Mikolic et al 1997

Persistent Annoyance

Background• What is persistent annoyance?

– A repetitive provocation from another person or group– Complainant is the party being annoyed, respondent is source of annoyance

• How do complainants responds to persistent annoyance?– Complainants enact a sequence of tactics in escalation– Adopting each new tactic as the prior tactic proves ineffective

• What is escalation?– Escalation is driven by spiral conflict, found in all forms of social conflict

• What is the goal of the study?– To map the sequence of tactics, confining to verbal tactics– To examine three independent variables

• Groups versus individuals• Gender of the complainant• Gender of the respondent

• What prior research has been conducted on this topic?– Peirce experiments used role-playing method (landlord/tenant, student/instructor)

• What are problems with prior research?– Role-playing is imagined, whereas social conflict is real and involves spontaneous &

emotional reactions• How does current research overcome those problems?

– New technique where participant genuinely believe they are in conflict with another• Confederates withhold key supplies for making birthday cards• Measure verbal comments by complainant to get key supplies

Hypotheses• What are the hypotheses?

– No hypothesis for mapping sequence of tactics• Descriptive part of the study

– Groups escalate faster and to higher level than individuals• Annoyance to group doubly frustrating

• Group members are less inhibited

• Public mistreatment requires face-saving aggression

• Groups tend to go to extremes

• Groups viewed as less trusting, more competitive

– Men escalate faster and to higher level than individuals• Women less aggressive, more normative restraints

– Men more likely targets of aggression• Women less likely targets because of chivalry norm

Results• How to measure results?

– Content analysis of verbal comments recorded over intercom, by blind coders– Six categories, four levels (page 154) – What do you think of these?

• What do tables 1&2 say about mapping sequence of tactics?– “Escalation script”

• What does the text say about other hypotheses?– Groups: greater escalation for groups (page 157)– Gender of complainant: Women showed higher escalation (page 158)– Gender of respondent: More escalation toward males (page 159)

• Problems– Researchers admit they didn’t find universal sequence! (page 161)– Didn’t test explanations from Intro about why groups more aggressive (?)– Researchers said groups more escalation because more talkative so why was

that not one of the explanations from the Intro (?) – Found opposite results for hypothesis about “gender of complainant” (?)– Tried to explain their method was better than Pierce experiments but maybe

different results because different method (?)

Beyond the research

• Should we use their new method?

• Can we fix it?

• Can you think of other ways to measure?