Hostility
Two people in a heated argument in New York City
Specialty	Psychiatry

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Hostility is seen as a form of emotionally charged aggressive behavior. In everyday speech, it is more commonly used as a synonym for anger and aggression.

It appears in several psychological theories. For instance it is a facet of neuroticism in the NEO PI, and forms part of personal construct psychology, developed by George Kelly.

For hunter gatherers, every stranger from outside the small tribal group was a potential source of hostility.^[1] Similarly, in archaic Greece, every community was in a state of hostility, latent or overt, with every other community - something only gradually tempered by the rights and duties of hospitality.^[2]

Tensions between the two poles of hostility and hospitality remain a potent force in the 21st century world.^[3]

Robert Sapolsky argues that the tendency to form in-groups and out-groups of Us and Them, and to direct hostility at the latter, is inherent in humans.^[4] He also explores the possibility raised by Samuel Bowles that intra-group hostility is reduced when greater hostility is directed at Thems,^[5] something exploited by insecure leaders when they mobilise external conflicts so as to reduce in-group hostility towards themselves.^[6]

Automatic mental functioning suggests that among universal human indicators of hostility are the grinding or gnashing of teeth, the clenching and shaking of fists, and grimacing.^[7] Desmond Morris would add stamping and thumping.^[8]

The Haka represents a ritualised set of such non-verbal signs of hostility.^[9]

In psychological terms, George Kelly considered hostility as the attempt to extort validating evidence from the environment to confirm types of social prediction, constructs, that have failed.^[10] Instead of reconstructing their constructs to meet disconfirmations with better predictions, the hostile person attempts to force or coerce the world to fit their view, even if this is a forlorn hope, and even if it entails emotional expenditure and/or harm to self or others.^[11]

In this sense hostility is a form of psychological extortion - an attempt to force reality to produce the desired feedback,^[12] even by acting out in bullying by individuals and groups in various social contexts, in order that preconceptions become ever more widely validated. Kelly's theory of cognitive hostility thus forms a parallel to Leon Festinger's view that there is an inherent impulse to reduce cognitive dissonance.^[13]

While challenging reality can be a useful part of life, and persistence in the face of failure can be a valuable trait (for instance in invention or discovery ^{[citation needed]}), in the case of hostility it is argued that evidence is not being accurately assessed but rather forced into a Procrustean mould in order to maintain one's belief systems and avoid having one's identity challenged.^[14] Instead it is claimed that hostility shows evidence of suppression or denial, and is "deleted" from awareness - unfavorable evidence which might suggest that a prior belief is flawed is to various degrees ignored and willfully avoided.^[15]

• Antisocial personality disorder
• Death drive
• Narcissism of small differences
• Righteous indignation
• Cook–Medley hostility scale

• Quotations related to Hostility at Wikiquote
• The dictionary definition of hostility at Wiktionary