Limited Resources as a Source of Human Aggression

Introduction:

Those that experience a shortage of resources will be more prone to be more aggressive to acquire those resources. According to Eibl-Eibesfeldt, “by war, groups acquired access to resources which were blocked by other groups. Groups of people have acquired land and driven away or even exterminated those who lived there before (1977).” It should come to no one’s surprise that wars have been started due to limited resources. However, my intention of this experiment will mostly be verbal anger. According to Archer, “most considerations of animal aggression concentrate on the forms that occur in response to resource competition (2009).” This should also be true of humans and I will demonstrate that in my experiment about deliberately taking away resources.

Literature Review:

Archer, J. (2009). The nature of aggression. International

Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 32(4), 202-208.

Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1977). Evolution of destructive aggression.

Aggressive Behavior, 3(2), 127-144.

Methods:

I know about a football house party that I will be going to on Sunday and I am in charge of food. The item will be pizza. I will create a shortage by merely stating I’m going to order the pizza, and have my buddy who works at one of the restaurant chains in town only deliver just one medium sized pizza instead of four large pizzas. Over the next half hour, I will try to gauge people’s reactions to the limited amount of pizza available. I will get another buddy in on the act, and he will purposely eat a large amount of that one pizza. I hope that there is some sort of rift between people that want to share a small amount to satisfy their appetite for the short term, or if members will try to go every person for themselves and satisfy their own appetite. My role is to pretend to fix the order over the phone while observing what people say to each other. I think there will be some verbal hostility between people at the party. I hope to keep it relatively short and end any possible hostilities by receiving the rest of the pizza about half an hour later. I will then ask afterward, one on one, to about ten to twelve people what they thought of the one pizza and the people around them.