In season, the players had very little worry about 2 (what other people thought about them). They knew that aggressiveness was expected of football players. But the controls had this worry all the time; the average man is not encouraged to be actively aggressive. Therefore, in this department the laymen probably showed a greater covert aggressiveness.

But on the other hand, the players were steamed up by the prospect of the retaliation they would meet on the football field, while the laymen, though partly affected by this defensive fear, were not so likely to be involved in physical contact.

Hence, the two factors balanced each other out and left players and laymen even on TAT ratings.

But as soon as the season ended the situation became different. The players now had roughly the same worry about what people would think about them as the laymen, since they were no longer encouraged by public opinion to be aggressive. But now their fear of retaliation falls off sharply: they are big men, trained in hand-to-hand conflict, and have little to fear. The controls still have the same fear as before.

Therefore, the players have a far lower score of covert aggressiveness. And the theory-widely accepted in psychological circles-that a chance to express oneself in aggression will clear one of aggressive feelings is directly contradicted. It actually has the opposite effect of boosting aggressiveness.

The main thing Stone expects to find from the check experiment now going on at the other Ivy college is that players' aggressiveness will not fall so much at the end of the season. The way he reasons this is that at most other colleges, football players receive a kind of prestige which stimulates them to act aggressively after as well as during the season. They therefore will create aggressive situations in which they can play their role. These situations, and the prospect of them, will keep their aggressiveness rating higher.

This brings us to the second part of the experiment-which is of far greater interest to coaches.

Here Stone was not checking a whole group of football players against a whole group of laymen; he was looking at the players individually. For this he used five factors:

1, whether they had high or low covert aggression ratings;

2, whether they were introverted or extroverted;

3, whether they "submarined" frequently or rarely ("submarining" was defined as ducking one's head when about to make contact-and did not apply exclusively to linemen as it does in normal usage);

4, whether they won or lost over their individual opponents on each play;

5, whether they indulged frequently in violent acts, such as slugging.

Studied Movies Closely

Aggression ratings he got from the TAT tests. He asked a small committee of coaches and players to rate the team for introversion or extroversion. For the last three factors-which involved action on the field-he obtained permission of Coach Art Valpey and later Lloyd Jordan to use movies of the previous season's games.