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Constantly expecting attacks from others, children become more aggressive. The results of a four-year study.
Scientists from Duke University in North Carolina, USA, conducted a four-year study that involved 1299 children and parents from 12 different cultural groups in 9 countries.
The researchers measured the child’s level of aggression by observing him and interviewing his parents. The little participants were asked, for example, to answer the question, what would they do if someone unexpectedly pushed them and they stumbled and stepped foot or fell into a puddle.
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Based on their responses, the researchers determined whether the child tends to regard such ambiguous actions as hostile or harmless and whether he is ready to show aggression in response. There have been children in every culture and society who have consistently assumed that the intentions are hostile. And in every culture, children who perceived the actions of another person as hostile were themselves more likely to show aggression – this probability was 5 times higher than in children who did not see anything special in the behavior of others. During the four years that the study continued, the guys who were inclined to regard any actions as hostile, for the most part, began to show aggression more often and in a more severe form.
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Children who tend to evaluate the actions of others as aggressive live, for example, in the city of Az-Zarqa in Jordan and in Naples in Italy, that is, cities where problems associated with child aggression are much more common. In contrast, from Trollhetane in Sweden and from Jinan, China, where such problems were observed much less often, the child respondents were more peaceful.
“These results tell us that it is not enough to teach children to treat others the way they would like to be treated: it is also important to teach them to think of others the way they would like to be thought of them. By teaching a child to assume the good intentions of others when in doubt, we will help him become more mature, less aggressive and anxious, ”says Kenneth A. Dodge, lead author of the study, director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.
Подробнее см. K. Dodge et al. «Hostile attributional bias and aggressive behavior in global context», Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2015, № 30.