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Aggression Study Provokes Fight

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Today’s post comes from disgraced journalist Bud Buck, who considers telling the truth to be “a content strategy that hasn’t really worked out.”

RSR

A team of researchers studying aggression in men has confirmed the long held suspicion that men will deliberately anger each other to get what they want.

Professor Kirk Buffdude of Pummel University led the study, which gave 140 undergraduate men a chance to call out to an opponent before competing with that same opponent in a fine motor skills contest.

The competition involved carefully threading lengths of puffy yarn through small holes cut in tablet-sized pieces of cardboard. Only one competitor was allowed to speak before the contest began, and that person had just three choices

Buffdude found that the participants who chose to issue a challenge to their opponent’s virility won the ensuing fine motor skills game 78% of the time, whereas those who chose to offer a supportive comment won only 3% of the time. The contestants chose to say nothing at all won the remaining 19% of the time.

“This shows that humiliating your opponent before a fight gives you a competitive edge,” Buffdude said. “The adrenaline spike of an impending confrontation makes it impossible to govern fine motor tasks, and aggressors inherently know this and use it to their advantage. It’s a major breakthrough, and it makes me the greatest aggression researcher of all time!”

But others in the field were not impressed.

“Buffdude’s study is a joke,” said Dr. Armstrong Slapdown, Chair of the Domination Department at Worrisome College. “If you add up the numbers, it’s apparent that the contestant who was allowed to talk won the competition every single time, no matter what he said. How is that possible? They must have been fighting girls.”

But Slapdown’s comments drew fire from Dr. Winsome Garrotte, holder of the Rob Ford Endowed Chair for In-Your-Faceness at Toronto’s Angst Institute. “Fighting girls is no picnic,” she said. “Professor Slapdown knows that very well from our joint appearance on the Bad Attitude Panel at last Fall’s I.V.A.C., the International Verbal Assassination Convention.”

In spite of the confrontational tone of the responses, the author of the study that sparked all the sniping was unmoved. “We don’t make a lot of forward progress in Aggression Studies,” Professor Kirk Buffdude said. “Mostly our work is a matter of posturing. You have to enjoy the show if you’re going to survive.”

How are you in a fight?

45 thoughts on “Aggression Study Provokes Fight”

  2. “By dint of railing at idiots we are in danger of making idiots of ourselves.”
    Those are words I have tried to live by but often failed. In other words, in conflict, I find myself as bad as any other male, which is why I live a semi-reclusive life, to spare the world the sight of me climbing upon my high velveteen horse.

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  3. Let’s just say Dr. Garrotte has it right.”Fighting girls is no picnic”.

    do not mess with me, I kick and bite. also make snide and sarcastic remarks.

    This is why I try very hard to not get into fights.

    re: yesterday’s most excellent Baboondocks question- I truly wished to comment, but as so often happens, fortune (and other people getting sick, impaired, inconvenienced…) intervened, so it did not happen.

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  4. Judging by the absence of commenting on this question, I’d have to guess that Baboons are conflict-avoidant 🙂 I sure know that I am. Angry people scare the hell out of me even when they’re angry at someone else in my presence. I feel like a deer in headlights if I’m even around someone with a raised voice. The concept of “fight or flight” needs one more part: freeze. I freeze. I imagine that this freeze response is largely due to having a childhood where anger between any family members was strictly forbidden, so handling angry people (or being angry myself) is completely missing in my skill set as an adult.

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  5. “Conflict averse” would describe me. I was married 31 years and parented a child without so much as raising my voice. I sometimes accuse myself of being cowardly because I saw bad things happening and I didn’t confront the perpetrator. In particular, I’ve been haunted by the time I saw a drunken fool torturing a fish he had caught. I think I should have stepped forward and buried a fist in his ample gut, but of course I didn’t. And that’s probably a good thing. Violence solves very few problems, and the chubby SOB was probably a lawyer who would have sued me.

    I was perfectly comfortable with my pacifistic ways until I met my friend, Larry, a rancher in Montana. He was astonished to meet a man who didn’t like to fight. Larry, when he gets bored, steps into a bar and says something inflammatory about Indians. Fifteen minutes later there is a lot of broken furniture, a few bleeding wounds, and Larry feels on top of the world. He had trouble believing I’d never done that!

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      1. new jersey poles still procalin chris christie a good guy of integrity not a bully and he didnt know anything about his underlings bad decisions. i knew there was a difference between minnesotans and people from new jersey, i just couldnt put my finger on it. they are dumb bastards.

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        1. Christie is, in my professional opinion, has a classic Narcissistic Personality Disorder. No matter what his poll numbers are, I see no integrity as he’s known for three months what went down – even though he claims to have only known about it “a couple of days ago”.

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        2. When Christie announced that “mistakes were made”, that passive voice that seems to imply that they just made themselves without any human help, I was convinced he was guilty. That weird, actorless tense is the refuge of scoundrels.

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  7. I have never thrown a punch in anger, though I have slapped someone in a fit of pique, which surprised both of us. I do raise my voice, which is a behavior I’m not pleased with, but there it is. Generally it takes quite a bit to really irk me – I got really firm with my director at work once when it seemed like he wasn’t listening to what a co-worker and I were saying, which, again, surprised everyone. My director did pay attention, I will say that. And since then, my manager has learned to really pay attention to when I start to look irked because he knows it’s really really bad…it takes a lot to get me there.

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  8. i get really perturbed when watching sports these days with all the trash talking among atheletes. i guess if it helps the team win then those jerks can go ahead and expolit the other pretenders who beleive that they are worth 20 times more than the college professors they didnt attend the classes of , the doctors who try to massage away their little achey muscles and the attourneys who fight for the contract that will be voided after the 2nd or 3rd iolation of substance abuse or domestic violence.. the vikings new head coach is known to be a head case who screams at the misfits who other teams throw out for bad behavior and cracks the whip to get those animals to perform. guys… you gotta love em. clyde you are such a wimp.

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    1. I am, tim, I am. But most people who have worked with me and encountered me on my high horse would call me something more like a pain in the ass.
      This is why I have quit on sports, and on most TV. Reality TV is an excuse for people, some in the role of judges, to be rude and overdirect, nasty. Every piece of reality is about conflict and rudeness. My grandkids and I have fallen in love with a show called Treehouse Master on Animal Planet of all channels, about a vibrant silly guy and his great crew who travel around building treehouses. He lives in Fall City WA very near where my son now lives.
      I am a wimp. I am. but two of my three grandkids are just as agreeable as any human beings can be, one at 11 and one at 5 months. I hope that lasts, a wimpish wish.

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      1. wouldnt the world be a wonderful place if we could ditch all the aggression.children are so sweet and then they grow up. i hope that my children like yours avoid reality

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  9. Let’s just say I’m NOT averse to conflict, but most battles simply aren’t worth the fight. Even if you do win the battle, you’ll often lose the war. But, if I do chose to engage in a conflict, you’ll find me a fierce opponent. Generally, I try to find a way of deescalating problem situations as confrontation tends to escalate them. In my personal life, as opposed to my previous
    professional life, I “fight” only with people I care about. I’d never shoot someone for texting in a movie theater, no matter how rude and obnoxious I might consider such behavior, but I’m likely to intervene if you’re mistreating a child in my presence.

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      1. Nice to be in your good company. A colleague found the care bear thing on pinterest and it made me laugh so naturally I stole it. That is the kind of fighter I am – bruk bruk bruk bruk braaawk! Occasionally though I will throw a punch at my pillow.

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        1. Once upon a time, I had a foam nerf bat that I used to beat the s… out of my mattress with. Way better than killing the sob I wanted to throttle.

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        3. my mom had therapy tools that were big padded bats that you could beat each other up with without hurting anyone. it let you get your aggression out without doing any damage. if i remember correctly it often resulted in laughter.

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        4. I bet none of you have ever heard my rendition of a sick chicken. Remind me next BBC…
          OT: Hey Doona de tune – send me an email – I lost some addresses when we replaced the broken computer…

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    2. Wow, that started out as a poem by Shel Silverstein. Was one of my dad’s favorites, and my sister Sue’s…

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  12. Don’t mess with me. I don’t handle fights very well and I will not react well. You don’t want to see the sulking, pouty person that I will become if you pick a fight with me. You might win the fight. You will not top me in the sour situation following the fight. Got that?!

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  13. I used to throw things instead of hitting. I remember getting off the phone with a former boyfriend, being furious and throwing pillows around the place; luckily nothing broke.

    Like some other baboons, I am mostly an avoider of conflict. I will also try to be the peacemaker if I’m in a position to do so. But I’ve held my own as I’ve gotten older, and a couple of times surprised myself and my adversary by coming right out with the issue verbally, confronting it head-on. Didn’t necessarily make everything all sweetness and light, but cleared the air a bit.

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  14. We had neighbors once who threw things when they fought. They fought when they were drunk, which was often. And by “things” I mean that they threw heavy cast iron skillets and other cooking implements weighing several pounds. The lady in that marriage outweighed her husband by something like 80 to 100 pounds, and if she had ever been accurate with one of her skillet tosses we would have had a messy homicide in the neighborhood, but luckily enough her aim was as erratic as her mood.

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    1. Steve, everybody knows that cast iron cookware does not not kill, it merely makes a boinging sort of noise and raises a large bump on the victim.

      I suspect you do not know this, being too old to learn it via Saturday morning cartoons, but I assure you, it is so.

      Not that I have tried it myself. Just flipping my waffle iron takes a bit of wrist strength.

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    1. Sounds like that neighbor woman is someone who you should try to keep happy, Steve. There was a woman in Clarks Grove who was like that. She operated a small restaurant. She told people who didn’t agree with her that she had a sharp knife in the kitchen that she might use on them.

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  16. If you’re talking fistfight, I’m a lover all the way. Only been in one fight in my life, when I was about 9 or 10, and it was more goofing around than angry fight, but I managed to knock out the kid’s tooth.

    With verbal fights, I’m not good because I don’t usually think fast enough on my feet to be effective, and I’m not a confrontational sort in the first place. I usually clam up and walk away, or else think of something I think will be an effective argument, but end up making the situation worse.

    Chris in Owatonna

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