ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses certain fundamental issues to set the stage for the discussion of social psychological research on aggression. As an academic discipline, social psychology is concerned with the many facets of people's social lives, their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours towards other people, and the impact of those others on the way they themselves feel, think, and act. For a person's behaviour to qualify as aggression, the behaviour must be carried out with the intention to inflict negative consequences on the target, which presupposes the expectancy that the action will produce a particular outcome. Observing aggression in natural contexts has the advantage that behavioural information can be collected in an unobtrusive way without people realising that their behaviour is being recorded. Given that aggression is a negatively valued behaviour and respondents are typically aware of this, an obvious drawback of selfreports is their susceptibility to response biases in the direction of social desirability.
