Clearly, the aggression game model presented by this paper has its limitations. Nonetheless, it does help explain a rather baffling part of human nature: the need to single out an individual, a scapegoat, and turn on him. Scapegoat situations are everywhere, though they are perhaps, and rather depressingly, most prevalent in elementary and middle school classrooms. Children especially seem to feel the need to pick on each other, and this model explains why classes tend to choose one student, the “teacher’s pet” or a “nerd,” as the one focus for all the other students’ aggression. William Golding brilliantly captures the scapegoat impulse of unwatched children in his novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of boys from an English boy’s school are stranded, without any adults, on an island.