had a main effect. Specifically, explicit prejudice exerted more important influence than the group identification on aggressive behavior, but when only the implicit social prejudice be primed but no explicit prejudice existed, the performance of group identification become more obviously and indicated the outgroup-hate effect.(3) For the formation of the overt intergroup aggressive behavior, intergroup threat variable had a more directed influence than social prejudice; the experimental effect of social prejudice showed Directional feature according to the forces comparison which both sides of conflict hold.(4) In the case of presence of social prejudice, that is, participants that high in explicit prejudice hold or implicit prejudice be primed had more selective attention bias and more hostile attributional interpretation during the aggressive information processing, but no memory accessibility to the aggressive cues.(5) During the formation of aggressive behavior, the way of the influence of explicit and implicit social prejudice indicated differently.In summary, social prejudice was the one of input variables to influence the formation of aggressive behavior. So, it could be effective way to reduce the aggression by means of weakening social prejudice.