We have seen how our evolutionary inheritance and biological systems give each of us a capacity for hostile feelings and aggression, a capacity that we are most likely to engage when something or someone thwarts our needs and desires. It makes sense, then, that the study of situational factors that provoke affective aggression begins by focusing on frustration. Imagine a brutal school day. You start your morning missing seemingly every traffic light as you race to campus, already late for an exam. Finally you get to class. The day that follows is filled with similar frustrations. On getting home, you open the door and trip over the dog, prompting a profanity-laced tirade at your canine companion if not an actual (hopefully off-target) kick at the four-legged bystander. If this scenario seems familiar to you, it’s because we all have an intuitive sense that frustrating situations can provoke aggressive behavior. Let’s take a look at how making sense of the connection between frustration and aggression has progressed, and the many different insights into aggression it has inspired.

In 1939 a group of psychologists at Yale University first proposed the frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard et al., 1939), which posits that aggression always is preceded by frustration, and that frustration inevitably leads to aggression. Frustration is the consequence of a blockage of a desired goal. For example, when participants were prevented from obtaining a desired prize—that is, frustrated—by a bumbling partner, and then given the opportunity to shock their partner during a subsequent learning task, they chose to give this partner stronger shocks than did participants not expecting an attractive prize (Buss, 1963). Subsequent studies have found that the more frustrated people are, the more likely they are to aggress. For example, it’s nearly always frustrating when someone cuts in front of you when you’ve been standing in line for a while. But the closer you are to the front of the line and to your goal, the more frustrating this injustice is. With increased frustration, we see a stronger aggressive response (Harris, 1974).

During the first half of the 20th century Hovland and Sears (1940) reported that the number of lynchings of African Americans by Whites in the American South correlated negatively with the value of cotton, which at the time dominated the southern economy. The researchers presumed that as the price of cotton went down, southern Whites became more frustrated at their economic misfortunes. This frustration led to more aggression against African Americans. More contemporary findings show that, across diverse cultures, aggressive behaviors (e.g., homicide, road rage, child abuse) increase with the prevalence of various sources of frustration and stressors, including shrinking workforce, unemployment, increase in population density, low economic status, and economic hardship (Geen, 1998).

Displaced Aggression

In many cases, frustration-based aggression is directed at targets that didn’t cause the frustration. Dollard and colleagues (1939) labeled this phenomenon displaced aggression. In our opening example of your returning home from the brutal day at school, poor Rover is just lying there and did nothing to warrant being the target of aggression. Generally, people will displace aggression when something prevents them from aggressing against the original source of the frustration. The source of frustration may be something intangible, such as a downturn in the economy. Or the target is of sufficiently high status, such as one’s boss or parents, that the consequences (e.g., being fired or grounded) makes one think otherwise about venting one’s frustration directly on the source. In such cases, the aggressive impulse often is instead directed at a safer, often innocent target. But in other cases, the alternative target adds a bit to your level of frustration, leading to what is known as triggered displaced aggression.

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Triggered displaced aggression occurs when someone does not respond to an initial frustration or provocation (i.e., the bad day at school) but later is faced with a second event that elicits a more aggressive response than would be warranted by only the relatively minor affront on its own (the dog stepping on your foot). Miller and colleagues (2003) suggest that the original provocation produces anger and aggressive thoughts. However, because the individual is prevented from retaliating, or decides not to retaliate, against the original provocation, the hostile feelings and thoughts remain. Then, when the individual is confronted with a second, actually minor, frustrating event, the preexisting hostility biases how he or she interprets and emotionally responds to that event. In the context of the bad day, your dog being in position to trip you seems more intentional and more painful, leading you to behave more aggressively than is warranted. The more the provoked person ruminates about the initial aversive event, the more likely triggered displaced aggression will occur (Bushman, Bonacci et al., 2005).

A study by Pedersen and colleagues (2000) provides a good illustration of how this works. Participants were initially given either insulting feedback about their performance on a task or no such feedback. The initial, insulting feedback is a provocation. Later in the study, the participants were given another task by a different assistant. In one condition, the assistant was somewhat annoying and incompetent, whereas the other participants had no such minor trigger. Participants were then given the opportunity to rate the assistant’s qualifications for a job. As can be seen in FIGURE 12.4, in the absence of an initial provocation, participants were not especially critical of the bumbling assistant. However, when participants had initially been insulted and were then exposed to the annoying assistant, they subsequently gave her a much more negative evaluation.

What this and other studies reveal is that we don’t displace our aggression against just anyone. Rather, we are most likely to lash out at targets who do something mildly annoying, are dislikable, are relatively low in social status and power, or who resemble the person with whom we actually are angry (e.g., Marcus-Newhall et al., 2000; Pedersen et al., 2008).

Arbitrariness of the Frustration

One factor that researchers discovered very quickly was whether the frustration seemed to be justified or arbitrary. Imagine stepping up to the refreshment counter at a movie theater and being denied a large container of buttered popcorn. If the snack-bar attendant says you can’t have any because the popcorn machine is broken, your goal is frustrated but in a way that is justifiable, so you would be unlikely to aggress. But if the attendant says you can’t have any but you can see plenty of popcorn behind the counter, the frustration seems to be arbitrary, and a disturbance in the theater is far more likely (e.g., Ohbuchi, 1982; Pastore, 1952). In one study (Fishman, 1965), participants were promised $2 if they succeeded on a task but then were denied the $2, either despite having succeeded (arbitrary frustration) or after being told they had failed on the task (nonarbitrary frustration). The arbitrary frustration led to participants’ directing substantially more verbal aggression at the experimenter than did the non-arbitrary frustration.

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Attacks, Insults, and Social Rejection

Perhaps the most reliable provocation of an aggressive response is the belief that one has or will be attacked intentionally, either physically or verbally (Geen, 2001). What could be more frustrating than being attacked or insulted? For example, in one study (Harmon-Jones & Sigelman, 2001), participants wrote an essay that an evaluator (actually a confederate) rated either positively (“I can understand why someone would think like this”) or negatively (“I can’t believe an educated person would think like this”). In a later part of the experiment, participants were given an opportunity to pick the type and quantity of beverage the evaluator would have to sample. When participants previously had been insulted, they were more likely to pick an unpleasant beverage (e.g., water mixed with vinegar) and to administer more of that beverage. Moreover, this aggressive reaction was related to how much each participant’s brain was emitting electrical signals that typically reflect anger-related approach motivation: greater activation of the left prefrontal cortex and diminished activation of the right prefrontal cortex. Presumably the insulting evaluation elicited anger, an approach orienting emotion, which then led to the aggressive decision to have the evaluator drink more of the unpleasant beverage.

Although it is not surprising that physical attack often leads to counterattack, if only for self-defense, why aggress against someone who has insulted us? One answer is that insults threaten our self-esteem and sense of significance. When James Averill (1982, p. 174) asked participants to recall situations that made them angry, he found that a common cause was “loss of personal pride, self-esteem, or sense of personal worth.” Because our sense of self-esteem and significance in the world depends so heavily on validation from others in our social sphere, insults and social rejection can arouse anger and an impulse to aggress, often in an attempt to restore wounded pride (Tangney et al., 1996). Indeed, when Leary and colleagues (2003) examined well-documented cases of school shootings between 1995 and 2001, they found that in 13 of the 15 cases, the perpetrator had been subjected to often malicious bullying, teasing, and rejection. Although a host of factors certainly contribute to the horrific acts that we see so frequently on the news, social rejection is clearly one of them.

Experimental research provides further support for the role of rejection. For example, in one study (Twenge et al., 2001), all participants had a 15-minute conversation together, then voted for the person they wanted to interact with further. The voting was rigged: Some participants were told that everyone wanted to interact with them (the accepted condition), but others were told that no one wanted to interact with them (the rejected condition). Each participant then was directed to play a computer game with another participant and told that the loser of the game would be punished by the winner by being subjected to noise blasts through a pair of headphones. Performance on the game was also rigged such that the (rejected or accepted) participant won and was thus allowed to choose the volume and duration of the unpleasant noise that the loser had to listen to. Compared with those participants who had experienced acceptance, participants who had experienced rejection opted to blast their opponents with louder and longer noises.

Of course, people don’t always respond to rejection by becoming more aggressive. Sometimes, they become withdrawn and despondent. At other times, they seek acceptance (e.g., Leary et al., 2006). As with all conditions that arouse hostile feelings, other variables we will consider throughout this chapter help determine whether aggression or other responses to those feelings are more likely. But one factor particularly predictive of aggression in response to rejection is a personality trait called rejection sensitivity. People high in rejection sensitivity tend to expect, readily perceive, and overreact to rejection with aggressive responses (Ayduk et al., 2008).

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After years of research, Berkowitz (1989) provided a particularly valuable additional answer to the “when” question in the form of his cognitive neoassociationism model. This model expands on the frustration-aggression hypothesis in three important ways. First, it proposes that a variety of unpleasant, stressful conditions (in addition to frustration) can make aggression more likely (although one can argue that anything unpleasant is frustrating). Second, Berkowitz hypothesized that negative affect in the form of anger or hostility is a central feature of affective aggression. Third, he specified features of situations that prime aggressive cognitions, which also make aggression more likely. Let’s discuss these developments in more detail, looking first at the range of negative factors that potentially increase hostile feelings.

Physical Pain and Discomfort

It turns out that when people are hurt physically as well as emotionally, they are more likely to lash out: Physical pain triggers aggression. In one study that made this point, Berkowitz and colleagues (1981) had participants immerse one hand either in a bucket of freezing-cold ice water or in a bucket of comfortably tepid water as they were told to administer noise blasts to someone they thought was another participant in the study. Participants who experienced the pain of cold-water immersion administered a greater number of loud noise blasts to the confederate in the study.

Excessive heat can also cause discomfort, and several studies show that heat-induced discomfort can generate hostile feelings. Craig Anderson and colleagues (1989; Anderson et al., 1997; Bushman et al., 2005) have shown that as the temperature goes up, so do signs of aggression. We see this based on location, as violent crimes (but not nonviolent crimes) are more frequent in the hottest regions of countries (Anderson et al., 1996), and also with regard to time periods, as hotter years, months, and days have more violent crimes (Anderson et al., 1997). We also see this relationship in field studies. When Kenrick and MacFarlane (1986) stalled a car at a green light at an intersection in Phoenix, Arizona, they found that people were much more likely to honk the horn—often continuously and with aggressive fervor—on hotter days than on cooler days. We also find this relationship during baseball games. Looking at archival data from the 1962, 1986, 1987, and 1988 Major League Baseball seasons, Reifman and colleagues (1991) found that pitchers were more likely to hit batters on days when the temperature reached or surpassed 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Moreover, the heat did not simply distract the pitchers or reduce their accuracy. The relationship between heat and plunking the batter holds up even after the researchers took into account other indices of the pitchers’ accuracy (e.g., walks, wild pitches). More recent research shows that perceived provocations intensify these effects. That is, pitchers are more likely to throw at opposing batters on hot days when one of their own teammates previously has been hit by a pitch (Larrick et al., 2011; see FIGURE 12.5). Whereas getting hit by a pitch is part of the game, at hotter temperatures, this potential provocation was much more likely to elicit retaliatory aggression.

The Role of Arousal in Aggression

As shown by Schachter’s two factor theory of emotions (see chapter 5), under some conditions, the more arousal individuals experience, the stronger their emotional reactions will be. So when anger seems to be the appropriate response to a situation, extra sources of arousal may intensify the anger and subsequent aggression. According to Zillmann’s (1971) excitation transfer theory (chapter 5), when people are still physiologically aroused by an initial event, but are no longer thinking about what made them aroused, this residual (or unexplained) excitation can be transferred and interpreted in the context of some new event. As a result, people who are already aroused are likely to overreact to subsequent provocations with intensified anger and aggression.

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Consider the following demonstration (Zillmann & Bryant, 1974). Participants were told they would be playing a game with an opponent who was actually a confederate. Some participants were asked to ride an exercise bike, while others performed a less vigorous activity. Two minutes later a confederate either insulted them or treated them in a neutral manner. Then, about 6 minutes after the first activity when participants were still aroused by the exercise but no longer aware of it, they were given the opportunity to deliver a punishing noxious noise to the person who had previously angered them. Do you think you might be more or less aggressive after exercising? Though the idea of catharsis or “blowing off steam” might lead you to think the exercise would provide a release, purging you of aggressive inclinations, the results were quite the opposite. In accord with excitation transfer theory, those participants who engaged in exercise and were insulted actually delivered more of the noxious noise than the other participants. The excitation of exercise intensified their anger at the insulter, and thus intensified their aggressive behavior. A follow-up study (Zillmann et al., 1975) showed that when highly aroused, people are unable or unwilling to reduce their aggressive response even when apprised of mitigating circumstances for the provocation. Exercise is of course not the only source of such arousal; research shows that other sources of arousal also can exacerbate aggression in provoking situations (e.g., Zillmann, 1971).

Taking the social cognitive perspective, Berkowitz’s cognitive neoassociationist model also proposes that hostile feelings will be especially likely to lead to aggression when hostile cognitions are primed by cues in the person’s situation. What are some of the most common environmental cues that prime violence and aggression? One big category that stands out is firearms. This leads us to a discussion of one of the seminal studies of aggression—the study that introduced what is known as the weapons effect.

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Imagine that you show up to take part in a study as participants did in Berkowitz and LePage (1967). You are told the study is exploring the connection between physiology and stress. You’re informed that another participant (actually a confederate) will be grading ideas that you come up with for a task by administering electric shocks to you (1 shock = good answers, 7 shocks = bad answers). After generating your ideas, you get hit with 7 shocks (an outcome likely to anger most people). Other participants in the study are randomly assigned to receive just the minimal 1 shock, and likely feel less angry as a result. After this, you’re brought to the room with the shock generator and given the chance to retaliate by administering electric shocks to the person who just shocked you. The second manipulation is whether people administered these shocks with a neutral object (e.g., a badminton racquet) sitting on the desk next to the shock generator, with nothing else on the desk, or—in the critical condition—with a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver sitting on the desk. Participants were told that these objects were left over from a previous study, and that they should ignore them. How do you think you would respond?

Check out FIGURE 12.6. If participants were not previously made angry, the presence of weapons had no effect on their level of aggression. Similarly, if participants were angry but not in the presence of weapons, they were more aggressive, but not overly so. Yet a very different effect emerged when participants were both made angry and in the presence of weapons. In this condition, they administered the greatest number of intense electric shocks.

You might be wondering whether something like this could happen outside the laboratory. You bet it could. In one field study, researchers got a pickup truck with a gun rack and had it stall at a traffic light (Turner et al., 1975). In one condition, there were two cues associated with violence: a military rifle in the gun rack and a bumper sticker that read “VENGEANCE.” In another condition, there was one cue—the rifle—whereas the bumper sticker now read “FRIEND.” In a third condition, there was neither a rifle nor a bumper sticker. Drivers behind the stalled truck were most likely to honk the horn when hostile cognitions were primed by the rifle and the “VENGEANCE” bumper sticker and least likely to honk when there were no cues priming such cognitions. This is a powerful demonstration when you consider that if participants had been thinking rationally about their behavior, someone with a rifle and a “VENGEANCE” bumper sticker would be the last person they would want to mess with.

Why does the weapons effect occur? One reason is that weapons prime aggression-related thoughts, which in turn makes it more likely an angered person will think of aggressive ways to deal with that anger. Another reason is that weapons can induce a physiological reaction that predisposes people toward more hostile actions. In one study, participants who spent 15 minutes handling a pellet gun that looks a lot like an automatic handgun, as opposed to handling the children’s game Mousetrap, showed increases in their level of testosterone (Klinesmith et al., 2006). In addition, the bigger their increase in testosterone, the more aggressive they were toward another supposed participant, spiking that person’s water with more hot sauce. An interesting result was that these hostile acts occurred even though these participants had not been frustrated or insulted by the person they aggressed against. The researchers suggest that because participants handled the gun for 15 minutes, their extended time with a weapon may have increased aggression even though they had not been provoked or frustrated.

Stimuli other than firearms also can become associated with violence and therefore can prime cognitions that encourage aggression. In one study, a violent film scene involving the actor Kirk Douglas led to more aggression against a provoking confederate if he was named Kirk instead of Bob (Berkowitz & Geen, 1967). In another study, Josephson (1987) showed seven- to nine-year-old children either a violent TV show in which walkie-talkies were used or a neutral show before they played a game of floor hockey. Boys who had seen the violent show and then saw walkie-talkies at the beginning of the game were the most aggressive during the game.

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So stimuli other than guns can become cues that encourage aggression, but will guns always do so? It largely depends on the associations that a person has with the object. Although for many people guns have an associative history with violence and aggression, this is not the case for everyone. People who hunt for sport may see guns in a different light. As a result they don’t tend to show activation of aggressive cognitions and are not more aggressive toward those who provoke them when exposed to pictures of guns; in contrast, nonhunters are (Bartholow et al., 2005). For hunters, pictures of guns actually arouse warm and pleasant cognitions (perhaps reflecting the enjoyable times with family and friends while they’ve hunted). But when hunters are shown pictures of assault rifles, which have no connection to recreational sport, they do show increased aggressive cognitions and behavior. Thus, the weapons effect critically depends on the person’s prior learning and experiences.

Of course, most Americans are not recreational hunters. Thus these weapons-effect findings make us pause when we think about the influence that rampant exposure and accessibility of guns have on violence in this country. Consider some of the following statistics. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2011, 11,101 persons were killed by firearm violence; 478,400 persons were victims of a crime committed with a firearm (Planty & Truman, 2013). Between 1993 and 2011, about 60 to 70% of murders in the United States were committed with firearms, especially handguns (see FIGURE 12.7) (Planty & Truman, 2013). Such statistics can be alarming, especially when we compare the United States with countries that ban gun ownership. Great Britain, which has one fourth the population of the United States, has one sixteenth the number of murders. Although the homes of gun owners differ in a variety of ways from non-gun owners’ homes, researchers point out that people in homes with guns are 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than those in homes without guns (Kellermann et al., 1993; Wiebe, 2003). Such statistics, in conjunction with his research, prompted Berkowitz (1968, p. 22) to suggest that “the finger pulls the trigger but the trigger may also be pulling the finger.”

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We’ve covered a lot of evidence on facilitators of hostile feelings and thoughts that lead to aggression, but can you think of times you were angry and thought about acting aggressively, but did not? What factors inhibit people from acting on their hostile feelings and thoughts? Moral values that forbid hurting others, feelings of empathy for others, and consideration of possible aversive consequences for oneself, such as prison or retaliation, all play a role in whether people choose aggression or other responses, particularly when the capacity for self-control is high and not hindered by circumstances (e.g., Geen, 2001). However, as we will see in our next few sections, people differ in the strength of both facilitators and inhibitors of aggression, leading some people to be more prone to aggression than others.