The Breaking Point: How Everyday Frustration Ignites Deadly Aggression

How Frustration Leads to Aggression

Frustration is a set of unpleasant, sometimes even painful emotions linked to the lack of an expected result despite intense effort. The word itself—frustratio—comes from Latin and means “disappointment” or “disillusionment,” so it describes a feeling that can be especially hard to bear. What’s more, these emotions cling to everyone as closely as a sense of failure. Differences in how people relate to frustration come down to how strongly they feel it and how they react to its consequences.

Everyday Situations That Push Us to the Edge

Our frustrated reactions are instinctive. They grow stronger the closer we were to the goal, and the greater the disappointment we feel when we fail to reach it. These can be completely ordinary situations. Just look at holiday sales in supermarkets. The more expensive the discounted goods, the greater the determination to “hunt down” products we can’t normally afford.

A Sale Line and Other Traps

Frustration—and the reactions that follow it—intensifies when, for example, only a few people in the line stand between us and buying the dream computer, and at that moment someone cuts in front of us and takes the last unit. In many hot-headed consumers, frustration turns into aggression they never suspected in themselves.

A Theory That Explains Our Outbursts

At the end of the 1930s, John Dollard, a professor at Yale University, formulated a bold theory: every frustration causes aggression or readiness for such a reaction. According to Dollard, every act of aggression is caused by frustration. The intensity of this relationship depends on a range of factors. If we return to the example of a promotional sale of a computer, the buyer’s frustration—and the aggression that could follow—would be much smaller if they watched the last unit sell out from the end of the line.

The force of frustration increases, however, when the receding goal matters deeply to us. It also rises when we have put a lot of work into achieving it. We endure similar emotions worse when disappointment hits unexpectedly, or in a way we find incomprehensible or unfair.

Innocent People Become the Victims. Shocking Cases from China

The links between frustration and aggression can be unpredictable, even explosive. A child’s aggression, when no one explains the reason for refusing a whim, may stay limited to an embarrassing scene in a shop. But in the adult world, blatant injustice can already lead to far more serious consequences.

China is struggling with a frustrated society whose aggression shows itself in especially painful ways. In November 2024 alone, two incidents took place that could not be hidden.

When the System Breaks People

In the city of Zhuhai in the south of the country, a 60-year-old man drove a speeding car into a crowd. 35 people died and more than 40 were injured. According to the police, his criminal rampage expressed extreme frustration. In an act of despair, the driver shifted his aggression onto random pedestrians, and the reason was said to be an unfair division of property after a divorce.

Soon after, in the east of the country, in the city of Wuxi, several people died after one student stabbed them, believing he had received wages that were too low after finishing vocational school. A few days later, another driver decided to ram a group of people with a car.

At first glance, these look like isolated signs of madness or depravity. However, the highest state authorities took up the matter. They concluded that over the next few months they must increase control over a society in which attempts to undermine stability occur more and more often. According to observers, aggressive, frustrated individuals were victims of the system—of bureaucratic policy—in a clash with which ordinary citizens have no chance at all.

Does It Always Have to Be This Way?

Aggression caused by frustration most likely led to the death of Brian Thompson, the president of UnitedHealth, a powerful health insurer in the United States. Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old from a wealthy family, stands accused of this most high-profile crime of recent weeks. His motives are not fully clear, but the investigation so far suggests the man felt deep frustration over physical ailments and the callousness of the U.S. healthcare system. He released his growing aggression by shooting a man in the back—a man he saw as the symbolic perpetrator of his suffering.

Frustration Without Violence

Research conducted by Dollard’s successors shows that frustration does not have to cause aggression immediately, and not every act of aggression is caused by frustration. After all, in the vast majority of cases, people first try to fight the symptoms of bad emotions, even when they feel ready to lash out. Moreover, when that struggle ends in failure, aggression is only 1 possible reaction, because apathy or regression can also occur.

There are also types of frustration that people can rationalize easily, and thanks to that—outside exceptional situations—they do not trigger aggression. A mother exhausted by chronic sleep deprivation and getting up at night for her child may feel a kind of frustration, yet as a rule this does not arouse aggression toward the child.

Psychological Proof: Objects Can Trigger Aggression

One emotion closely associated with aggression is anger. However, we should not treat these concepts as identical. Although anger can raise the risk of aggression, it does not cause it automatically. According to psychologists, aggressive behavior requires the right factors. These can include anger caused by frustration, but also a habit of reacting aggressively.

Stimuli that people automatically associate with anger or aggression can also push someone toward similar behavior.

Anger and Revenge in the Laboratory

In the 1960s, American psychologists Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage studied the impact of such stimuli on anger that leads to aggression. In the experiment, volunteers wrote essays. A research assistant who took part in the study tried to anger them by grading their work poorly, and what’s more, punished them with harmless electric shocks. Then the roles were reversed. The previously judged authors had to grade their “critic” and “tormentor,” while punishing him in a similar way.

It turned out that the intensity of the punishment set by the authors depended on the level of anger and frustration they had reached earlier. However, stimuli also proved very important—in this case, objects automatically associated with aggression. If, for example, a gun or a knife lay in the room where the punishment took place, participants increased the level of shocks.

To confirm this relationship, the researchers repeated the experiment and left in the room objects that had no association with aggression at all. It could be a coffee grinder or a tennis racket. Then the level of shocks given to the assistant was clearly lower.

Does the Trigger Pull the Finger? The Final Limits of Responsibility

The development of Berkowitz’s and LePage’s research led to the formulation of a claim: “Not only does the finger pull the trigger, the trigger may also pull the finger.”

Frustration, however, cannot justify any crime. Extreme emotions and situational cues can easily influence our behavior, and we can use them to explain it. But they do not change responsibility for the consequences of decisions made under the influence of such feelings.

Read the original article in Polish: Od kolejki w sklepie do tragedii. Jak frustracja przeradza się w agresję