Attributions for social failure and adolescent aggression

VioLit summary: OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study by Guerra et al. was to explore how attributions about the causes of social failure might influence affective reactions and increase aggressive behavior. METHODOLOGY: This study was quasi-experimental. The authors compared a sample of nondelinquent high school boys of similar age with delinquent boys. In the initial sample of delinquent subjects there were 79 males incarcerated in a state correctional facility ranging in age from 15 to 19 years. About 67% of the subjects were of African-American or Hispanic origin. Approximately 88% of the boys incarcerated in this facility were from lower or lower-middle class backgrounds. Within the nondelinquent group, there were 119 males ranging in age from 15 to 19 from a large urban high school in an ethnically diverse lower-middle class neighborhood. Approximately 57% of the nondelinquent subjects were of African-American or Hispanic origin. The nondelinquent subjects were recruited from several physical education classes in the high school. While some boys in the nondelinquent sample may in fact have engaged in delinquent behaviors, the authors defined the sample as nondelinquent by the fact that the boys were attending regular classes in a regular high school and were not institutionalized in a facility for delinquent youth. The authors operationally defined the delinquent youths as those boys who were incarcerated in a facility for seriously delinquent youth. In order to assess levels of aggression, subjects were administered the Physical Aggression Scale, which was a 13-item self-report measure which included a 3-item self-report of general aggressive behavior. The subjects rated their aggressive behavior based on a Likert scale, ranging from 0 (never having committed aggressive acts) to 4 (committing an aggressive act four or more times). The authors also developed the Assessment for Social Failure (ASF) questionnaire. This measure assessed three dimensions of causal attributions (locus of causality, stability, and controllability) using the questions from the Causal Dimension Scales. However, the stimulus stories were constructed to portray social failure instead of academic failure. The subject was asked to answer several questions about each of four stimulus stories involving social situations in which another person frustrates the subject. In two of the situations, subjects were exposed to failure involving peer-group entry with either a same gender or opposite gender peer. The other two situations involved blocked attainment of an instrumental goal by either a same gender or opposite gender peer. Testing of all the subjects was conducted in small groups by two female graduate students during the regular school day. There was no concern raised about the gender nor race of the experimenters nor the confidentiality of the subject's responses nor their difficulty understanding the items. The same procedures were followed for both the delinquent and the high school samples. FINDINGS/DISCUSSION: A multivariate analysis of variance enabled the authors to reject the null hypothesis that the two populations' mean scores were the same on attributions for social failure. However, the means on the three individual attribution scores were very similar for the two samples and did not contribute to the overall significant differences. Therefore, the results suggested that there were both similarities and differences in cognitive processing following social failure for delinquent and nondelinquent adolescent boys of the same age. Looking at the similarities, delinquent boys were no more likely than the nondelinquent boys to attribute social failure to controllable, external, and stable causes, even though they were substantially more aggressive and endorsed more verbally and physically aggressive responses. Rather, their findings suggested that studying the relations between attributions about failure, hostile affective reactions, subsequent behavioral choices, and actual aggressive behavior in delinquent and nondelinquent populations could detect differences in the cognition (attribution)oaffectobehavior linkages in these two populations. In particular, among delinquent but not among nondelinquent boys, the tendency to attribute ones social failures to stable and controllable causes predicted stronger hostile emotional responses to failure and a tendency to endorse physically aggressive responses following such failure. These hostile emotional responses to failure and this preference for a physically aggressive response, in turn, predicted greater actual aggression within the population of delinquent boys. AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS: The authors contended that the next step for further investigation included whether aggressive behavior was related to a tendency to attribute negative social outcomes to: 1) the event being caused by either an external force or the adolescent themselves; 2) the child's perception of the intentionality of the others act; 3) whether or not who caused the negative event was perceived by the child as controlling the child or not; 4) to what extent did the child perceive the negative event to be due to anothers hostility towards the child. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado) Aggression Causes Offender Nonoffender Comparison Male Aggression Male Inmate Male Delinquency Male Offender Juvenile Aggression Juvenile Offender Juvenile Male Juvenile Inmate Juvenile Delinquency Interpersonal Relations Relationships Skills Physical Aggression 02-05