 17. Cognitive Approaches to Personality  377
cial targets following hostile primes, a pat -
tern of performance suggestive of automatic 
forms of self-  regulation (Myrseth, Fishbach, 
& Trope, 2009). In other words, people high 
in agreeableness appear to somewhat auto -
matically recruit prosocial thoughts as a way 
of combating their hostile thoughts, when 
they have them.
This model of agreeableness was further 
validated in an experimental study (Meier, 
Wilkowski, & Robinson, 2008). Partici -
pants were randomly assigned to one of two 
conditions. In the experimental, or training, 
condition, hostile primes were systematically 
paired with prosocial targets in a procedure 
borrowed from Baccus and Baldwin (2004). 
In the control condition, no such associa -
tions were trained, though prosocial targets 
were presented equally often. Subsequently, 
participants played in a competitive RT task 
that actually measures tendencies toward 
aggression. As hypothesized, training people 
to recruit prosocial thoughts following hos -
tile primes reduced subsequent levels of ag -
gression. Thus, the cognitive tendencies that 
agreeable people naturally exhibit (Meier et 
al., 2006) are efficacious in reducing aggres -
sion likelihood (Meier et al., 2008).
Agreeable people do more than control 
their thoughts in hostile contexts. They also 
control their behavior. This point was estab -
lished in a set of studies by Bresin, Fetter -
man, and Robinson (2012). At the beginning 
of each trial, participants had to rehearse 
and memorize a word that was either neu -
tral (e.g., sweep, vacuum ) or hostility- 
related (e.g., argue, kill ). While rehearsing 
the trial-  specific word, participants engaged 
in a motor control task that required them to 
hold a joystick cursor as steadily as possible 
on a presented visual target. Joystick posi -
tion was somewhat continuously sampled, 
and the metric was how closely participants 
remained to the target. Agreeableness and 
prime type interacted to predict motor con -
trol. At low levels of agreeableness, hostile 
primes undermined motor control. At high 
levels of agreeableness, on the other hand, 
motor control was actually better  in the 
context of hostile primes. These results pro -
vide important insights into why there is a 
negative relationship between agreeableness 
and reactive aggression (Robinson, Klein, & Persich, 2019). Specifically, agreeable people 
appear to carefully control their behavior 
when they have hostile thoughts.
Thus far, our focus has been on how 
agreeable people control their hostile 
thoughts once they have them. In addition, 
though, agreeable people may regulate their 
attention or the environment, so that they 
do not have hostile thoughts in the first 
place (see Gross & Thompson, 2007, for a 
relevant model). Consistent with this pos -
sibility, Wilkowski, Robinson, and Meier 
(2006) found that agreeable people shifted 
attention away from the location of hostile 
stimuli, and Bresin and Robinson (2015) 
found that agreeable people selected nicer, 
gentler media (e.g., romantic comedies rath -
er than violent movies) when given a choice. 
Through their choices and cognitive habits, 
then, agreeable people seem to create more 
benevolent environmental niches for them -
selves, relative to disagreeable people.
In comparison to agreeableness, trait 
anger may be a more proximate predic -
tor of tendencies toward anger and aggres -
sion (Wilkowski & Robinson, 2010). Thus, 
another body of work has focused on this 
more specific trait. Wilkowski and Robin -
son (2007) initially examined reactivity to 
hostile primes in a word evaluation task. 
Participants high in trait anger rated words 
more negatively following hostile primes, 
whereas people low in trait anger did not. 
Hence, it appears that people low in anger 
are capable of mitigating the influence of 
hostile primes on their subsequent (evalua -
tive) behavior. Studies 3 and 4 then provided 
some evidence for the idea that these pro -
cesses are self-  regulatory in nature, in that 
they consume cognitive resources. Such re -
sults led Wilkowski and Robinson (2007) 
to suggest that low-anger people (but not 
high-anger people) spontaneously recruit 
self- regulatory resources in hostile contexts, 
cognitive habits that should be valuable in 
controlling unwanted forms of emotional re -
activity (Berkowitz, 1993).
Direct evidence for this model was re -
ported by Wilkowski and Robinson (2008b) 
in a study in which participants completed 
individual trials of a flanker task immedi -
ately following the activation of hostile or 
nonhostile thoughts. Reduced flanker costs 