The Pleasure of Aggressiveness Among Inmates in Preventive and Long-Term Detention

Abstract

To a large degree, humans use pleasure (hedonicity) maximization to guide decision making, thereby optimiz- ing their behaviour, as shown by research on either sensory or purely mental pleasure (e.g., pleasure from video-game playing or mathematical problem-solving). Our group has now found that pleasure determines decision making in situa- tions of interpersonal aggression, i.e., people tend to behave aggressively in proportion to the resulting pleasure. In the present study, two groups of inmates in a Spanish prison were compared: those serving long sentences and those being held in preventive detention. All participants answered self-administered questionnaires that had been devised to examine how hedonicity influences decision making in the case of aggressive behaviour. The questionnaires described social con- flict situations and offered four options ranging from a passive response to a highly aggressive response. Previous re- search showed similar results between inmates serving long terms and a non-delinquent population, even though the de- gree of hedonicity was higher in the inmates: increasingly aggressive behavior is increasingly pleasurable to the aggressor, but only up to a certain level.. In contrast, this paper shows that inmates in preventive detention did not rate any of the ag- gressive responses as pleasant. Such a difference was present in males only and may have been caused by a desire for so- cial acceptance.