Frustration, Aggression, and the Sense of Justice

Abstract

Until recently the search for cognitive mechanisms mediating aggressive behavior und the external conditions under which it occurs has emphasized rational descriptive processes, neglecting the evaluative judgmental processes that may intervene in this connection. The present work will explore this line of inquiry. Most of the thinking about aggressive behavior elaborated within the realm of social psychology has tended to leave aside the problem of the functional significance of this behavior. This tendency goes back to the classic Frustration and Aggression (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939), where the relationship between frustration and aggression was presented as a kind of empirical generalization based upon informal observation, and extends of the present-day theories of attribution which stress the cause-effect relationships between the events which precede the response, but fail to consider the events created by the latter. The neglect of the functional significance of aggressive behavior and the bias favoring the consideration of “objective” judgmental processes over “subjective” ones seem to be the result of the assumption on the part of the researchers that aggressive acts are pathological manifestations and, therefore, devoid of general functional significance.