The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

In 1961, Arnold Buss, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, published one of the first comprehensive books about human aggression. He concluded, based in part on laboratory experiments, that people exhibit two distinct flavors of aggression: The first is a “hostile” one driven by anger or frustration and motivated by the reward of seeing someone hurt or punished; the second is an “instrumental” one that isn’t motivated by a desire to injure but by the determination to achieve a worthwhile goal. Buss believed that these instrumental acts—which were task-specific, didn’t blatantly violate the rules, and were not intended to do harm—might not really be aggressive at all. They might be better described as assertive. “You have to distinguish between assertiveness and aggression,” Buss said. “There is a low correlation between them.”