Scholars have recently spent growing attention to what public employees think of citizens, which influences policy implementation through more manifest attitudes and behaviors. The origins of employees' positive and negative associations with citizens have, however, not been examined thus far. This study draws attention to workplace aggression as critical incidents in state‐citizen encounters and examines the traces they leave in employees' subsequent thinking about citizens. Building on social cognition and affective events theory, we hypothesize that the more severe the aggressive incidents have been, the more negative employees' associations with citizens become. Results of a free association task confirm this assumption. Type of work and the gender of the employees moderate the relationship between aggressions and associations. The findings raise awareness for the significance of workplace aggression and provide an outline and agenda of a socio‐cognitive theory of public employees' associative thinking about citizens.