No abstract

The question “What are aggression and violence?” can be answered in many ways given the many forms that both phenomena can take. This chapter defines aggression and violence and provides a detailed discussion of distinctions that have emerged between different types of aggression. For example, aggression can be classified as physical, verbal, or relational; hostile or instrumental; reactive or proactive; impulsive or premeditated; direct or indirect; active or passive; overt or covert; legitimate or illegitimate; displaced, triggered displaced, or not displaced; and person based, situation based, or both person and situation based. Aggression is also differentiated from similar but distinct concepts including antisocial behavior, juvenile delinquency, coercion, assertiveness, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affect. This chapter provides readers with a clear understanding of what aggression and violence are as well as what they are not.

No abstract

The potential role of brief online studies in changing the types of research and theories likely to evolve is examined in the context of earlier changes in theory and methods in social and personality psychology, changes that favored low-difficulty, high-volume studies. An evolutionary metaphor suggests that the current publication environment of social and personality psychology is a highly competitive one, and that academic survival and reproduction processes (getting a job, tenure/promotion, grants, awards, good graduate students) can result in the extinction of important research domains. Tracking the prevalence of brief online studies, exemplified by studies using Amazon Mechanical Turk, in three top journals ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) reveals a dramatic increase in their frequency and proportion. Implications, suggestions, and questions concerning this trend for the field and questions for its practitioners are discussed.

No abstract