Proactive aggression refers to attaining personal goals or gains through aggressive means with prior deliberation and moral disengagement, and it can occur without provocation and with a low-level of anger arousal. The current study introduces a new task, a Reward-Interference Task (RIT), to induce and measure proactive aggression in the laboratory under incentive conditions and develops a task-related questionnaire (Interference/ Non-interference Motivation Questionnaire, INIMQ) through four experiments. The findings reveal that instrumental motivation toward incentives and moral motivation (moral disengagement and moral inhibition) were the main motivations for participants to attack opponents during the RIT. The validity and reliability of the INIMQ were acceptable, and the RIT had good internal consistency, adequate convergence, and discriminant validity. The present results show that the RIT is a valid tool for inducing and measuring proactive aggressive behavior under incentive conditions.

Introduction

Aggression is any behavior that causes physical or psychological harm to another individual (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). Aggressive behavior can pose a threat to individual health, human collaboration, social economy, and safety (Blair, 2013; Brugman et al., 2017; Carroll & McCarthy, 2018). Aggression is a heterogeneous concept and can be divided into different categories, for example, verbal, physical and indirect aggression (Björkqvist, Lagerspetz, & Kaukiainen, 1992; Crick & Bigbee, 1998). Another widely accepted classification is proactive and reactive aggression, based on motivation (Dambacher et al., 2015; Dodge & Coie, 1987; Dodge, Lochman, Harnish, Bates, & Pettit, 1997; Wrangham, 2018). Previous studies have suggested that proactive and reactive aggression have different cognitive, physiological, and neurobiological mechanisms and etiologies (Dambacher et al., 2015; Hubbard, McAuliffe, Morrow, & Romano, 2010; Nelson & Trainor, 2007; Wrangham, 2018). Proactive aggression refers to obtaining personal goals or gains through aggressive means with prior deliberation and moral disengagement and it can occur without provocation and with a low-level of emotional arousal (Babcock, Tharp, Sharp, Heppner, & Stanford, 2014; Smeijers, Brugman, von Borries, Verkes, & Bulten, 2018). The core goal of proactive aggression is obtaining self-interest rather than harming the target (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). Stalking, bullying, and premeditated crimes are typical forms of proactive aggression (Wrangham, 2018).