Hot Sauce Paradigm: Behavioral research on aggression sometimes requires inflicting pain or some sort of discomfort. How can one do this at an ethically acceptable level? Answer, “…hot sauce administration was effectively utilized as a measure of physical aggression” in experiments related in a 1999 paper by Joel D. Lieberman, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Holly A. McGregor. Hot sauce is considerably less unpleasant than electrical shocks, for example. And it comes in handy when you need to determine how cruel someone can be.





