The Person-Environment Duet

Abstract

Every act of aggression is a person-environment event. The singular goal of this book is to provide supportive substance for this assertion. For many decades, the study of aggression was the study of aggressors; the study of crime was the study of criminals. In this early era of near exclusive focus on perpetrators, first constitutional, then psychoanalytic, and then personality theories of aggressive and criminal behavior held sway. In its own way, each perspective was dispositional in its central tenet: antisocial behavior grew from something in the perpetrator. For the constitutional theorist Lombroso (1911), it was a combination of moral deficiency (lazy, shameless, cruel, impulsive) and physical primitiveness, as evidenced by cranial asymmetries, large ears, sloping shoulders, short legs, and numerous other facial and bodily characteristics. Though such “criminaloid” propositions never gained appreciable scientific stature, a later incarnation of constitutional causation theorizing by Sheldon (1949), of body type correlates of both temperament and overt behavior, did gain a measure of credibility. Mesomorphy—the muscular, broad-chested, large-boned, low-waisted body type—was shown by several independent investigators to be disproportionately characteristic of delinquent, as compared to nondelinquent youth (Cortes & Gatti, 1972; Epps & Parnell, 1952; Gibbens, 1963; Glueck & Glueck, 1950). Not unimportantly, however, the same physique appears to be more frequently characteristic of salesmen, politicians, and other extroverted, domineering, high-activity subgroups.