Attributions for social failure and adolescent aggression

In the present study, 119 high school boys and 79 institutionalized delinquent boys of the same age range were assessed on their own aggressive behavior and on their tendencies to attribute social failure to controllable, external, stable causes, anticipate a hostile affective response, and endorse aggressive behavioral responses to by pothetical social situations. While the two populations of boys did not differ detectably in their attributional tendencies, the relations between an individual's aggressiveness and an individual's attributions differed considerably across the two populations. In particular, among deliquent but not among delinquent but not among nondelinquent boys, the tendency to attribute one's 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. Neither of these links could be demonstrated for nondelinquent boys. However, in the nondelinquent sample, attributing social failure to external and controllable causes predicted endorsement of aggressive responses only indirectly through increased hostile affect. It was concluded that the specific relations between cognitive and affective responses to social failure may be a contributing factor to the serious physical aggression displayed by some delinquents and to the less serious aggression of nondelinquents.