Attributions for social failure and aggression in incarcerated delinquent youth

Abstract

While a variety of cognitive deficits and biases have been found to characterize aggressive and delinquent children and youth, very little attention has focused on determining whether aggressive youth also display deviant attributional beliefs in response to social failure. Research in the more impersonal cognitive domains such as achievement has shown attributions for failure to be potent determinants of both affective reactions and subsequent responding. Thus, the present study was designed to investigate whether specific attributional patterns following social failure may also relate to aggressive behavior. The aim of this study was to determine the relation between the level of self-reported physical aggression and specific attributional patterns following hypothetical social failure in a sample of incarcerated delinquent males. While the general hypotheses were that increased aggressiveness would be related to a greater tendency to endorse attributions for social failure that are external, stable, and controllable, only the hypothesis with regard to controllability was supported. The findings are discussed in terms of the relation between cognition and aggression in delinquent youth.