{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/phsve","title":"Harming In Order To Help: An Empirical Characterization of Prosocial Aggression","abstract":"People sometimes inflict harm with the intent to help the very target of their aggression. Across six studies (N = 1,527), we examined the nature of such prosocial aggression. Many participants believed that altruistically-motivated aggression exists and most believed their aggression was more altruistic than others’ — beliefs that were positively associated with antisocial and prosocial traits. Translating beliefs to behavior, participants were often prosocially-aggressive — inflicting more harm when their aggression could also help (versus only hurt) the target. Prosocial aggression was elevated towards agreeable (versus antagonistic) people, robust to whether it was personally costly or not, and sensitive to both the degree of harm it inflicted and help it conferred. It was unassociated with antisocial and prosocial traits, failing to map neatly onto agreeable or antagonistic tendencies. Our findings characterize a novel aggression phenotype and highlight the need to understand how people often intentionally harm those they wish to help.","journal":"PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2022,"id":302896,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9431,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":995008,"name":"Gregory John Depow","orcid":"0000-0001-9995-4143","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":995009,"name":"Drew M. Parton","orcid":"0000-0002-7845-3523","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989068,"name":"David Chester","orcid":"0000-0001-8722-360X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":673877,"name":"Samuel J. West","orcid":"0000-0002-6439-9159","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":61,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:32:20.348385Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}