Passive-Aggression

Passive-aggressive behavior is communication that, in the speaker's own mind, is rooted in a strong negative emotion such as anger, but is expressed using words that do not convey that emotion, leaving the recipient confused by the mismatch between the message and the underlying feeling. It appears through tactics such as procrastination, deliberate inefficiency, stubbornness, sarcasm, the silent treatment, sabotage, and playing the victim, allowing a person to avoid direct confrontation while still registering their resentment. The U.S. Army psychiatrist William C. Menninger first defined the behavior clinically during the Second World War, describing soldiers who expressed dissent through pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, and inefficiency rather than open defiance, and attributing the pattern to the stress of military life combined with psychological immaturity. The concept later fed into clinical descriptions of passive-aggressive personality disorder, though psychiatric definitions of the pattern have shifted considerably since Menninger's original account.