Aggressive

Aggression, fear and curiosity

Within ethology, it has long been recognized that there is a relation between aggression, fear, and curiosity. A cognitive approach to this relationship puts aggression in the broader context of inconsistency reduction, and proposes that aggressive behavior is caused by an inconsistency between a desired, or expected, situation and the actually perceived situation (e.g., "frustration"), and functions to forcefully manipulate the perception into matching the expected situation. In this approach, when the inconsistency between perception and expectancy is small, learning as a result of curiosity reduces inconsistency by updating expectancy to match perception. If the inconsistency is larger, fear or aggressive behavior may be employed to alter the perception in order to make it match expectancy, depending on the size of the inconsistency as well as the specific context. Uninhibited fear results in fleeing, thereby removing the inconsistent stimulus from the perceptual field and resolving the inconsistency. In some cases, thwarted escape may trigger aggressive behavior in an attempt to remove the thwarting stimulus.