Harming In Order To Help: An Empirical Characterization of Prosocial Aggression

People sometimes inflict harm with the intent to help the very target of their aggression. Across six studies (N=1,527), we examined the nature of such prosocial aggression. Many participants believed that altruistically-motivated aggression exists and exhibited a self-serving bias in which most believed their aggression was more altruistic than others’ — beliefs that were linked to greater antisocial and prosocial traits. Translating these beliefs to behavior, participants were often prosocially-aggressive when given the chance — inflicting more harm when their aggression could also help (versus only hurt) the target. Such prosocial aggression also exhibited features of both aggression (i.e., it was positively correlated with dispositional aggressiveness) and altruism (i.e., it was preferentially doled out to people who had been previously kind to participants and even when it was personally costly to do so). We also independently varied the amount of harm and help that prosocial aggression provided, revealing that participants sought to maximize the help and minimize the harm done to people who had been kind to them but not towards those who had provoked them. Our findings argue against models that conceptualize harm- and help-based motives as opponent processes, showing that these motives readily coexist and dynamically interact to shape aggressive behavior — even towards the same target.