If the world seems angry it may just be you
by Gian Gonzaga | March 26, 2008
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One finding that cuts across many areas of research in psychology is how individuals create their own environment. For example, it has been shown that people who are anxiously attached (or constantly worried that their relationship will end) act in ways that make their partners less satisfied and more likely to leave the relationship. So the fear of being rejected becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.A fascinating new paper was just published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Craig Anderson, Katherine Buckley, and Nicholas Carnagey at Iowa State University. They looked at the tendency for aggressive individuals to create hostile environments. In their study they had pairs of participants compete in a reaction time game with 25 trials. Losing caused a loud blast of noise as punishment, winning caused the partner to hear the blast (the experiments rigged the competition to each lost about the same amount of times. The catch was that before each trial each participants set how loud the blast would be for their partner if they lost.
Aggressive participants set the noise blast louder in the early trials, which is not surprising. As the trials went on, those who got louder blasts early on were more likely to respond with louder blasts of noise as the trials went on. By the end there was an upward spiral of revenge (so to speak) that made the environments of aggressive individuals more punishing and hostile. They probably used this environment as an excuse to increase how aggressive they were on each trial.
The lesson is simple, the less you respond to the world in an aggressive way the less likely that people will be hostile, so before you punish someone remember they will just want to get you back in the future.
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