Youth with greater hostile attribution biases view friendly-sounding responses to peer conflict as less effective ways to handle peer conflict

Peyton Nault | Michele Morningstar

Think of a time where someone you just met at a party turned away from you mid-discussion. Is this their way of telling you that they don't want to talk anymore? Or did they just have to take an incoming phone call? This ambiguous situation could be interpreted in many ways. Some people are more likely than others to see others' behaviours in these uncertain situations as hostile towards them: these people would have a "hostile attribution bias".

Youth with hostile attribution bias tend to struggle to get along with others: they are often found to be more aggressive and to endorse aggressive behaviours in response to conflict (i.e., they think that being aggressive is a good way to respond to conflicts with peers). But, most research on the topic to date used questionnaire-based measures that asked youth to select behaviours without considering the tone of voice it was said in. We know that the way you say something can be just as important as *what* you say. So, we set out to determine whether hostile attribution bias also impacted the way youth judged others' nonverbal tone in peer conflict situations.

We asked 11- to 14-year-olds to tell us about their interpretation of ambiguous situations (to measure their hostile attribution bias) and asked them to listen to audio recordings of a peer conflict situation. We then presented them with many different recordings of other teens saying the same response but in different tones of voice (some friendly-sounding, some mean-sounding). We asked our participants to tell us how *effective* each recorded response way to solve the problem in the conflict scenario.

What did we find?

Youth who had higher levels of hostile attribution bias were more likely to judge friendly-sounding responses as *ineffective* ways to deal with peer conflict, compared to youth with lower levels of bias. To some degree, they also thought that mean-sounded responses were a better option!

These findings point us to an important aspect of social interactions that is not often considered in interventions targeting hostile attribution bias: tone of voice! Teens who tend to see the worst in things might also think that responding kindly to peer conflict wouldn't work so well to deal with the problem. This could explain why they are more likely to be aggressive with their peers.

Curious to know more about the study?