Page 291 - The Social Animal

Human Aggression 273

ond place in line. Frustration is increased when a goal is near and
your progress toward it is interrupted.
When the interruption is unexpected or when it seems illegiti-
mate, the frustration is increased still further, as an experiment by
58
James Kulik and Roger Brown points out. Subjects were told they
could earn money by telephoning for donations to charity and ob-
taining pledges. Some of them were led to expect a high rate of con-
tributions, being informed that previous calls had been successful
almost two thirds of the time; others were led to expect far less suc-
cess. When the potential donor refused to contribute, as all of them
did (the subjects were actually calling confederates of the experi-
menters), the callers with the high expectations exhibited more ag-
gression, speaking more harshly and slamming down the phone with
more force. The experimenters also varied the reasons the confeder-
ates gave for refusing to contribute, sometimes making them sound
legitimate (“I can’t afford to contribute”) and sometimes having them
sound arbitrary and illegitimate (“Charities are a waste of time and
a rip-off”). The subjects who heard refusals that seemed unjustified
displayed more aggression.
In sum, as these experiments demonstrate, frustration is most
pronounced when the goal is becoming palpable and drawing within
reach, when expectations are high, and when the goal is blocked un-
justifiably. These factors help to point out the important distinction
between frustration and deprivation. Children who simply don’t have
toys do not necessarily aggress. Rather, as the earlier experiment in-
dicates, it was those children who had every reason to expect to play
with the toys who experienced frustration when that expectancy was
thwarted; this thwarting was what caused the children to behave de-
structively. Similarly, in the 1960s, the most intense riots by African
Americans did not take place in the geographical areas of greatest
poverty; rather, they took place in Los Angeles (Watts) and Detroit,
where things were not nearly as bad for blacks as they were in many
other sections of the country. The point is that things were bad rel-
ative to what white people had. Revolutions usually are not started
by people whose faces are in the mud. They are most frequently
started by people who have recently lifted their faces out of the mud,
looked around, and noticed that other people are doing better than
they are and that the system is treating them unfairly. Thus, frustra-
tion is not the result of simple deprivation; it is the result of relative
deprivation.