Aggression and the attribution process.

Abstract

Summary The present study demonstrated that Ss who were led to believe that an external cause was responsible for their arousal at being yelled at behaved less aggressively than those who attributed their arousal as due to the insult. Ss were led to believe that listening to a loud noise would cause either arousal or irrelevant physiological symptoms; those in the arousal symptoms group subsequently were less aggressive to a confederate and reported themselves to be experiencing a greater degree of arousal than those in the irrelevant symptoms group. These results support Schachter's cognitive attribution theory of emotion and suggest its importance in explaining aggressive behavior.