Cognition and Aggression: A Reply to Fowers and Richardson

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Abstract
Fowers and Richardson (1993) charge that our theory of aggression is `infused with unacknowledged liberal individualistic... assumptions which portray humans as... autonomous, strategic agents seeking to achieve pre-given ends' (Abstract), and that these `unacknowledged sociocultural and moral values... distinctly limit its [our theory's] potential for either fully understanding unwanted forms of human aggression or orienting a practical response to them' (p. 354). In this reply we assert that, when stripped of their jargon, none of these criticisms is valid. The theoretical basis for our model is not disguised but has been specified quite openly and precisely. The theory has not been built on an ideological base of how humans should behave but on an empirical foundation of how humans do behave. Fowers and Richardson have invented an ideology for which they have coined the term liberal individualism. We suggest that, if they see some of its characteristics in our theory, it is because humans behave that way, not because the theory was derived from the ideology.