Page 290 - The Social Animal

272 The Social Animal

the following situation: You must drive across town for an impor-
tant job interview. On your way to the parking lot, you realize you
are a bit late for your appointment, so you break into a fast trot.
When you find your car you notice, to your dismay, that you have a
flat tire. “Okay, I’ll be twenty minutes late; that’s not too bad,” you
say as you take the jack and lug wrench out of the trunk. After much
tugging and hauling, you remove the old tire, put on the spare tire,
tighten the lugs—and, lo and behold, the spare tire also is flat!
Seething with frustration, you trudge back to your dorm and enter
your room. Your roommate sees you standing there, resume in hand,
sweaty, dirty, and rumpled. Immediately sizing up the situation, he
asks humorously, “How did the interview go?” Shouldn’t he be pre-
pared to duck?
If an individual is thwarted on the way to a goal, the resulting
frustration will increase the probability of an aggressive response. A
clear picture of frustration-aggression relationships emerges from a
classic experiment by Roger Barker, Tamara Dembo, and Kurt
56
Lewin. These psychologists frustrated young children by showing
them a roomful of very attractive toys, which were then kept out of
reach. The children stood outside a wire screen looking at the toys,
hoping to play with them—even expecting to play with them—but
were unable to reach them. After a painfully long wait, the children
were finally allowed to play with the toys. In this experiment, a sep-
arate group of children was allowed to play with the toys directly
without first being frustrated. This second group of children played
joyfully with the toys. But the frustrated group, when finally given
access to the toys, was extremely destructive. They tended to smash
the toys, throw them against the wall, step on them, and so forth.
Thus, frustration can lead to aggression.
Several factors can accentuate this frustration. Suppose you were
about to bite into a Big Mac and somebody snatched it away. This
would be more likely to frustrate you—and lead to an aggressive re-
sponse—than if someone had stopped you if you were merely on your
way to McDonald’s to buy a Big Mac. An analogue of this situation
57
was demonstrated in a field study by Mary Harris. She had students
cut in front of people waiting in line for tickets, outside of restau-
rants, or to check out of a grocery store; sometimes they cut in front
of the 2nd person in line, other times in front of the 12th person. As
we would expect, the responses of the people standing behind the in-
truder were much more aggressive when the student cut into the sec-