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Scientific Study of Non-Violence
99
temperate climate but man just put off his coat and survived.
Prior to the mammoths, gigantic reptiles like dinosaurs and ichthyosaurs which flourished in wide expanses of sea and swamp during the Jurassic era in warm and moist climate, became extinct when the climate became drier and colder and waters more restricted. These reptiles perished because they were too closely adapted for living in a particular set of conditions.
From the above examples, we learn, that exclusive adaptation to a peculiar environment can prove biologically disadvantageous, and on the other hand, capacity for adaptation to changing environments helps the species to survive.
We shall now deal with the causes and circumstances that make an individual or a group of individuals aggressive and violent.
Individual Aggression
The causes and circumstances that elicit an aggressive response from an individual are:
1. Frustration and noxious stimuli 2. Reinforcement history 3. Social facilitation 4. Temperament We will take each one of them separately.
Frustration and Noxious Stimuli: Frustration and noxious stimuli of various type are the two chief antecedents of aggression; their frequency and intensity determines the degree of aggressiveness.
Frustration is not necessarily caused if a person who wants something is prevented from getting it. A distinction has to be made between a deprivation which is unimportant to a person (easily substituted for, with few serious after-effects), and a deprivation which is a threat to his personality, to the life goals, to his defensive system, to his self-esteem or to his feeling of security. It is only the later deprivation which leads to frustration. Let us try to understand this distinction clearly.
A child deprived of an ice-cream cone may have lost simply an ice-cream cone. Another child, however, deprived of an icecream cone, may have lost not only a sensory gratification, but may also feel deprived of the love of his mother because she
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