IT’S NOT just classroom bullies who vent their anger by beating up the small guys. Fish do it too.
In primate societies, intermediate-ranking individuals that lose a fight often take out their frustrations on a low ranker who had nothing to do with the original dispute. This “displaced aggression”, as psychologists call it, might help reduce the stress caused by losing the original fight, or act as a warning to other group members that the intermediate ranker is still a fighter.
Now Øyvind Øverli at the University of Oslo in Norway and his team have shown that something similar happens…
