Sorting out aggression: Dimensional and categorical perceptions of aggressive episodes

Abstract

Taxonomies of aggressive behavior have largely been based upon social scientist' common sense or theoretical notions of forms of aggression and have received no formal empirical testing. In the present study, college students nominated a pool of real-life aggressive episodes which they had observed or in which they had been involved. A representative sample of 24 of these situations were given back to a subset of the subjects who were asked to sort them into meaningful groups on the basis of perceived similarity. This technique allowed subjects to generate subclasses of aggressive behavior without cueing from the experimenter in the form of provided rating scales. The results were analyzed by means of Takane's IDSORT multi-dimensional scaling package and by cluster analysis. Both techniques revealed that the major dimensions and groupings were in terms of verbal-physical form, familiar other-strangers, and equity-victimization. Comparison with results from Forgas et al's [1980] study suggests that contextual, form, and social judgment dimensions may be central in subject' categorical schema.