Whatever Happened to the Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis?

There is a fairly common pattern in the way social psychology’s major theoretical conceptions have changed in the past four decades. The Hegelian view of history envisions a regular sequence: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; a proposition is advanced which generates opposing ideas and the apparent contradiction is then reconciled at a higher order of abstraction. This last step is not particularly obvious in recent social psychological theorizing. Thesis leads to antithesis but the final result, more often than not, appears to be a narrowing of the original conception rather than a broader synthesis. The conditioning formulations of the 1930s and 1940s have now been confined to a relatively limited sphere, primarily involving some types of involuntary emotional and attitudinal reactions. Cognitive dissonance theory seems more and more to be concerned mainly with the individual’s attempt to preserve his pride and is no longer king of all it surveys. The frustration-aggression hypothesis advanced by Dollard et al. in 1939 has seen the same developments. Although this formulation is best known for its central notion-that frustrations produce an instigation to aggression-the I939 statement was actually a far-ranging collection of interrelated ideas that grew out of a mixture of psychoanalysis and the dominant stimulus-response orientation of the prewar era. Helped by this amalgam and the fame of its authors, but also aided to a considerable extent by its sweep and simplicity, this statement has attracted a great deal of attention. It offered a readily grasped account of one ofthe most important aspects of life, aggression. However, the thesis was also quickly countered by antithesis as other social scientists rushed in with opposing arguments. The outcome has been not a broader synthesis but a sharper analysis. As a consequence, we must now restrict the scope of the frustration-aggression hypothesis.