Introducing Adversarial Social Posture: A New Construct for Modern Psychology
I’m sure you’ve felt it. That hot surge of irritation when someone stops dead in their tracks on a crowded sidewalk. The tightening in your chest when the person in front of you at the coffee shop is taking too long to order. The low, simmering rage at the driver in the passing lane who is inexplicably matching the speed of the car next to them.
These moments of everyday friction feel increasingly common, a constant source of low-grade stress that defines modern public life. As an academic psychologist, I felt we were lacking the precise language to describe this specific phenomenon. We might dismiss it as just "being in a bad mood," but I believe it is a specific, predictable psychological orientation.
These are the observations that led me to develop and propose a novel construct: Adversarial Social Posture (ASP). In my new paper, Adversarial Social Posture: A Proposed Construct for Understanding Everyday Irritability and the Perception of Others as Inconvenience, I argue that for many, the default way of seeing others is not as fellow humans, but as potential sources of disruption. My goal with this framework is to provide a much-needed language for a malady of modern life that affects both our personal well-being and the health of our communities.
What exactly is Adversarial Social Posture?
I define Adversarial Social Posture as a cognitive and emotional schema where an individual habitually interprets the mere presence and mundane actions of others as obstructive, inconsiderate, or unnecessarily complicated.
Think of it as a perceptual filter or a default operating system for navigating the social world. An individual with a pronounced ASP doesn’t necessarily hate people; rather, they experience them as friction—as sources of interference in executing their personal agenda. The core appraisal of a social situation isn’t based on threat ("that person might harm me") or malice ("that person is evil"), but on obstruction ("that person is in my way").
This "inconvenience attribution bias," as I call it, is the central organizing principle of the posture. It’s an egocentric worldview that evaluates others primarily on their instrumental value—or disutility—to one’s own immediate goals. In this mindset, the world is a series of personal objectives to be completed efficiently, and other people are the unpredictable, frustrating variables that constantly threaten to derail the plan.
How ASP differs from other psychological concepts
In my paper, I take care to differentiate ASP from other well-established psychological concepts to highlight its unique explanatory power.
Hostile Attribution Bias (HAB) vs. ASP: HAB is the tendency to interpret ambiguous actions as having malicious intent. If someone bumps into you, the HAB interpretation is, "They did that on purpose to disrespect me." ASP is different. The ASP interpretation is, "That person is so clumsy and unaware; now my path is blocked." The focus shifts from perceived malice to perceived inconsiderateness and obstruction.
Misanthropy vs. ASP: Misanthropy is a generalized, philosophical disdain for humanity as a whole. It’s an abstract attitude. ASP, in contrast, is a practical, in-the-moment perceptual stance. A person can hold no grand misanthropic beliefs but still exhibit high ASP in a crowded airport, reacting with reflexive annoyance to the sheer presence of others slowing them down. ASP is the cognitive pattern that animates daily interactions; misanthropy is the overarching judgment of humankind.
Trait Irritability vs. ASP: While people high in ASP are certainly irritable, the trait of irritability is a general disposition toward frustration that can be triggered by anything—bad traffic, slow Wi-Fi, or even one’s own mistakes. ASP is more specific; it is the social-cognitive lens that directs that irritability toward other people as the default source of life’s frustrations. I posit a reason why the social environment is the primary trigger for annoyance.
The origins of ASP: Where does this posture come from?
I argue that Adversarial Social Posture is not a simple choice but emerges from a complex interplay of personality, cognitive habits, and the pressures of the modern world.
From a personality psychology perspective, ASP is strongly linked to the Big Five trait of low agreeableness, particularly its facets of low compassion and low politeness. A deficit in compassion makes it difficult to see others as fellow beings with their own legitimate goals, while a lack of politeness fosters the belief that one should not have to be constrained by social norms. In the paper, I also connect ASP to narcissistic traits, where a sense of entitlement and self-importance provides a powerful engine for interpreting minor delays as profound personal insults.
From a social cognition standpoint, ASP functions as a chronically accessible "other-as-inconvenience" schema. This mental shortcut creates a state of hypervigilance for potential social disruptions and a confirmation bias where one preferentially notices behaviors that validate the belief that others are incompetent or selfish. This can create a self-fulfilling prophecy: a person acting with visible impatience may elicit defensive reactions from others, which then serves as "proof" that their adversarial expectation was correct all along.
Crucially, my framework emphasizes how our environment scaffolds this posture. Drawing on Milgram’s "urban overload" hypothesis and the concept of psychological crowding, I suggest ASP is a maladaptive response to the constant stimuli and goal-interference of high-density living. Furthermore, our digital lives may be training us for impatience. User interfaces designed for "frictionless" experience and on-demand services create an expectation of a world that conforms instantly to our preferences. When the messy, unpredictable analog world of other human beings fails to meet this digitally-conditioned expectation, an adversarial response is primed.
The broader implications: Why ASP is a social corrosive
A key part of my argument is that the implications of a widespread Adversarial Social Posture are profound. For the individual, it is a recipe for chronic stress. Constantly perceiving the world as a landscape of frustrating disruptions activates the body’s stress response system, contributing to what scientists call a high "allostatic load"—the cumulative wear and tear on the body that can lead to negative cardiovascular outcomes. ASP systematically impoverishes one’s capacity for positive emotional experiences by filtering out moments of kindness or shared humanity in favor of a grievance narrative.
For society, ASP is a quiet crisis of civility. It directly attacks the foundations of social capital—the norms of reciprocity and generalized trust that allow a diverse society to function. It replaces what sociologist Erving Goffman called "civil inattention" with a kind of "civil hostility," where public spaces become arenas for low-grade conflict rather than sites of neutral coexistence.
This grievance orientation can even have political consequences, creating fertile ground for us-versus-them narratives. If your daily experience confirms that anonymous others are selfish and inconsiderate, it becomes easier to believe that the political "other" is malicious and threatening. In this way, ASP acts as a psychological primer for the polarization that frays the social fabric.
Is there an antidote?
Recognizing Adversarial Social Posture as a clinical and social issue is the first step toward addressing it. In the final sections of the paper, I outline several therapeutic pathways, moving beyond simple anger management to target the underlying interpretive schema.
Approaches from Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can help individuals identify and challenge their automatic "inconvenience attribution bias". Mindfulness and acceptance-based practices can create a crucial pause between a social trigger and the habitual irritable reaction. Perhaps most powerfully, I suggest that Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) offers a direct antidote to ASP’s egocentric nature. Exercises that encourage cultivating a sense of "common humanity"—actively imagining the inner world of the person perceived as an inconvenience—can help reactivate our capacity for empathy and recalibrate our adversarial stance.
Ultimately, my work on Adversarial Social Posture is an attempt to provide an invaluable new lens for understanding a deeply resonant modern experience. It gives a name to the frustration that simmers beneath the surface of our collective life and challenges us to look deeper at the sources of our everyday irritability. By mapping this psychological territory, I hope to offer more than just a diagnosis for our age of impatience; my goal is to provide a vocabulary and a direction for rebuilding the foundations of a more cooperative, patient, and resilient public sphere. By understanding the posture that promotes friction, we can begin the critical work of choosing a different one.