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Hostile Attribution Bias

Definition

The hostile attribution bias (HAB) is the tendency to interpret the behavior of others, across situations, as threatening, aggressive, or both. People who exhibit the HAB think that ambiguous behavior of others is hostile and often directed toward them, while those who do not exhibit the HAB interpret the behavior in a nonhostile, nonthreatening way. Furthermore, people who make the HAB often respond to the other person's behavior in an aggressive manner because they perceive it as a personal threat. When they respond aggressively, this action is often viewed as inappropriate because the other person's original behavior was not intended to be aggressive. For example, imagine that José accidentally bumps his shopping cart into Melissa's cart in a busy grocery store. Then Melissa mistakenly assumes that José aggressively bumped her cart to get ahead of her in the aisle. If Melissa then intentionally hits José's cart, she has reacted in an aggressive manner that was inappropriate to the situation.

An important point is that individuals who show the HAB often misperceive the intent of the other individual's behavior as aggressive or harmful to themselves or another person, wrongly believing that the person meant to cause harm in performing the action. This biased judgment of the other's intent represents a disruption in normal cognitive processing of events. Nicki Crick and Kenneth Dodge developed the social information processing model, which describes the steps that are experienced when people cognitively process information in social interactions. Crick and Dodge have also conducted several studies that have identified how aggressive children show different patterns of information processing than nonaggressive children. Once these cognitive patterns are developed, they are considered to be relatively stable through adulthood.

Social Information Processing

According to the social information processing model and other cognitive theories, children process and act on information from the social environment through sequential steps, including (a) absorption of social stimuli (encoding of social cues), (b) assignment of meaning to the stimuli (interpretation), (c) determination of goals, (d) accessing of possible responses, (e) selection of a response, and (f) performance of a behavioral act. Progression through these steps usually occurs rapidly.

Aggressive children have been found to experience disruptions at most of the stages, particularly at the encoding, interpretation, and response generation stages. They tend to focus their attention on threatening social cues (such as potentially angry facial expressions of the person talking to them), interpret that information in a hostile manner, and generate aggressive responses. An important theoretical concept that affects how people encode, interpret, and utilize information is schemas.

Aggressive Schemas

Processing social information is cognitively demanding; therefore, humans use schemas—mental frameworks of beliefs about people, events, and objects—to rapidly understand stimuli. Schemas are automatically activated (brought to mind) when the schema is available in memory and information relevant to that schema is encountered. Schemas direct people's attention to particular information and guide their interpretation of it, even to the extent that they may fill in missing pieces by utilizing the schema. Schemas can also act like a filter; people tend to pay attention to information that is consistent with their schemas and ignore inconsistent information.

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