Effects of aggressive personality on social expectations and social perceptions

Individual differences in aggressive reaction tendencies appear early in life and are stable across the life span. People who chronically interpret ambiguously aggressive behaviors as intentionally hostile are more likely to aggress against a provocateur than people without this hostile bias. Two studies used a Structural Equation Modeling approach to examine the effects of aggressive personality on hostile expectations and hostile perceptions in personally irrelevant social interactions. Study 1 demonstrated that aggressive personality was positively related to hostile expectations in the imagined outcomes of ambiguously aggressive story stems. Study 2 demonstrated that aggressive personality was positively related to hostile perceptions of observed dyadic interactions. This finding was not limited to the interpretation of ambiguous interactions, as has been found in the past. Results are discussed in terms of their applicability to understanding biased interpretations of everyday social interactions. (C) 1997 Academic Press.