Discuss Psychological Explanations of Two or More Forms of Institutional Aggression

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There is empirical support for the notion that situational forces can influence institutional aggression. McCorkle et al. (1995) found that overcrowding, lack of privacy, and the lack of meaningful activity all significantly influence peer aggression in institutions. This shows that situational forces, such as the environment can influence aggression, through boredom, agitation and lack of personal space. This increases the credibility of the idea that situational forces can influence the levels of aggression in institutions, as there is empirical evidence to support it.

On the other hand, There is contradictory evidence that refutes McCorkle’s findings that situational forces can influence institutional aggression, for example. Nijman et al (1999) found that increased personal space failed to decrease the level of violent incidents among patients in a psychiatric institution. This suggests that aggression in patients is not just down to the institution itself but it must be that interpersonal factors and personality traits contribute also. For example, it could be that these individuals have the ‘warrior gene’ and increased levels of testosterone which increases aggression in men. Consequently, this reduces the credibility of the deprivation/situational explanation in explaining institutional aggression.

There is a real-life application of the deprivation model at HMP Woodhill in the early 1990s. For example, Wilson (2010) reasoned that if most violence occurs in environments that hot, noisy and overcrowded, then this could be avoided by reducing these factors. He set up a prison unit to reduce ‘prison like’ factors that were less claustrophobic and that gave views to the outside. Temperature was lowered and the typical prison noise was masked by music from a local radio station. Wilson found that these changes practically eradicated assaults on prison staff and other prisoners. This supports the deprivation model because it shows that inmate aggression must have been the product of the stressful and oppressive conditions of the institution (Paterline & Peterson, 1999). This is because once a more ‘pleasant’ environment was introduced, the aggression was eliminated. Thus, such research into institutional aggression lack internal validity as researchers are not measuring what they set out to measure. As a result, this casts doubt on the credibility of the research into institutional aggression between groups.