Human aggression is a psychological term referring to a wide range of observable concerning behavior that may result in both psychological or physical harm to oneself, another and/ or your immediate environment.
Aggression is predominantly focused on harming another person and can be an expression of anger or hostility, competition with others, asserting dominance, reacting to pain or fear, intimidation or straight up threat to another.
It has been around since the first caveman attempted to assert his ambitions of dominance over the second caveman. Human aggression is made manifest by harassment, annoyance, irritation, embarrassment, verbal abuse, and physical violence among others.
Levels of human aggression can escalate from a heated conversation to a shouting match, to a scuffle, to a fist fight and then at the very highest end personal combat resulting in your fighting for life and limb. Each level of increased human aggression is commensurate with a parallel escalation or scale of injury demonstrating a relationship between human aggression and injury potential. The greater the level of aggression the greater your potential for incurring severe bodily injury or even death.
Violent crimes are a common expression of human aggression. Street fights, gang beatdowns, drive by shootings, the knockout game, home invasions and human trafficking are all real-world examples of the expression of human aggression. All of which can be effectively managed.
Human aggression can escalate and de-escalate based on circumstances surrounding its manifestation. Law enforcement and protective services experts acknowledge a relationship between aggression and injury – the higher the level of aggression is allowed to escalate the higher your potential for injury. The same experts can manage injury potential by managing aggression.
Hailing from the world of protective services there are three tools you can add to your tool kit to best manage human aggression toward maintaining the lowest possible scale of injury, these are spotting, recognizing or identifying a physical manifestation or expression of human aggression, matching its position on the sliding scale of aggression and then lastly but certainly not least, taking control of it.
Spotting Aggression
Identifying human aggression is certainly not difficult. You may have most likely already witnessed it in one form or another starting in grade school. If you observe the dynamics of human interaction at home, at work, while out shopping or running errands, at a gas station, a concert or a coffee shop, you can readily observe where people may be on the emotional spectrum – happy, sad, depressed, anxious, nervous, tense, angry, calm et al, based on their body language.
You can further develop your observation skills by looking for non-verbal cues of human aggression. As part of your soft skills training try running this ‘body language drill’ next time you are in a situation to discretely observe other people.
Find a position in the room or environment where you will most likely not be observed or engaged. Look for two or more people in a conversation. When you find a suitable scenario, carefully observe their interpersonal interactions and look for subtle non-verbal signs such as hand gestures, facial expressions, changes in body position such as crossing legs or arms, hands on hips, pointing a finger and the like. Try to assess their non-verbal communication. What would you determine as the mood, emotion or demeanor of their interaction?
Another identifier of human aggression is verbal cues. If you are in ear shot of the interaction, are they speaking in a low to moderate tone? Is there an observable acoustic change in volume, intention, emotion?
Lastly, combine the two – non-verbal and verbal. A change in verbal intensity is usually accompanied by a change in body language. Recall a time where you recognized human aggression, were you able to see the connection between verbal escalation and change in body language?
Match its Level
Should you be a participant in an escalating aggression scenario and your intention is to de-escalate, then you don’t want to meet anger with batting eyelashes. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you don’t want to scream at the top of your lungs with someone who is whispering to you. Akin to applying appropriate use of force to a violent physical altercation, applying appropriate communication level helps to connect with that other person who may be escalated, at a ‘shared frequency’ where you might be able to establish an initial connection.
Establishing such an initial connection all by itself can sometimes positively affect the situation when the other person or persons realize that they now have your undivided attention in that you have at least acknowledged their position on the spectrum.
Control It
Law enforcement is adept at aggression de-escalation and are trained to employ uniformed or command presence, a polite but assertive voice and at first to connect with that person. As a civilian you may not have the uniformed presence part, but you can certainly assert a command but non-intimidating and non-confrontational presence. You don’t want them to walk all over you like a door mat, but you cannot appear confrontational which will add fuel to the already burning fire. The overall concept here is to dial down the flame under the already boiling pot of water – not add to it.
Changing your volume and tone of voice plus your body language – for example presenting both of your open palms to the other person (universal non-verbal sign of ‘surrender’) can often de-escalate the situation.
You can’t fix something you can’t see. The first step to managing human aggression is to recognize it. Upon identification, the next step is to connect with that person on a compatible frequency and then lastly take control of the situation by setting your rheostat to effectively reduce interaction dynamics to an even more manageable level.