Abstract
Somewhat surprisingly, previous research has failed to demonstrate what was thought to be an intuitively obvious negative relationship between aggression and attraction toward the victim of aggression. It was proposed that powerful instigation procedures in past research had served to obscure the effects of attraction on aggression. It was therefore hypothesized that aggression toward a stranger occurs as an inverse function of attitudinally induced attraction toward that stranger only when instigation strength is low. Male subjects (N=60) responding on the Buss aggression apparatus were exposed to a similar or dissimilar victim and to one of three levels of instigation: no instigation, a moderately aggressive model, or insulting evaluations. The hypothesized interaction between similarity and strength of instigation was confirmed for shock intensity (p<.02). For shock duration, main effects were found for both similarity (p<.02) and strength of instigation (p<.02). It was concluded that relatively negative feelings about another individual increase the probability of aggressing against him, but that such feelings do not constitute a necessary or sufficient condition for that aggression.
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This research was supported in part by Research Grant GS-40329 from the National Science Foundation. The authors wish to thank Dr. Don A. Nelson and Dr. Robert A. Baron for their aid in this experiment.
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Kelley, K., Byrne, D. Strength of instigation as a determinant of the aggression—Attraction relationship. Motiv Emot 1, 29–38 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00997579
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00997579