Yeah!!!
You do realize that animals, especially social animals, learn from watching and experiencing. Animals don't contemplate or discern. They simple act as they are compelled. You can't explain to an animal why you are punishing them. They don't learn like that.
If you want your dog to be aggressive to those it thinks it is the leader of, you know, like some smaller kid that it knows it can dominate or you later on when you grow complacent in establishing yourself as the dominant one in the relationship? Then you teach them to be aggressive by being aggressive.
If you want a dog that does not think aggression is the way to treat others, then you be the example.
Remember, a dog doesn't think. It simply feels. You tell it not to bite it has no idea what you're saying, or that you're even talking. To a dog, our speech must sound like different types of barks because words mean nothing. It just hears noise that your making in a certain way like a bird chirping, only not as melodious or high-pitched.
Your dog learns whatever you make consistent. That's why they come when you train them too. They learn that a given sound articulated a certain way, and/or gestures done a certain way means to come. They only know that because you were out there with them every day doing the come command and then making the come towards you and giving them whatever reward they get for it till they come to be compelled to come when you call.
They don't think, oh he's calling me. They just feel compelled to come because you conditioned them to feel that way either through negative or positive reinforcement. Positive being the treat route, and negative being the expressing of displeasure. The positive route tends to work best with animals because animals are more or less automatons. They don't think, they don't rebel, they don't contemplate.
They just do as they feel compelled, thus if they are not doing as you want, it means you have not taught them sufficiently that they feel compelled to do as you want.
It's always the human's responsibility to learn the animal and how to control the animal because the animal does not have the mental capacity to understand anything beyond their little instinctive-compulsion world. It is your job to learn them, and then use their little world of understanding to condition them to what you want.
You basically are brainwashing your animal, not to think a certain way, but to respond a certain way in a given situation, such as when you call them or tell them to sit. You can't just tell them. You have to show them somehow, and then give them something that will compel them to want to do what you want them to do.
With animals that you have nothing to give them, you have to learn their instincts and figure out how to exploit their desires in order to condition them to do what you want for a given situation.
As a human, you know how puppies are. If you don't want him biting, you have to figure out a way to overcome his instinctive compulsion to play with a compulsion to behave.
The Dog Whisperer helps a lot with this. According to him, you must be the leader. You don't have to show aggression, only that you are the leader. One way he says that you do that is to nip at them with your fingers like a lead dog might nip at the neck of another dog when the other dog is doing something it doesn't like. Of course if it's a puppy, the instinct to play might be too great a compulsion for you to overcome. However, fortunately, by the time a dog gets big enough to hurt someone, they are old enough to start learning social skills such as not biting.
One of the most important things is that you remain consistent. Don't tolerate it one day, and discourage it the next. You choose either you're going to tolerate it up to a certain point, or not. Don't switch.
Changing confuses the animal because animals don't think, they act on compulsion, how they feel.