The Theory of Why People Get into Fights with Belligerent People

Two Defense Mechanisms: Convergent Displacement and Distraction Displacement

Convergent Displacement

People have low tolerance for the traits in other people that they don't like in themselves. For example, a person that is aggressive has low tolerance of the aggressiveness of another person (one reason why fights may occur). Another example is that a person who is highly critical of other people notices when other people are highly critical of each other, and tends to criticize this. A person who is suspicious of other people may prescribe ulterior motives to other people. 

A few distinctions: Perceiving one's own traits in places where they may or may not be there. 

  Confronting one's own traits in other people, especially when they are there.

  Evaluating the intentions and character of other people incorrectly, according to one's own traits, especially when they are actually not there.

Inferences: People have an intuitive drive to dislike things that they perceive are bad (whether they are or not) and to challenge them. (A justice principle.)

People's tendency toward the justice principle is fueled by perceived injustices directed at them, but then often re-directed toward other people.

This drive comes from an unconscious assessment of what one learns not to like about one's self, and then displaces to other people, probably to avoid anxiety. 

This learned drive to be critical comes from two possible sources: Explicit (criticism) or implicit (isolation, hardship) evaluations by others; or a natural (really unnatural) absence of some necessity. 

The reason people get in fights is not only that there are two aggressive people that dislike each other, but there are two aggressive people that see their fault of aggressiveness in the other person, and want to attack their own perceived fault; therefore there is a much deeper emotional context and emotional entanglement. 

Hypercritical people are also perpetuating the same dynamic; they are being critical of others as a way of criticizing the perceived fault of being critical by criticizing most often the inappropriate criticism of others (e.g. that person was rude!)

Distraction Displacement: Objectification and Verbalization

A person may often be critical or angry about a particular thing, idea, habit or trait of others. For example, "that person is rude", "that person is grouchy" are two verbalized objects of criticism, the objects being grouchiness and rudeness. Distracting displacement is when a grouchy person is obsessed with rude people and a rude person is obsessed with grouchy people. The person who is obsessed with grouchiness is particularly (and suspiciously) not grouchy, but for some reason always points out grouchy people. The person who is obsessed with rudeness is very polite, but grouchy in the morning. This is not to say that grouchiness and rudeness are dialectically opposed, but that personal misgivings of one's own shortcomings have a tendency to be redirected as verbalized complaints of seemingly unrelated behavior in other people. The criticism is displaced, as with convergent displacement, but it is focused on an unrelated trait, not a similar trait, unlike convergent displacement. Whatever is being criticized is probably more emotionally significant than grouchiness. 

This objectification (in terms of gravitating to a specific idea) and verbalization (in terms of both talking for a purpose that is not entirely small talk (there's a point trying to be expressed that could just as well be expressed in any other context, unlike someone's scarf or the weather)) is an example of where an individual's perceived lack of something, possibly brought about or exaggerated by other's criticism or by lacking some necessity, is redirected to something unrelated. For example, if a person lacks punctuation, he may constantly bring up the notion of poor grammar in other people, as others have told him he has good grammar. There is most likely a reason the person brings up the specific distracting topic, but it is not clear why it is that specific unrelated topic (even to the person who is bringing it up), as it is the result of complex personal circumstance. In effect the weight of a perceived fault (likely unconscious) is compensated for by something else; and since it is socially unacceptable to brag all the time, this personal strength is usually reinvented as another person's fault. This is like a person who thinks his own furniture is awful, but thinks that he owns nice utensils, and then points out how rotten everyone else's utensils are. Abstractly, the emotional strength of a person's conscious or unconscious feelings of lacking something is proportional to the extent they verbalize a seemingly unrelated object.