Proponents of the original “frustration-aggression” hypothesis, the first widely used theory of aggression in psychology, might regard all the motives that I specify below as the result of frustration. But I prefer a differentiated view, identifying a variety of motives that may generate aggression.
1. Instigation can give rise to anger, rage, and the desire for retaliation and harm-doing. Aggression as a means to serve this motive has been called hostile aggression. Anger, rage, and the desire to retaliate or harm can also be useful for mobilizing a person to remove the attack or threat, that is, for self-defense.
2. Instigating conditions can also directly give rise to the motivation for self-defense. Escape is one mode of self-defense, but it is often impossible or inconsistent with a person’s self-conception and values or imposes further frustration by requiring extreme effort, such as moving away. Aggression is an effective self-defense, since it communicates that instigation does not pay and makes renewed instigation less likely.12 It can also serve self-defense by reestablishing a balance of power with the instigators,13 which reduces the likelihood of further harm-doing, reestablishes self-esteem and public esteem, and makes a cooperative relationship possible. In this way reciprocity or retaliation can serve the motivation for self-defense rather than the desire to harm. Other means of self-defense are subordination and attempts to initiate a positive, cooperative relationship with instigators.
3. Instigating conditions also give rise to the motive to protect the psychological self: one’s self-concept, identity, self-esteem. Threat to values, beliefs, and ways of life can also give rise to this motive. For some people the experience of threat does not even require an external source; the insecurity, weakness, and incapacity can come from within. Whatever its source, the need to defend the psychological self can be extraordinarily powerful. Often it employs such “internal,” psychological means as scapegoating or devaluation of others, which eventually provides a basis for violence against them.
A related goal is to elevate the self. Social comparison, the desire for a favorable comparison of the self to others – in material or psychological well-being, status and power, character and personality – is an important and perhaps universal human motive.14 Like all human motives, it differs among persons and cultures in its strength and nature.a This desire is more intense when the self-concept is under attack.
Interviews with violent criminals show that many of them have poor self-esteem. Their violence is aimed at protecting their self-image or their image in others’ eyes in response to a provocation that is often mild or even imagined.15 Other criminals are violent because they think a “real man” must be strong and forceful. They seek violent encounters to experience this sense of their maleness and to create an image in others’ eyes of a powerfully masculine individual.
4. A sense of injustice that arises from unfavourable comparison of one’s relative well-being and of the balance between one’s efforts and rewards or between one’s own or one’s group’s rights and privileges and those of other people or groups can give rise to resentment, anger, and violence. The experience of injustice motivates aggression of many kinds: revolutions and other social movements, criminal and other violence.16 In hard times, if others are unaffected, feelings of injustice or unfairness can be especially intense. It is not the actual injustice that is the source of resentment, but the perception of injustice. Those identified as responsible will often be perceived as evil and deserving punishment.
5. A related motivation is to enhance a sense of personal efficacy and to gain a feeling of personal power. A feeling of inefficacy may result from frustration or it may be a personality characteristic. Aggressive persons are often unsuccessful. For example, aggressive children are often low academic achievers and aggressive adults often did poorly in school as children.17 Aggressive children tend to be socially unsuccessful, unpopular among their peers.18 Unable to satisfy their affiliation needs and social goals, they feel powerless. Aggression can give a sense of power or efficacy. In one study, frustrated boys were led to subject others to loud, noxious noise. When the victims denied feeling discomfort, previously aggressive boys turned up the sound, but nonaggressive boys did not.19 The escalating aggression of some Nazi concentration camp guards in the face of the powerlessness and resulting passivity of victims suggests a desire for efficacy or impact.20 Over time, the association of efficacy with aggression makes aggressive behavior self-reinforcing.
Clinical experience with a group of incestuous fathers suggests that one of their motives was to gain a feeling of power. These men are weak and ineffectual and have low self-esteem. They often have sexual and emotional problems with sick or rejecting wives and are unable either to take steps to improve their marital situation or to seek sexual and emotional gratification from women outside the home.21 The capacity to make a daughter into a sexual partner may give them a feeling of power.
Otto Rank and, following him, Ernest Becker proposed an extreme form of the idea that aggression serves a desire for power.22 Becker maintained that human beings cannot come to terms with death. Killing, including human sacrifice ritualized in some cultures in earlier times, may give the killer a feeling of invulnerability and power over death.
In my view, however, it is the feeling of present insecurity, incomprehension, and lack of control due to cultural background and personality together with life problems that lead people to seek strength and control through the exercise of power over others, including the ultimate power, killing. People who feel valued and significant and who find life comprehensible and their circumstances controllable will not kill out of a need for invulnerability and immortality.
The feeling of vulnerability and the need for aggression to overcome it and the desire for power for its own sake can become persistent characteristics of individuals and groups.
6. Chaos, disorder, and sudden profound changes, especially when accompanied by frustration, threat, and attack, invalidate the conceptions of self and world that serve as guides by
