Finding common ground may reduce aggression

Updated 10:45 AM January 4, 2007

Finding common ground may reduce aggression

By Diane Swanbrow
News Service

By pointing out similarities between themselves and assailants, potential victims may be able to defuse violence before it happens, a new study suggests.

The finding applies to violence committed by people who are narcissists, and who strike out when they receive a blow to their inflated egos.

"Threatened egotism is one of the risk factors for violence," says psychologist Sara Konrath, first author of the study published in the December issue of Psychological Science.

"People who are narcissists behave aggressively when they're criticized or rejected by others," Konrath says. "But our research finds that if narcissists can be made to feel a sense of psychological connection to someone who criticizes them, they're unlikely to strike out at them."

Konrath, a doctoral candidate in social psychology, conducted two separate experiments with 716 undergraduate students in collaboration with U-M psychologist Brad Bushman and University of Georgia psychologist W. Keith Campbell. All participants completed an online survey that included questions that measured their degrees of self-esteem and narcissism.

One of the measures for narcissism required participants to say which of the following statements they agreed with, if they had to choose between the two: "If I ruled the world it would be a much better place" vs. "The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me."

Next, participants were told they would be interacting with a partner of the same sex during the study. This partner actually was a member of the experimental team pretending to be another participant.

In one experiment, some participants were told that their supposed partners had the same birthday they did; in the other, some participants were told that their partners had the same fingerprint type that they did—a very rare one.

Participants then were asked to write a short essay and either received negative feedback ("This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!") or positive feedback ("No suggestions, great essay!").

Finally, they were told they would be tested on competitive reaction time. They and their partners were told to press a button as fast as possible on each of 25 trials. The slower person received a blast of noise through headphones, a widely used way of measuring aggression in laboratory experiments. Before the trials, participants could set the level of noise their partners would receive, with choices including no noise, or one of 10 levels between 60 and 105 decibels.

The researchers found that narcissists who thought there was a similarity between them and their partners showed no tendency to deliver aggressive levels of noises to the other person, even when they had been criticized by him or her.

But narcissists who hadn't been told they shared a birthday or a rare fingerprint type with their partners, and who had been criticized by them, were much more likely than others to select painful high-decibel noise levels.

"This research has important practical implications," Konrath said. "It appears that narcissistic aggression after an ego threat thrives when the connection between individuals is weak. Thus, establishing commonalities between individuals may be a powerful strategy for keeping ego-driven aggression in check."

Finding common ground may reduce aggression

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