Is the subject's personality or the experimental situation a better predictor of a subject's willingness to administer shock to a victim?

Personality and aggressive behavior under provoking and neutral conditions: A meta-analytic review

The authors conducted a comprehensive review to understand the relation between personality and aggressive behavior, under provoking and nonprovoking conditions. The qualitative review revealed that some personality variables influenced aggressive behavior under both neutral and provocation conditions, whereas others influenced aggressive behavior only under provocation. Studies that assessed personality variables and that directly measured aggressive behavior were included in the quantitative review. Analyses revealed that trait aggressiveness and trait irritability influenced aggressive behavior under both provoking and neutral conditions but that other personality variables (e.g., trait anger, Type A personality, dissipation-rumination) influenced aggressive behavior only under provoking conditions. The authors discuss possible relations between these patterns of aggressive behavior and the personality dimensions of Agreeableness and Neuroticism and consider implications for theories of aggression.

The role of moral disengagement in the execution process

The present study tested the proposition that disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables prison personnel to carry out the death penalty. Three subgroups of personnel in penitentiaries located in three Southern states were assessed in terms of eight mechanisms of moral disengagement. The personnel included the execution teams that carry out the executions; the support teams that provide solace and emotional support to the families of the victims and the condemned inmate; and prison guards who have no involvement in the execution process. The executioners exhibited the highest level of moral, social, and economic justifications, disavowal of personal responsibility, and dehumanization. The support teams that provide the more humane services disavowed moral disengagement, as did the noninvolved guards but to a lesser degree than the support teams.

External Validity of “Trivial” Experiments: The Case of Laboratory Aggression

The external validity of artificial “trivial” laboratory settings is examined. Past views emphasizing generalizability of relations among conceptual variables are reviewed and affirmed. One major implication of typical challenges to the external validity of laboratory research is tested with aggression research: If laboratory research is low in external validity, then laboratory studies should fail to detect relations among variables that are correlated with aggression in “real-world” studies. Meta-analysis was used to examine 5 situational variables (provocation, violent media, alcohol, anonymity, hot temperature) and 3 individual difference variables (sex, Type A personality, trait aggressiveness) in real-world and laboratory aggression studies. Results strongly supported the external validity of trivial laboratory studies. Advice is given on how scholars might handle occasional descrepancies between laboratory and real-world findings.

Aggression in a competitive task

This paper describes the construction and validation of a competitive task which uses a new apparatus designed for the study of aggression. A variety of personality measures were answered by 144 male and female university students before they participated in the task. During the task three independent variables (instrumentality of aggression, sex of aggressor, and sex of target) were manipulated to determine the comparability of the results with past research. Instrumental shocking occurred more frequently than non-instrumental (hostile) shocking, and males shocked more than females. A factor analysis of the personality measures produced a factor, Repression vs Expression, which represented a dimension of aggressiveness and accounted for 18% of the variance in hostile shocking. The competition paradigm was shown to provide a valid index of hostile aggression while minimizing deception and risk to subjects.

Do Authoritarian Attitudes or Authoritarian Personalities Reflect Mental Illness?

It is pointed out that authoritarian attitudes and authoritarian behaviour are generally not associated. The few studies that have been made of authoritarian behaviour directly are reviewed. In studies of Nazi Germany, of police and army personnel and of educational methods, no evidence is found that authoritarian behaviour is psychopathological. Ray's (1976) Directiveness scale measuring authoritarian behaviour and a balanced F-scale were presented to a random sample of 95 Sydney people in a doorstep survey. The authoritarian personality as measured by the Directiveness scale was found to go with better mental health as measured by the Eysenck Neuroticism scale. There was no significant correlation between the balanced F-scale and neuroticism. The study made use of extensive controls against acquiescent response set and social desirability response set.

Differences in Young Children's Expectations of Women's and Men's Intervention in Aggression

This paper reports two experiments which examined children's expectations of women's and men's intervention in aggression. In Exp. 1, 91 preschool children were randomly divided into 2 groups and shown separate video tapes: (1) subjects viewed a man passively watching young children's simulated fighting and (2) subjects viewed a woman passively watching identical simulated fighting. Upon questioning, 17% of subjects in the male-adult condition reported adult intervention while 4% of subjects in the female-adult condition reported intervention. In Exp. 2, 30 preschool boys were randomly divided into 3 groups and subjects viewed a tape of either (1) an adult male passively watching simulated fighting, (2) an adult female interrupting simullated fighting, or (3) irrelevant material (control). Tapes were discussed and rerun with subjects to ensure comprehension, then subjects were observed in free play during which the adult they had viewed was present but behaved passively. Aggressive acts were recorded for the four quarters of each play period. Aggression was uniformly low throughout the adult-male condition, high throughout the control condition, and progressed from low to high over the course of the adult-female condition. These studies appear to support the existence of differential expectations and suggest that such expectations influence behavior but may be overridden or altered under certain conditions.

LABORATORY AGGRESSION WHERE THE VICTIM IS A SMALL DOG

Earlier experiments in laboratory aggression have demonstrated the willingness of subjects to shock human victims as functions of obedience and situational conformity processes. In this experiment, 30 undergraduate college students shocked a small dog. The hypothesis that subjects would shock this vulnerable victim less was confirmed. Females shocked the dog significantly less than males, a difference which does not occur for human victims. This difference may be attributed to different empathy levels, and different roles that pets play for the two sexes. Rationale supporting the shocking behavior evolved around the belief that punishment is legitimate and the dog received fair treatment.

SITUATIONAL PRESSURE, ATTITUDES TOWARD BLACKS, AND LABORATORY AGGRESSION

The importance of the situational context in producing discriminatory behavior cannot he overlooked. This experiment on laboratory aggression investigated the effect of racial attitudes on the willingness to shock a black victim. A second purpose was to compare two groups in the shock levels administered to a black or a white victim. The results showed that attitudes toward blacks are not related to the level of shock administered to blacks. A black victim is shocked less than a white victim. This discriminatory behavior can be understood as a function of the social pressures of the university community as influenced, for example, by the affirmative action programs.