How Social Media Has Made People Aggressive

Introduction

With the increasing usage of social media, face-to-face interactions, essential for personality growth, acquisition of knowledge, social skills, and communicative skills, have been withdrawn from people's lives (Hollis, 2019). Children rarely interact with one another hence leading to unsocial characteristics. On the other hand, social media has made lives easier because people can easily find information, connect with strangers, advertising content, and resolve problems. Also, social media quickly makes users compared their experiences with other people hence increasing depression levels. Even though there is minimal investigation connecting the number of hours one spends on social media with aggressive behavior, enough material proves that some internet users might generate aggressive behavior due to internet usage. According to the drive theory, the terms drive implies amplified provocation and internal inspiration to reach a specific objective. Experts claim that there is a primary and secondary drive. Direct campaigns are tied to survival and include food and water (Rost et al., 2016). On the other hand, secondary drives are culturally influenced, namely, social media influence, and approval. Another alternative theory that can explain aggressive behavior due to social media behavior is learning theory. The learning theory stipulates that aggression is a learned behavior acquired through the interaction between two or more people (Chwialkowska, 2019). Since social media facilitate the exchange of numerous people at a go, it generates a higher level of aggression than other businesses.

How Learning and Drive Theory Explain Aggression Social Media Behavior

 Most of the time, social media platforms such as Instagram show people a lavish lifestyle. Despite the harsh realities of life, social media users are accustomed to; whenever they log into their favorite social media platform, they might get the impression that someone else is living a better life than them (Chwialkowska, 2019). Social media gives its users an illusion, which in turn, motivates or drives them to pursue lifestyles that might be beyond their reach aggressively. On the other hand, learning theory explains that people acquire aggressive behavior by observing other people. As stated earlier, social media is an outlet through which large amounts of information are accessible and readily available (Rost et al., 2016). Some of the reports contains violent content or aggressive behavior, thus arousing more feeling than usual. In the end, an average social media user becomes more aggressive than he or she could have become without the use of social media.

The Bob Doll Experiment 1961

 The aim of the bobo doll experiment was to study social behaviors such as aggression. According to the conclusions of the report, social characteristics can developed through observation and imitation. During the experiment, Bandura et al., isolated 36 boys and 36 women from Stanford College (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961). All the participants were aged 3-6 years. In order to effectively attain the objectives, some researchers physically abused a doll in front of the children. Later the children imitated the behavior and assaulted the doll. Similarly, social media has the same effect on people. Most of the time, social media users are passive, hence the only way to release energy is through making aggressive remarks a cyberbullying. More so, social media give its users a chance to select content through followers. Without knowing it, social media conforms people to develop extreme non tolerant behavior toward people who harbor a contrary behavior. In summary, social media platforms induce aggression through the content it airs, the opinions it supports and depicts to its users.

Factors Contributing To Aggressive Behavior Due To Internet Usage

 In the past ten years, the emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have increased user-generated material and made it accessible to numerous people. Any information can spread far and wide due to social media platforms (Sparby, 2017). This led to a lively exchange of content but has also triggered aggressive and potentially harmful behavior. Some of the destructive behavior is cyberbullying and hate speech. Even though bullying and hate speech existed before the advent age of the internet, with the increasing usage of social platforms, cyberbullying and hate speech greatly influence people. Some internet users have committed suicides after deactivating their social media accounts. Thus, aggressive and harmful behavior is marked as an indication of the impact social media has on its users.

 One of the most notable contributing factor to aggressive behavior is the number of hours social media users spend on social media platforms (Chatzakou et al., 2017). Numerous researches tie internet addiction to rising aggressive behaviors. The unregulated use of the internet causes distress and wastefully hinders an individual's progress in the long run leading to social, monetary, and professional challenges. Most internet users spend most of their time liking and commenting on images, which might trigger violence, leading to harmful behavior.

Outrage has defined the current society; this is due to the increasing usage of the internet. Social media has replaced society's fundamental ideas; nowadays, anyone can Photoshop an image and then change the context to suit their own needs.  For example, one user can Photoshop a picture that might be abusive to other social media users hence sparking outrage and even violence (Chatzakou et al., 2017). An underlying reason for the increasing outage is that people cannot defend themselves over the internet.  Consequently, when an internet user sees an offensive issue on the internet, they cannot quickly consider the person behind the offensive post, thus building up anger and anguish. Also, the virtual world of social media has given people courage because they can say anything without the actual consequences following them hence a driver to use and abuse the freedom of speech.

Long Term Impact of Social Media Aggression

 Anger brings considerable economic costs because it leads to antisocial behavior and negatively impacts relationships, work output, mental status, and, generally, an individual's health. Although humans cannot wholly avert anger, permitting it to exist and graduate into a chronic disaster, persistently might cause abuse in the current society. It is vital to note that anger is a useful outlet for pent up energy (Ho et al., 2017). However, its misuse leads to dysfunctionality due to its frequency and the cynical manner in which it is expressed. As a fundamental human instinct, anger triggers a response. Aggression is an instinctive emotion which can be harnessed physically due to the adrenaline driving it. The only challenging issue with social media is its limitless accessibility due to its virtual nature. Social media users can hide their identity and even values whenever they want to. Every social media user can easily pretend to be something that he or she is not (Edinyang, 2016). Thus, thinning tolerance increases stress due to the enormous amount of information one feeds into. Social media has been able to determine the mental status of the younger generations and accurately facilitate outburst due to the numerous amounts of data flowing through various social media outlets (Van Hee et al., 2018).  More so, the study into social media offers a variety of thought-provoking observational revelations. Research on the face to face categories exposed that conversation among like-minded individuals radicalized their usual perspective. A class that begins with average opinions ends up having strong opinions on matters concerning a particular issue. 

Two issues are contributing to the radicalization of opinions. One of them is informational individuals who acquire new information on the specific subject matter. Secondly, radicalization occurs due to social media's social nature, where people emulate each other and influence each other against particular issues due to the newly found information (Zafar, & Chaudhary, 2018). Thus, social media discussions can be either informational or contain elements of categorization.  In social media platforms such as Twitter, people argue against or for specific subject matters to gain fame or even go viral (Hoste, 2018). No matter the factual background of the people involved in the conversation, social media users tend to exhibit aggression and violence in their opinions and discussions. Radical people have a higher sway on other social media users than the average social media influencer.

 In summary, the increasing usage of social media has also seen an emergence of aggressive behavior worldwide. One social media platform can contain more than 15million users per hour. Each user interacts with different followers or friends at different time levels. Also, each user has his or her own unique opinion. Through the drive theory, users can gain motivation from the illusion lifestyles they see on different social media platforms. On the other hand, learning theory explains that aggressive behavior is learned in social media platforms as one interacts with social media users.

 

 

 

References

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Chatzakou, D., Kourtellis, N., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., & Vakali, A. (2017, June). Mean birds: Detecting aggression and bullying on twitter. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on web science conference (pp. 13-22).

Chwialkowska, A. (2019). How sustainability influencers drive green lifestyle adoption on social media: the process of green lifestyle adoption explained through the lenses of the minority influence model and social learning theory. Management of Sustainable Development, 11(1).

Edinyang, S. D. (2016). The significance of social learning theories in the teaching of social studies education. International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Research, 2(1), 40-45.

Ho, S. S., Chen, L., & Ng, A. P. (2017). Comparing cyberbullying perpetration on social media between primary and secondary school students. Computers & Education, 109, 74-84.

Hollis, L. P. (2019). Lessons from Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiments: Leadership’s Deliberate Indifference Exacerbates Workplace Bullying in Higher Education. Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education, 4, 085-102.

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Sparby, E. M. (2017). Digital social media and aggression: Memetic rhetoric in 4chan’s collective identity. Computers and Composition, 45, 85-97.

Van Hee, C., Jacobs, G., Emmery, C., Desmet, B., Lefever, E., Verhoeven, B., ... & Hoste, V. (2018). Automatic detection of cyberbullying in social media text. PloS one, 13(10), e0203794.

Zafar, A., & Chaudhary, U. G. (2018). Effects of violence shown in media on children: A study of parent’s perspective. Journal of Early Childhood Care and Education, 2.