Actor or victim of aggression: Divergent perspectives—divergent evaluations

The present study investigated the general assumption of perspective-specific dissent between actor and victim in evaluating aggressive interactions. Four experimental designs were established to test the relation of evaluations between (a) actor versus victim when judging a single act, (b) initiator versus reactor when judging action and reaction, and (c) actor as well as recipient when judging own versus other's behaviour. Results of 2 × 2 ANOVAs supported the hypotheses showing a consistently more favourable evaluation of identical actions by actors versus recipients with respect to the dependent variable ‘appropriateness’. For the second dependent variable ‘aggressiveness’ differences were not significant.