The General Aggression Model (MOAB)

Aggressive acts are a common occurrence in today’s society. There is war across the globe, bombings in public locations, street violence, and even personal acts of aggression. In a rather public act of aggression that occurred recently, the United States military dropped a bomb on an important ISIS location, but not just any bomb, the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB). The MOAB is the largest, non-nuclear device that has ever been deployed in combat. It was a massive 21,600 pound bomb, which is equivalent to eleven tons of TNT, and yet, it paled in comparison to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima in World War II (Steinbuch, 2017). The target of the MOAB was a reinforced tunnel system located in the Nangarhar province that was being
The GAM discusses how a chain of events can lead to blatant aggression through the input of situational and person factors (Branscombe & Baron, 2017). The GAM functions as a cycle with input variables and a person’s own internal state which then leads to either a thought out action or an aggressive act. The internal states that influence the decisions of aggressive acts include arousal, which increases physiological arousal, affective, which generates hostile feelings, and cognitions, which cause individuals to think aggressive thoughts (2017). The GAM has been important in integrating the numerous theories of aggression that exist into one straightforward framework. According to DeWall and Bushman (n.d), they define “aggression as any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed [and] define violence as any aggressive act that has as its goal extreme physical harm” (p.246). The attack on the ISIS tunnel is considered both an aggressive and violent act, whether it was necessary or not. In terms of the bomb drop on the ISIS tunnel by the US military, the aggression held between these two groups of people was due to the characteristics that each group brought to the war and the environmental setting in which the violence is taking place which increases aggression (DeWall & Bushman, n.d). The dropping of the MOAB on the tunnel complex was not done impulsively or to stop something before it even began, but was due to the escalating chain reaction of one aggressive act that lead to another and so on. Group aggression is similar to individual aggression in that their prior history develops beliefs and attitudes to influence the aggression. Therefore, determining the appropriate treatments on aggressive behaviors for a group should be similar to determining treatments for an