Trait Aggressiveness and Situational Provocation: A Test of the Traits as Situational Sensitivities (TASS) Model

Abstract

In this article, the authors propose and test an interactionist model of personality functioning. The model maintains that many traits function in a threshold-like manner, such that less situational strength is needed to evoke a trait-relevant response in people who are high on the trait than in those who are low on the trait. Because of these different sensitivities, people who are high on a trait are more reactive to moderate provocation than are those who are low on a trait, but the opposite is true when strong provocation is compared to moderate provocation. Three studies are reported showing how the model can be used to understand the nature of aggression.

Fueling the Fire: Violent Metaphors, Trait Aggression, and Support for Political Violence

“…Trait-aggressive people tend to be more susceptible to violent cues because they maintain a larger store of aggressionrelated schemata in memory ready to be activated (Bushman, 1995(Bushman, , 1998Dill, Anderson, & Deuser, 1997). When provocative cues are mild-like the violent metaphors in the three studies here-the strongest effects appear among trait-aggressive people (Marshall & Brown, 2006). Recent studies also show that metaphors increase attention and interest in arguments and motivate systematic processing in people with interest in the domain (Ottati, Rhoads, & Graesser, 1999), so violent content may appeal more to aggressive citizens.…”

How Taking a Word for a Word Can Be Problematic: Context-Dependent Linguistic Markers of Extraversion and Neuroticism

“…Precipitating situations, then, selectively afford the expression of conceptually relevant personality traits (cf. Marshall & Brown, 2006). An important theoretical dimension along which personality traits vary is the degree to which they are public and generally high in visibility or private and generally low in visibility.…”

Proposal of a Nonlinear Interaction of Person and Situation (NIPS) model

“…Marshall and Brown (2006) proposed a Traits as Situational Sensitivities ( TASS ) Model , which implies a systematic person × situation interaction. We review this model and show that it suffers from several limitations.…”

“…Marshall and Brown (2006) proposed a Traits as Situational Sensitivities ( TASS ) model, which addresses an important issue that each theory of behavior has to address: How do personality and situational factors jointly shape behavior? The TASS model is a person × situation interaction model.…”