Krav Maga Blog Articles

In last week’s article I looked at aggression and violence being explained by social learning theory; that aggression and violence is learnt through observation, and that it doesn’t even have to be experienced – but can be learnt by simply witnessing an aggressive/violent incident. In this article I want to look at the Instinct Theory of Aggression that was put forward by Sigmund Freud. As a teenager I tried to “learn” Freud from his books. I remember scouring second-hand bookstores looking for cheap copies of his writings that I could afford – most secondhand book shops at the time would...

As this is the time of year when students go off to college – either returning or for the first time – I have been thinking about when I first started studying psychology at university, and the theories and ideas that I was introduced to regarding human aggression and violence. The university I attended was pretty much split in the middle regarding the faculty/teaching staff: half were ethologists and the other half behaviorists. The ethologists believed that all/near-all human responses were hard-wired and instinctive, whereas the behaviorists, believed we were born as a “blank slate” and it was our experiences...

In last week’s article I looked at how self-deception, which is something we engage in on a daily basis, concerning a variety of potential threats, can put our personal safety at risk. In this article I want to look at some of the reasons why as a species we ae so susceptible to other people’s deception. We may like to believe that we are skilled at identifying deception – partially that which is a result of our own ability to deceive ourselves (which is part of the problem) – but in reality, this is not...