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The purpose of this paper is to explore if a ringing cell phone could impact cognitive performance as well as being agitating to provoke aggressive reactions. The study investigated variables that could impact a participant’s willingness to aggress and retaliate, such as sensitivity to arousal and dark personalities (DRPs), Machiavellianism, narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy and sadism.

There were 128 participants (77 women and 51 men). The cognitive load task consisted of forming anagrams while being in a high or low provocation condition. Participants were subsequently asked how willing they would be to allow one out-group member to be harmed in favor of saving several in-group members. Three personality measures were used: two measuring DRPs and one measuring arousal sensitivity.

The authors discovered that older age and subclinical psychopathy were significant predictors for the willingness to aggress. Those in the high provocation condition retaliated the most against the experimenter, and a participant’s English ability was the only variable that predicted good performance on the cognitive task.

The results warrant further research into how personality types, aggression, and everyday, multiple arousal sources intertwine to inform personalized evidence-based interventions. Organizational and educational psychologists could also use this research to in form how offices and schools are run.

We examine whether individual differences exist in reactions to toxic situations, reviewing historical examples of massacres. The social psychological research on the question consists of the famous Milgram experiment on obedience and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Although these studies show the power of situations in eliciting aggression towards targets, they overlook an essential aspect of real world behaviours ‐ the innovation of imaginative sadistic sequences that go beyond the orders given. We argue that analogue studies are too limited to capture these situations and that social psychological research has been too limited in its assessment of key relevant individual traits, one of which is a potential for sadism. Furthermore, we raise concerns about whether ‘snapshot’ analogue research can capture the transitional processes central to an understanding of real world reactions to toxicity.

Although internet growth has allowed producers to shift control of service transactions to the customer, little research has examined the effects of this shift. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how the performance of different task types differentially affects consumer responses.

The paper is a field study using online data collection to examine the US Hispanic market, the fastest‐growing consumer group in the US as well as one of the fastest growing online user groups.

The paper finds that Hispanic consumers were less affected by the type of task than non‐Hispanic consumers, in terms of perceived quality, satisfaction, and intended patronage. Using constructs from the communications literature, task effects on three communication perceptions were shown to explain the differences.

The results provide support for the notion that more complex (transaction) tasks can lead to lower evaluations than less complex (information) tasks, while also providing some limiting conditions to this result.

The results in this paper suggest that services firms should consider, not only the environment in which the service encounter will be performed, but the type of service task, the type of consumer, and the potential interaction between them. As service organizations move from face‐to‐face to online service provision, they must consider how, online service provision is evaluated by consumers’, and how this affects patronage intentions.

The paper shows the usefulness of communications medium perceptions in explaining the interactive effects of service task and consumer type. It is pertinent to service providers, academic researchers, and consumer groups.