Winners more aggressive than losers,says study

It seems that people have a tendency to stomp down on those they have defeated,to really rub it in, said Brad Bushman,co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.

Losers,on the other hand,dont really act any more aggressively than normal against those who defeated them, he stated,adding this is the first study to examine who acts more aggressively.

There were reasons to believe either side could have been more in a fighting mood,Bushman said.

Bushman conducted the study with three French scholars: Dominique Muller and Emmanuelle Ceaux of Pierre Mendes-France University in Grenoble and Baptise Subra of University Paris Descartes. They conducted three related studies.

The first study involved 103 American college students who were told they would be paired with a partner who they would be competing against on two tasks. In actuality,there was no partner.

In the first task,participants were shown patterns of simple shapes on a computer screen for just a fraction of a second and they had to decide whether a dollar sign was present or absent.

After 80 trials,all students were told their scores. Half of them were told they did better than their supposed partner,and half were told they did worse.

The second task was a competitive reaction time task,which is used to measure aggression. Participants were told that they and their partner would have to press a button as fast as possible on each of the 25 trials and who ever was slower would receive a blast of noise through headphones.

The winner of the task would decide how loud the blast would be and how long it would last.

Losers acted about as aggressively as did those in the control group,who didnt know if they were winners or losers thus,suggesting winners indeed acted particularly aggressively,while losers arent particularly non-aggressive.

Results showed that participants who won in the first competition blasted their partners longer and louder than did those who lost the competition.

Bushman said the fact that the findings were repeated in three different studies,in two different countries,suggest that there really is something about winning that makes people more aggressive.

Losers need to watch out, he said.

The next step,he said,is to find out if winners act more aggressively towards everyone,or just towards people they defeat.

Their results appeared online in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.