A test of the high-magnitude theory of aggression

JOURNAL

A

Test

OF EXPERIMEKTAL

of

the

CHILD

PSYCHOLOGY

High-Magnitude

RICHARD

H. WALERS

1,

376-387 (I%%)

Theory

AND MURRAY U?riversity of Wntsdoo

of

Aggression1

BROWN

The high-magnitude theory of aggression predicts that training in highintensity responses will lead a child to behave in interpersonal situations in ways that will be labeled as aggressive. In Part 1 of the study, grade 2 children were twice trained on an automated Bobo doll; in one training session they were reinforced for high-intensity hitting responses, while in the other training session they were reinforced for low-intensity hitting responses. Following each training session, each child competed in physical-contact games with a grade 2 child who did not otherwise participate in the study. The Ss’ physically aggressive responses were recorded by observers. In Part 2 of the study, kindergarten and grade 1 children were twice trained in a nonaggressive lever-pressing task; the children were reinforced in one training session for high-intensity responses and in the other session for low-intensity rcsponses. The testing procedure was the same as in Part 1. In both parts of the study, children were judged to be more aggress& following highintensity training than following low-intensit,y training.

Acts tend to be labeled as aggressive if the agent’s behavior is capable of producing pain, damage, or loss to others under circumstances that are not thought to justify this outcome. The labeling of an act as aggressive thus involves both a value judgment and the identification of a response sequence as possessing characteristics that are likely to inflict pain, damage, or loss on others. According to the high-magnitude theory of aggression, proposed by Bandura and Walters (1963a,b; Walters, 19641, the possessionof high intensity is one such characteristic. There are several aspects of the high-magnitude theory that perhaps need to be distinguished. In the first place, whereas a mild response may be regarded as nonaggressive, a topologically similar, but more intense, responsemay be judged to be aggressive. For example, a child who gently tugs at its mother’s skirts is likely to be regarded as displaying dependent behavi’or, whereas violent pulling may be categorized as aggression. In ’ The authors wish to express their appreciation to the Kitchener School Board and to the Principal and Staff of Smithson School for their cooperation in this study. Thanks are due to Roland Hersen for acting as the experimenter’s assistant, and to Knil De, Eunice Desmond, and Ruth Franks for serving as observers. Thr rcsearrh was supported by the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, Grant Ko. 42. 37G

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either case, the goal of the response may be to attract the mother’s attention; nevertheless, the social judgments elicited by the two responses differ considerably. A second, related aspect of the theory deals with the widely accepted frustration-aggression hypothesis. Frustration, defined as delay of reward (Bandura and Walters, 1963a), may increase the intensity of the responses for which reward is delayed; on account of this increase in intensity, the agent’s behavior may be regarded as aggressive. Thus, although, according to the theory, frustration is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the eliciting of aggressive responses, frustrating circumstances often elicit acts that are judged to be aggressive. A third aspect of the theory, which the present study was designed to test, concerns the learning of responses that are likely to be labeled as aggressive. High-magnitude responses may be acquired in a wide variety of situations that would not ordinarily be classified as frustrative (for example, play) and generalize to other situations. Under the conditions of acquisition, the high-magnitude responses may not be judged to be aggressive; however, these responses may generalize to other situations in which they are regarded as instances of aggression. Bandura and Walters (1963a) give the example of a child who is taught by his fat.her, through a discrimination-training process, to strike hard on a punch-ball. Once the intense hitting response has been established, it may be elicited in interpersonal situations in which it could inflict pain on others. Generalization of this kind may occur not only in respect to a specific kind of response, for example, hitting, but also in respect to the characteristic of intensity itself. As Bandura and Walters (1963b) have suggest,ed, mothers who ignore mild overtures from their children and attend only when the behavior is frequent and intense may be unwittingly reinforcing socially undesirable high-magnitude responses that may generalize widely; these mothers are t’hus likely to have children who are judged to be “trouhlesome and “aggressive.” In one of a series of investigations int,o the effects of positive reinforcement on aggressive behavior, Walters and Brown (1963) demonstrated that children who had been intermittently reinforced for hitting a Bobo doll showed more “physically aggressive” responses in an interpersonal competitive-game situation than did children who had been continuously reinforced for hitting responses. Alhough it was not possible, at the time, to measure the intensity of the reinforced hitting responses, one may suspect that the intermittently reinforced children made more intense responses when reward was witheld and had, in fact, been reinforced for intense, effortful behavior. When these children were made to compete

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with others in interpersonal situations demanding physical contact, the generalization of the characteristic of intensity may have resulted in their displaying more responses that the observers considered to be classifiable as physically aggressive. The purpose of the present study was to compare, in physical-contact games, the behavior of children who had been trained to give highmagnitude responses and that of children who had been trained to give low-magnitude responses. During the games, the occurrence of responses falling into selected physical-aggression categories was noted by one or two “naive” observers. It was predicted that children trained to give highmagnitude responses would show more physically aggressive behavior than children who had been trained to give low-magnitude responses. One assumption underlying this predict,ion was that training in highmagnitude, effortful behavior would be reflected in an increased number of responses of sufficient intensity to be judged by the observers as falling into one or other of the physical-aggression categories. Unfortunately, there is no practicable means of securing objective measures of the intensity of children’s responses in competitive-game situations like those employed in this study, and consequently t.his underlying assumption cannot be directly verified. The study was conducted in two parts. In Part 1 the response utilized in training was hitting; if used in interpersonal situations, such a response would ordinarily be regarded as aggressive. In Part 2 of the study, a lever-pressing response was used in training; the specific response was similar to that used by Liivaas (1961) as an instance of non-aggressive behavior. METHOD

Part

1

Subjects Sixteen grade 2 boys served as Ss. Their ages ranged from 7 years, 3 months to 9 years, 8 months; the mean age was 7 years, 10 months. The Ss were randomly selected from the available pool of boys in the two grades. Since each boy was to be tested under both a high-intensity and a l’ow-intensity training condition, eight boys were randomly assigned to each of the two possible orders of training. Cmpe titers An additional 16 boys were selected from the grade 2 classes to compete with Ss in the testing situation. The Ss and competitors (Cs) were randomly paired.

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Apparatus The apparatus was an automated Bobo doll, described in previous publications (Bandura and Walters, 1963b; Cowan and Walters, 1963). Each time a child struck the doll’s stomach, the occurrence of the response and its intensity were recorded on an Esterline-Angus recorder. Intensity was recorded by means of a Clark CS-5-50 pressure cell (O-50 pounds). Since the force of the hits versus the recorder pen deflection was a nonlinear uncalibrated function, only the relative force of hits could be determined. When the toy was struck by the child, the clown’s eyes and a flower in his buttonhole lit up. In addition to the minimal reinforcement that the lights presumably supplied, reinforcements in the form of glass marbles were provided for selected responses. The marbles were contained in a Gerbrand’s Universal Dispenser located beside the Bobo doll and were released from the dispenser by means of a remote-control button. When released, the marbles fell into a tin can placed immediately underneath the dispenser. The locat.ion of the can, together with the noise of the dropping marbles, ensured t’hat S was aware that some of his responses were being reinforced. The Angus-Esterline recorder and the remote control for the dispenser were both located behind a transportable one-way vision booth that had been set in one corner of the experimental room. Training

procedure

Each boy received two training sessions on the Bobo doll, each session being followed later in the same day by a testing session. An assistant of E, who was stationed behind the observation booth during the training session, noted the recorded incidence and intensity of S’s responses and operated the dispenser. First training session. On the morning of one day, S was brought to the experimental room by E and instructed as follows: ‘(Do you see this toy? You may play with it if you like. You play with it by hitting it right here (E points to the clown’s stomach) and you may keep anything you win.” At this instant the operati’ons recorder was turned on by E’s assistant, and E removed himself to a table where he appeared to be occupied with books and papers. In order to establish the intensity of responses for which S was to be reinforced, he was given an initial 2-minute period of play, during which marbles were dispensed on a fixed-interval schedule of one marble every 30 seconds. This period also served to familiarize S with the equipment and the reinforcement procedure.

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Following this 2-minute period, E said, “O.K. Now let’s rest for a minute.” During this rest period, E’s assistant calculated the intensity level at which S was to be reinforced during the training period. After the l-minute rest period, E said, “Now you can play with the toy again, if you like.” During the training period, eight Ss were reinforced for responses that, were more int,ense than the ten most intense responses that they gave during the initial 2 minutes of responding; the remaining Ss were reinforced for responses that were less intense than the ten least intense responses that were registered during the initial pIay period. All Ss were allowed to play with the toy until they had made 15 reinforced responses. The E then said to S, “That’s enough. You may keep all you won. You may go back to your room now.” Second training session. The second training session, which occurred exactly 2 weeks later, was identical wit’h the first, except that the assignment of Ss to the two experimental conditions was reversed. The Ss previously t,rained to respond with high-intensity responses were now trained to respond with low-intensity responses, and vice versa. Testing procedure In the afternoon of each day on which he received training, X was brought back to the experimental room and was told that he was going to play some games. He was instructed to be seated while E fetched someone with whom he might play. Two observers, who had no knowledge of the purpose of the experiment and who were unaware of the condition under which S had been t’rained, were located behind the one-way vision booth. As soon as E returned with C, he said, “Come over here, fellows. We are going to play some games.” The S and C followed E to a rectangular game area, approximately 10 X 12 feet, which had been marked out on the floor. On reaching the game area, E said, We’re going to play some games. Will you go over there (motioning S to one corner of the rectangle), and will you go over there (motioning C to another corner).” During the session, S and C interacted during two competitive games, LLCover the Cross” and “Scalp” [previously used by Davitz (1953) and Walters and Brown (1963) 1, and during an intervening free-play period. “Cover the Cross”: In the center of the game area was an “X” consisting of two strips of black mystic tape. The E instructed the competitors as follows: “DO you see this X-mark? Now, the winner of this game is the one who is on the X-mark when I call ‘Stop.’ You can do anything you like to get on the X-mark or to get the other fellow off. Now, when I say ‘Go,’ you start; and remember, the one who has some part of his body completely c’overing the X-mark when I call ‘Stop’ is the winner. And if

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you play the games real well, 1’11 give you each some marbles.” The game was continued for 3 minutes, after which E cried “Stop” and said clis the winner” or “There’s no winner in this game,” depending on the outcome. Free play: E now said, “Now, you can do anything you like for the next little while, but do something together. Go ahead; do something together.” If at the end of each 30-second interval of the free-play period, S and (1 were not playing t,ogether, E told them, “Go ahead; play together some more.” At the end of 2 minutes, E said, “Let’s play one more game.” “Scalp’f: E bound self-adhesive elastic bandages around the arms of both S and C. He then said, lLYou see these things around your arms. They are your ‘scalps.’ This is your ‘scalp’ (pointing to S’s bandage), and this is your ‘scalp’ (pointing to C’s bandage). Now, in this game the winner is the one who takes the ‘scalp’ from the other fellow but keeps his own on. Now, just like in the ‘X-game,’ you can do anything you like to take the other fellow’s scalp from his arm and to protect your own. When I say ‘Go,’ you start; and remember, it is just as important to keep your own ‘scalp’ on as to take off the other fellow’s ‘scalp.’ And if you really play the game well, I’ll give you each some marbles when we are all finished.” The game was played for 2 minutes. If there was a winner before this time, E simply said, “Let’s have another game.” The bandages were then once more wrapped around the boy’s arm. Time lost in re-starting the game was not included in the 2-minute period. At the end of 2 minutes, whether the game was completed or not, E said, “O.K., fellows. That’s enough.” To avoid Ss’ telling about their experiences to t’heir schoolmates, E continued, ‘%ince you both played the games so well, I am going to give each of you some marbles, but I do not want you to tell anyone about it or about anything that happened down here.” The S and C were then returned to their classrooms. The first and second testing sessions were carried out in an identical manner. Moreover, each S interacted with the same C in each testing session. Measures Ratings during testing were made only on the boy in the pair who served as S. The observers were supplied with specially prepared sheets, listing a number of conventional physical-aggression categories, similar to those previously used by Walters and Brown (1963). These categories were butting, kneeing, elbowing, kicking, punching, pulling, pushing, twisting hand, and sitting on back. The total testing time was divided into 20-second intervals. 1 f an oh-

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server judged that a response falling into one of the physical-aggression categories occurred during any 20-second interval, he placed a line in the appropriate box on the rating sheet. A response of a particular kind was scored only once within a single 20-second interval. This procedure was employed to eliminate the problem of determining what constit,uted a single response. The average of the total numbers of responses assigned by the two raters was regarded as S’s aggression index for the testing session. Part 2 Subjects and competitors The Ss were 16 kindergarten and grade 1 boys from the same school as the grade 2 boys used in Part 1 of the study. Their ages ranged from 5 years, 0 months to 7 years, 0 months; the mean age was 6 years, 3 months. The Cs were kindergarten and grade 1 boys who were randomly paired with Ss from their own grade. The design and the testing procedure of Part 2 of the study were precisely the same as those employed in Part 1. Consequently, only the apparatus and the training procedure require describing. Apparatus The t,raining apparatus consisted of a lever-pressing device which was secured to a wooden platform 36 inches long and 24 inches wide. The lever enabled a ball to be propelled toward the top of a 29-inch column. The front and sides of the column were made of clear plastic, while the rear consisted of a board marked out in 14 equal intervals. The intervals were signified by red lines on a white background and were boldly numbered. The lever protruded 5 inches from a box at the base of the column. The end of the lever inside the column formed a cup, designed to hold a ping-pong ball. When the lever was depressed, the ball was propelled upwards ; the height to which the ball was propelled was indicated in terms of the interval divisions on the back ‘of the column. The difficulty with which a ball could be propelled upwards was determined by a weighted wooden panel that was connected with springs to the part of the lever inside the column and also to the lower-front inside wall of the column. If the springs were disconnected from the lever, a gentle press easily sent the ball to the top of the column; when the weights and springs were attached to the lever, the ball could be propelled to the top of the column only if considerable force was employed. When-

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ever the ball hit the ceiling of the column, which was made of tin, a clanging noise was produced. The marble dispenser, used in conjunction with the Bobo doll, was employed to dispense reinforcements for responses in the lever-pressing task. The arrangements were similar to those employed with the Bobo doll, except that the remote control for the marble dispenser was left outside the one-way vision booth and was manipulated by E. Trairkg

procedure

Instructions to S were as follows: ‘(Do you see this toy? You may play with it, if you like. You play with it by holding it like this and pressing down. (E demonstrates by gripping the lever, with his thumb placed on a piece of scotch tape that was affixed to the lever at a point about half way along its length.) Make sure the ball has settled before you depress the lever.” In order to establish the intensity level at which S was to be reinforced, he was allowed an initial “practice” period, consisting of 20 presses on the lever. The E recorded the level the ball reached after each press. At the end of this “base-line” period, E said, “O.K. Now, let’s rest a minute.” The E then calculated the level at which S was to be reinforced. After a l-minute break, E told S, “NOW, you can play with the toy again, and this time you may keep anything you win.” Each S was tested twice, as in Part 1 of the study. Under the highintensity training condition, the weights and springs were attached to the lever, and S was reinforced only for responses that projected the ball as high as, or higher than, the point that it reached in the fifth highest trial of the initial 25trial period. Under the low-intensity condition, the springs and weights were disconnected, and S was reinforced only for responses that projected the ball to a lower level than that which it reached on t’he fifth lowest trial of the initial 25-trial period. If, under the low-intensity condition, S had reached the maximum level possible on sixteen or more of the 20 initial trials, he was reinforced for any response:: that did not propel the ball to the top of the column. The Ss were, under each training condition, allowed to play with the toy until they had made fift,een reinforced responses. The E sat behind S during the reinforcement procedure; the remote control of the dispenser was hidden behind a curtain so that S was not aware of E's role in dispensing the marbles. Thus, the reward procedure was not dissimilar to that employed in Part 1 of the experiment in spite of the fact that E himself controlled the reinforcers. After S had received 15 reinforcements, E said, “That’s enough. You may keep all you won. Now we are going to

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play some games, so why don’t you sit here (E points to a chair) while I get someone to play with you.” As in Part 1, all Ss were tested twice, once following training under the high-intensity condition and ‘once following training under the lowintensity condition, with order effect,s controlled. During testing, S’s responses were recorded by two observers. One of these was a housewife who had no knowledge of the purpose of the experiment or ‘of the experimental conditions; the other was E’s assistant. The judgment,s made by the “naive” observer were used in statistical analyses. RESULTS

Inter-rater reliabilities for the aggression indices were 0.89 and 0.94 for Parts 1 and 2 of the study, respectively. TABLE GROUP

MEANS

AND

STANDARD

1

DEVIATION

OF AGGRESSION

INDICES’

Type of training High intensity Mean

SD

Mean

SD

High First High Second

26.7 27.9

7.35 5.17

22.0 23.4

7.29 4.07

High First High Second

21.2 19.5

7.79 5.87

16.2 14.5

6.85 5.89

Task Hitting

Low intensity

Lever pressing

1~n = 8 in each group; repeated measures design.

Table 1 gives the group means and SD’s for these indices. Type II analyses of variances (Lindquist, 1953) showed that children tested under the high-intensit,y conditions, both on the Bobo doll and on the leverpressing task, had significantly higher mean physical-aggression indices than those trained under the corresponding low-intensity conditi’ons (F = 5.43; p < 0.05 for Bobo-doll training; F = 10.14; p < 0.01 for leverpressing training). The effects of differential training in high-magnitude and low-magnitude responseswere thus similar for two groups of subjects varying in age and trained on very different types of tasks. Neither analysis yielded a significant main effect for order of treatment or a significant interaction effect. Since the dependent measures in Part 1 and Part 2 were precisely the same, a supplementary Type III analysis of variance (Lindquist, 1953)

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carried out by using the data from both parts of the study. The analysis yielded a highly significant main effect attributable to the differential reinforcement of high-intensity and low-int,ensity responses (F = 14.08; p < O.OOl), and also a significant difference between Ss used in Part 1 and those used in Part 2 of the study (F = 11.87; p < 0.005). This latter effect cannot, however, be attributed to the single factor of type of training (hitting versus lever-pressing), since the two sets of Ss differed in age and were rated by different observers.

was

DISCUSSION Observation of the raters indicated that they did not score every competitive physical-contact response of the subjects as an instance of aggression. After ratings had been completed, the “naive” raters were questioned concerning the criteria that had been employed in deciding whether a particular physical-contact response, for example, pushing, should be scored in one of the physical-aggression categories. Their replies indicated that they had utilized to a large extent an intensity criterion (‘(force”) in making their judgments. It is therefore pr’obably safe to conclude that habits of responding with high or low intensity set up during training generalized to the competitive game situation, and that, as a result, children trained under the high-intensity condition exhibited more responses classifiable as aggressive than did children trained under the low-intensit’y condition. The study does not provide an ideal test of the high-magnitude theory. Such a test would entail securing an objective measure of the intensity of the responses made in the testing situation, together with judgments of observers concerning both the incidence and the strength of responses that they would categorize as aggressive. Technical difficulties obviously preclude objective measures of intensity of responses made during socialinteraction sequences of the kind used in this study. The use of the competitive-game and free-play sit,uations nevertheless had the advantage that it rendered the data comparable to those previously secured by Walters and Brown (1963). It is now reasonable to suppose that the relatively high aggression of children trained by Walters and Brown on an FR 1:6 schedule was due to the different,ial reinforcement of the intense hitting responses of these children during the training period. In Part 1 of the study it was more difficult for children under the highintensity condition training, than for children under the low-intensity condition, to reach criterion during training. On the average, children under the former condition were reinforced only once every twelve responses; in contrast, children under the latter condition were reinforced, on the average, once every eight responses. It could therefore be argued

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that the difference between the two groups of subjects represented a motivational (frustration) effect and was not the outcome of differential reinforcement. The motivational interpretation is rendered less convincing by the outcome of Part 2 of t’he study. The lever-pressing equipment was designed in such a way that the production of low-intensity responses was difficult for the children. While E did not actually count the number of responses made by each S during training, it was quite evident that children under the low-intensity condition took considerably more trials to reach criterion than did children under the high-intensity condition. The obtained difference between the intensity groups must therefore be attributed to the transfer of previously reinforced habits of response.? In spite of some methodological shortcomings, the findings from Parts 1 and 2, taken together, demonstrate the need for re-evaluation of customary approaches to the problem of aggression. Walters and Parke (1964) have argued that the traditional motivational categories of socialpsychological research, for example, dependency and aggression, arc “quasi-evaluative” in nat,ure. “It is suggested that motives of this kind are not characteristics of human agents, but’ constructs by means of which human beings order social phenomena and evaluate behavior in terms ‘of its acceptability or nonacceptability within a given cultural context” (pp. 271-272). It follows, from this point of view, that children d’o not, strictly speaking, acquire social habits or social drives; on the other hand, they may learn characteristic response-components, or modes of response, common to all or most acts that are customarily placed in a specific motivational category, so that their behavior is in many contexts judged to be, for example, aggressive or dependent. This theoretical approach further implies that the response components or modes of response in question may be acquired in contexts in which they would not, be subsumed under a social-motivation label. The data from Part 2 of the st’udy support this implication. The generalization of high-magnitude responses from the lever-pressing situation, in which such responses could hardly be classified as aggressive, to the play situation, in which they were classified as aggressive, is an example of the kinds of transfer of learning that would be predicted by t’he theory. Alth’ough the observers primarily employed the criterion of ‘Lforce” ‘The difficulty of the tasks was assessed by testing ten children not included in the study, five under the high-intensity condition and five under the low-intensity condit,ion. Each child was required to press the lever until he had obtained 15 reinforcements. The ratio of reinforced to total responses was 1:1.6 for children under the high-intensity condition and 1:4.9 for children under the low-intensity condition ; the distributions of responses to criterion for the two groups did not overlap.

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in determining whether they should classify a response as aggressive, they also mentioned the use of a second criterion, “expression,” which has not yet been considered in expositions of the social-judgment approach to the problem of aggression. While facial expression, gestures, and body posture can provide indications of the intensity or effortfulness of behavior, they may influence judgments concerning social motives in other ways than this. Any thorough investigation into the learning ‘of social judgments will undoubtedly have to evaluate the role of cues that are provided by the facial and bodily expression of agents. REFEREXCES A., AND WALTERS, R. H. Aggression. In Child psychology: The sixty-second yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. 1963, pp. 364415. (a) BANDURA, A., AND WALTERS, R. H. Social learning and personality development. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963. (b) COWAN, P. A., AND WALTERS, R. H. Studies of reinforcement of aggression. I. Effects of scheduling. Child Develpm., 1963, 34, 543-552. DAVITZ, J. R. The effects of previous training on postfrustrative behavior. J. abnorm. sot. Psychol., 1952, 47, 309-315. LINDQUIST, E. F. Design and analysis of experiments in psychology and education. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1953. L~VAAS, 0. I. Interaction between verbal and nonverbal behavior. Child Develpm., 1961,32,3%336. WALTERS, R. H. On the high-magnitude theory of aggression. Child Develpm., 1964, BANDURA,

35,303-394.

R. H., AND BROWN, M. Studies of reinforcement of aggression: III. Transfer of responses to an interpersonal situation. Child Develpm., 1963, 34, 563-572. WALTERS, R. H., AND PARKE, R. D. Social motivation, dependency, and susceptibility to social influence. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology. Vol. 1. Kew York: Academic Press, 1964, Pp. 231-276. WALTERS,