Now let's contrast that with proactive aggression.
Proactive aggression is a much more sneaky calculated way of trying to get a goal.
So, this was actually something studied originally in the animal world,
where people realized that when studying different species there were those
species that wanted to have the first access to food or
mating partner or want to be dominant within their herd or their group.
And they would do this by being aggressive in very calculated, thoughtful ways.
They could either do that in an object oriented fashion by being aggressive
using a tool or trying to get some sort of a banana, or
a piece of fruit, or a first opportunity to eat some prey.
Or it might be more person oriented, simply to demonstrate that they're higher
on the hierarchy, and that's what we refer to as bullying.
It's a way of simply being aggressive to show that you are more dominant than
somebody else on that hierarchy, and then the next time that something becomes
available, you're further up in the line, and being able to access that object and
this is cold blooded aggression, again is sneaky and calculative.
What we know is that in humans we're usually not having to have
this type of aggressive warfare for food or mating partners but
we do try and have different access to status.
For different other things in our life.
For wealth, for power, for influence,
and because of those human goals, we see proactive aggression happening a lot.
Proactive aggression is specifically designed to get you more status.
And it works.
It works on the playground and it works in adulthood as well.
So, when people act in an aggressive way proactively,
it does lead them to have higher status.
It doesn't mean it makes them more popular, more likeable that is, but
it does work.
So, it's reinforced through social learning theory.
So again, this is where someone might be interested in getting an object, or
in getting some sort of status they think carefully about ways to do that.
They reacting in aggressive ways and it's reinforced through more status.
How is all of this related to popularity.
Well, remember we talked about two different forms of popularity.
One that we refer to as sociometric status, well, you might remember,
we took the number of nominations someone got for liked most, and
we subtracted from the number of nominations they got for liked least.
We call that social preference.
So, that's a way of understanding how much someone is well-liked more than they
are disliked.
Social preference is likeability.
The other way that we look at popularity, the way that it starts becoming relevant
in adolescence we called social reputation.
That was where we took the number of nominations you got for
being most popular and we subtracted from it the number of nominations you got for
being least popular, and that is a measure of your reputation of being popular or
your reputation of dominance or status and that we'll call social reputation.