Drugs affecting directly or indirectly impulse control are always 'on the table'.
but considered from the perspective of a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer....
When human status enforcers engage in hyperbolic displays to intimidate (aka produce fear), the display on it's surface is intended to overcome cognitive resistance and behavioral non-compliance. However, this simple explanation involves much deeper issues of psycho-socio biology that to be understood must include individual experience and group evolution.
Comparative ethology shows the presence of hyperbolic displays to be a shared feature within dominance hierarchies of various great apes. Non-human relatives of humans use intimidating displays to order and maintain the structure of social dominance hierarchies including, chest thumping, smashing of objects in the immediate environment, etc. Humans, despite their sense of elite status among hominid fauna, retain the primitive cognitive-behavioral platforms that enable these displays. And humans still manifest such behaviors and incorporate them into interpersonal/social manipulation in both aggressive and defensive situations.
Within human culture, such threatening displays are a frequent response during episodes of paradigm enforcement where the re-inscription of social dominance (and self-esteem of the 're-enforcer') is as important as behavioral compliance of the subject.
This phenomenon seems particularly true for persons whose childhood development involved parents, mentors, and social institutions that endorse the use of intimidation. The use of threats and actual application of both real and ritualized violence (aka spanking, paddling) are broadly defended among some social groups as normal and good. Consequently even superficial consideration suggests that although heritable biological properties may have been selected to support these behaviors (gender differentiated size, age/sex determined distribution of body hair, etc), these traits also involve acquisition of cognitive networks that serve to identify and release behavior in response to learned and perceived environmental effectors which function to release these hyperbolic displays.
Humans vary in response to challenges of their social status, but, it appears to be a general truth, that when exposed to repeated stress of status defense by cognitive and behavioral noncompliance, aka defiance, the self-esteem of the enforcer and thereby both the enforcer's emotional and behavioral lability are progressively altered.
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