Human Growth and Development / Unit 8 HGD 1068 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Hostile Attribution Bias
The idea
Social cognition is understanding others' thoughts and feelings, including reading faces and posture, perspective-taking and empathy. Hostile attribution bias is a pattern in social cognition: reading an ambiguous act as deliberately hostile. Across twelve countries, Dodge and colleagues found that this bias predicts aggressive responses. Children with good emotional regulation more often reappraise, considering kinder explanations for the same act.
In practice
A friend walking past without saying hello: one child deciding "she's ignoring me on purpose," another deciding "maybe she didn't feel well."
Where people slip
The bias is a way of explaining others' behaviour, an attribution, which unit twelve returns to under attributional style. Teaching kinder attributions and perspective-taking helps reduce it. Theory of mind keeps developing through middle childhood, shaped by social experience and shaping it in turn, and a child's attributions are one place that shows.
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