Aggressive Reaction to Arbitrary Frustration as a Function of Causal Information

Abstract

The present experiment examined whether information about causes of frustration affects a victim’s; aggressive reactions. Eighty-eight university students were asked to write responses to frustrating stories. Each subject received a set of stories which contained one of four kinds of causal information: egocentric motive, negligence, coercion, or accident. Dependent measures were separately tested by au ANOVA for sex (2) X causal information (4) X situations (2). The results showed that both the female and male subjects wrote the victim would respond both at covert and overt levels more aggressively to the frustrator in the following direction among the conditions: egocentric motive, negligence, coercion, and accident (the listed former, the more). These suggest that the victim’s aggression depends on the perceived arbitrariness of frustration which is determined by inferences on the cause of frustration, and further suggest that the victim’s reactions are mediated by attribution of free will to the frustrator or/and by attributional inferences about the frustrator’s attitude toward the victim.