CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

252 PRUITT
Actor Characteristics
Individual Differences. Overall, men retaliate more heavily than women
do, especially in the physical realm (Eagly & Steffen, 1986; Martinko &
Zellars, 1998). However, there is some evidence that women are more
annoyed by perceived unfairness, so there may be a special exception
in this case. In the unilateral escalation study described earlier (Mikolic
et al., 1997), women viewed the confederates who deprived them of the
resources as more unfair and escalated further in their comments to these
confederates than did men.
Research also suggests a number of personality characteristics that are
related to the tendency to retaliate. One example is the hostile attribution
bias—a tendency to assume that annoying behavior from others is done with
hostile intent. Dodge and associates (Dodge & Coie, 1987; Dodge & Crick,
1990) showed that this bias is predictive of retaliatory behavior. For example,
in the Dodge and Coie (1987) study, teachers put primary school boys
into three categories: often initiating aggression, often retaliating aggressively,
or neither. Unlike the other two groups, the retaliators were found to
see hostile intent in videotaped incidents of accidental annoyance.
Type A individuals—people who are hard driving, competitive, and
time urgent—have also been shown to engaged in more retaliation than
type B individuals—people who are easy going (Baron, Neuman, & Geddes,
1999; Carver & Glass, 1978). In the Carver and Glass (1978) experiment,
undergraduates were first insulted about their progress on a puzzle
and then had a chance to shock the insulter. Type A individuals employed
more shock than did type B individuals.
Folklore to the contrary, no relationship has been found between
low self-esteem and readiness to retaliate (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden,
1996). However, certain kinds of people with high self-esteem show that
tendency—those whose self-esteem is unstable so that they occasionally
experience periods of self-doubt (Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989)
and those with narcissistic (inflated and grandiose) views of themselves
(Bushman & Baumeister, 1998). In the Bushman and Baumeister (1998)
study, undergraduates at various levels of measured narcissism were
given strikingly unfavorable evaluations of essays they had written and
then had a chance to blast the evaluator with noise. Those who were higher
in narcissism gave louder and, hence, more punitive blasts, an effect that
was not found when positive evaluations of the essays were given. The
mechanism for both these effects is probably one of ego threat. People
with unstable high self-esteem and narcissists suffer especially uncomfortable
self-doubts when others assert superiority over them or put them
down. Hence, they lash out to protect their self-esteem.
Two personality traits—high need for social approval (Dengerink,
1976) and empathy with others (Rusbult, Verette, Whitney, Slovik, & Lipkus,
1991)—encourage underreaction and, hence, reduce the extent of
escalation.