A Study of Factors Influencing the Occurrence of Ethnic Conflicts and Aggressions from the Perspective of Psychology

Understanding the concept of “aggression” is the key to understanding any kind of militancy and violence in psychology. Ethnic conflict is one types of social aggression in global society, done by ethnic groups, which is not the exception to this rule. Among the effective factors which lead to the incidence of ethnic aggression, from the perspective of social psychology, it can be mentioned: frustration, prejudice, social learning, reinforcement, projection, and etc. Frustration is also divided into factors such as basic needs, relative deprivation, loss of political power, and etc. which in their turn, are effective in occurrence of ethnic violence and aggression. The present paper aims to investigate the effective factors on the incidence of ethnic aggressions from the psychological point of view; also, it tries to determine the causes of this violence from the individual psychology perspective and whether the sole reliance on the psychological causes can lead to a complete understanding of roots of ethnic conflict occurrence or there are some other factors contributing to this process.

Ethnic identity, Psychology, Frustration, Ethnicity, Ethnic elites