Aggressiveness: Definition, Behaviors & Psychology
Aggressiveness is the tendency to want to harm other people. For a fairly antisocial characteristic, it is also quite common. Can psychology explain why?
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In adulthood, I have settled into two primary athletic pursuits: trail running and rock climbing. Two advantages are that they are solitary and social activities and that they get me outdoors. One disadvantage of choosing these two activities is that they are not team sports and do not involve direct physical contact with other people.
Until high school, I really enjoyed playing basketball. Looking back, I can recognize |
Nobody who knows me would ever tell you that I am an aggressive person, but these aggressive tendencies are in me. Where does the urge to be aggressive come from? When is it adaptive or maladaptive? Let’s look at the psychological science of aggression.
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What Is Aggressiveness? (A Definition)
Perhaps it seems obvious that people would not want to be harmed, but this is actually an important distinction to make (Warburton & Anderson, 2015). A surgeon is not acting aggressively when she removes a cancerous tumor from your body, nor is a lover being aggressive when their sexual partner asks them to slap or spank them. In fact, we would generally say that in these instances, the person causing some kind of physical harm is doing so with consent and for the betterment of the other person.
Aggressiveness is the tendency to hurt another person to satisfy our own needs; it ignores or even violates the needs of the other person. It is different from being angry or hateful, because we can have those thoughts and feelings without taking any physical action (Warburton & Anderson, 2015). Aggression may be physically violent—it may cause significant physical harm, requiring medical treatment—but it can also be purely verbal or psychological.
Opposite of Aggressiveness
Video: Aggression vs. Altruism
Are There Benefits of Aggressiveness?
It has been suggested that most instances of human aggression stem from some kind of interpersonal provocation (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). In other words, most of the time people are not spontaneously aggressive but are instead reacting with aggression to some threat in their environment. Moreover, their aggressive response usually has a clear purpose, such as establishing safety or reducing the likelihood that the threat will be realized. In this regard, I think of what my mother told me about aggression when I was younger: “It is okay to be physically aggressive if somebody has you backed into a corner.”
Was my mother advocating for me to go pick fights? Quite the opposite; she knew that a primary benefit of aggression is that sometimes decisive and even harmful action is necessary to protect ourselves. In fact we can acknowledge that, at least for the person behaving aggressively, there is clearly some kind of perceived benefit—otherwise, they would not choose to act in that way. The problem is that aggression often isn’t about getting a bully to stop cornering you. Over time, people can develop the trait of aggressiveness because it is an approach that frequently works, even if it has substantial costs for others.
Causes of Aggressiveness
Second, we can look at aggression as a natural behavioral response to feeling angry. We feel angry when our boundaries are violated or it is possible that we will lose or not get what we want. Simply feeling angry would be useless; as you probably know, sitting around and stewing in your anger never seems to improve things much. But being able to act aggressively to resolve the concerns raised by your anger can be a very effective trait.
Biologists and psychologists also point to how early in life organisms show aggressive tendencies; any parent will tell you that two-year-old toddlers will harm others to get what they want, no questions asked. Children don’t need to see this kind of aggression modeled for them to know how to aggress; instead, they learn to inhibit their aggressiveness over time. This suggests that it is a natural and innate tendency.
So we act aggressively because it can be beneficial for our ability to survive and thrive. What makes us more likely to aggress? What makes one person higher in aggressiveness than another? One clear cause is being aggressed against as one grows up; people who were abused or neglected as children typically aggress against others more often as adults (Allen, 2011). Where other children might have seen many examples of people inhibiting their aggressiveness to useful ends, these children have learned that aggressiveness is normal and adaptive and perhaps should even be cultivated.
Examples of Aggressive Behaviors
Any behavior that might benefit me while potentially hurting another person can qualify as aggressive. When I slip between lanes on the highway, speeding around slower cars to get home a bit faster, I am driving aggressively because I am putting my desire for a quick trip above their safety. When my friend’s dog meets another dog and starts to feel unsafe because of its behavior, she lets him know immediately by jumping back and snarling or by pouncing on him. These behaviors suggest a willingness to harm the other dog in order to achieve the goal of feeling safe again.
Passive Aggressiveness
Aggression can be passive as well as active in nature (Allen & Anderson, 2017). When people are passively aggressive, they cause harm by not acting or by disengaging. In this sense, it is often much more subtle than active aggression. For example, in the past I have caught myself overcommitting in my life and then knowingly failing to honor my commitments; not doing what I said I would was a twisted and unhelpful way to communicate that I had boundaries and wasn’t going to be helpful after all.
Psychology of Aggressiveness
It is also generally accepted by psychologists that these threats look consistent across cultures and even species. Typical situations include the possibility of a mate being sexually unfaithful, gaining or seeking to preserve social status, taking resources from others, and reducing loss of resources to others (Buss & Shackelford, 1997).
Verbal Aggressiveness
A common initial response to threatening or negative life events is to engage first in verbal aggression (Hamilton, 2012). In some ways, verbal aggressiveness is adaptive in that it can resolve a situation without any party having to resort to physical aggression. In other ways, it is also just as or even more damaging, as any person who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you.
Aggressiveness in Dementia
Trait vs. State Aggressiveness
Competitive Aggressiveness
Competition for resources or social standing brings out our aggressiveness (Carré et al., 2011). This may be related to fluctuations in how much testosterone is in our bodies at any given time, which is perhaps why people who take steroids as part of their fitness routines are colloquially considered to be high in aggressiveness.
Aggressiveness in the Workplace
In alignment with theorizing about aggression, aggressiveness in the workplace occurs most often when people feel that they have been treated unfairly or are at risk of losing resources (Dupré & Barling, 2006). Workplace culture, whether it promotes or discourages aggression, often is an important factor in determining how much aggression will happen when people’s boundaries are violated or their professional opportunities are threatened.
Aggressiveness vs. Assertiveness
In contrast to aggressiveness, assertiveness is the quality of adaptively acting to get one’s needs met without causing harm to another person (Thompson & Berenbaum, 2011). In the sense that they help you meet your individual needs, both assertiveness and aggressiveness are adaptive; however, assertiveness has the added benefit of moving one toward one’s goals while minimizing the complicating factors of potential harm to others and aggression from others.
Articles Related to Aggressiveness
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Final Thoughts on Aggressiveness
I think this is a useful perspective for us as humans, because we are very much like other primates. Sometimes our aggressiveness is helpful and necessary; at other times, it is better to be cooperative or even altruistic. Most modern cultures have developed expectations that aggressiveness be something of a last resort, because we have also developed so many ways to work together and because a peaceful existence is definitely less stressful! We can be grateful for the ways that our aggressiveness can serve us while also trying to resort to it only when absolutely necessary.
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References
- Allen, B. (2011). Childhood psychological abuse and adult aggression: The mediating role of self-capacities. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26(10), 2093–2110.
- Allen, J. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2017). Aggression and violence: Definitions and distinctions. The Wiley handbook of violence and aggression, 1–14.
- Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). Human aggression. Annual Review of Psychology, 53(1), 27–51.
- Archer, J. (2009). The nature of human aggression. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 32(4), 202–208.
- Buss, D. M., & Shackelford, T. K. (1997). Human aggression in evolutionary psychological perspective. Clinical Psychology Review, 17(6), 605–619.
- Carré, J. M., McCormick, C. M., & Hariri, A. R. (2011). The social neuroendocrinology of human aggression. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 36(7), 935–944.
- Cipriani, G., Vedovello, M., Nuti, A., & Di Fiorino, M. (2011). Aggressive behavior in patients with dementia: correlates and management. Geriatrics & Gerontology International, 11(4), 408–413.
- Dam, V. H., Hjordt, L. V., da Cunha‐Bang, S., Sestoft, D., Knudsen, G. M., & Stenbæk, D. S. (2021). Trait aggression is associated with five‐factor personality traits in males. Brain and Behavior, 11(7), e02175.
- Dupré, K. E., & Barling, J. (2006). Predicting and preventing supervisory workplace aggression. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 11(1), 13–26.
- Hamilton, M. A. (2012). Verbal aggression: Understanding the psychological antecedents and social consequences. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 31(1), 5–12.
- Hare, B., Wobber, V., & Wrangham, R. (2012). The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due to selection against aggression. Animal Behaviour, 83(3), 573–585.
- Severance, L., Bui‐Wrzosinska, L., Gelfand, M. J., Lyons, S., Nowak, A., Borkowski, W., . . . & Yamaguchi, S. (2013). The psychological structure of aggression across cultures. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(6), 835–865.
- Thompson, R. J., & Berenbaum, H. (2011). Adaptive and aggressive assertiveness scales (AAA-S). Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 33, 323–334.
- Warburton, W. A., & Anderson, C. A. (2015). Aggression, social psychology of. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 1, 373–380.
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