ABSTRACT
The hypothesis that social interchanges escalate to aggression and violence is a simple and powerful idea. Cast into an interactional framework, the proposition is that hostile acts of one person toward another provide the stimuli for more hostile counteractions. All things equal, aggression begets aggression. Among peers, a positive feedback loop of negative actions-reactions may be created whereby increases in response intensity occur with each cycle. The concept of escalation has been employed to account for such diverse phenomena as the behavior of aggressive children and adolescents (Raush, 1965), violent men (Toch, 1969), coercive families (Patterson & Cobb, 1971), agonistic behavior of mammals (Cairns & Nakelski, 1970, 1971; Cairns & Scholz, 1973), “imitation” in young boys (Hall & Cairns, 1984), and violence in incarcerated adolescent girls (Perrin, 1981). Implicit in the proposal is the larger theoretical proposition that behaviors should not be divorced from the social contexts in which they occur. The escalation hypothesis has proved to be a versatile and productive proposal in several domains of social inquiry.
