RESUMO
Unsurprisingly, victims and perpetrators often view aggressive behaviors differently. The current study examined whether victims, perpetrators, and witnesses also explained aggressive behaviors differently. The current study included 408 participants who recalled a time when they harmed another person (i.e., perpetrator memory), when another person harmed them (i.e., victim memory), and when they witnessed an aggressive behavior (i.e., witness memory). Replicating past research, participants rated their recalled aggressive behaviors from the victim perspective as being more harmful and less justified than they did for their recalled behaviors from the perpetrator perspective. When examining their explanations for the behaviors, participants most often explained their own aggressive behaviors by referring to their mental deliberations that led to their behavior (i.e., reason explanations). In comparison, they referred to background causal factors (i.e., causal history of reasons explanations)-such as personality traits, demographic factors, cultural norms, etc.-more when explaining others' aggressive behaviors, especially when the explanation was from the victim perspective. These findings show the subtleties in how people communicate about their aggressive interactions: When communicating about their own aggressive behaviors, people use modes of explanations that portray their behaviors as sensible, and when communicating about a time when another person behaved aggressively towards them, people use modes of explanations that omit the thought processes that led to those behaviors.
RESUMO
Victims often perceive aggressive behaviors as being more harmful than do perpetrators-a so-called victim-perpetrator asymmetry. We examined whether this victim-perpetrator asymmetry was especially strong for individuals who were high in trait hostility. In two studies-one where participants recalled actual aggressive experiences and one where participants took the perspective of a person in a vignette-we found that victims who were high in trait hostility, relative to those who were low, viewed aggressive behaviors as being most harmful. We found somewhat inconsistent effects for whether perpetrators viewed the aggressive behaviors as more justified than victims did and whether trait hostility moderated this judgment. Collectively, the current findings show that victims who are high in trait hostility are especially likely to view an aggressive behavior as harmful, which potentially makes conflict resolution difficult for these individuals and increases the likelihood they would retaliate.