JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, ***(*), 1–10
Implicit and Explicit Peer Evaluation: Associations With Early Adolescents’ Prosociality, Aggression, and Bullying Tessa A.M. Lansu and Antonius H.N. Cillessen
William M. Bukowski
Radboud University
Concordia University
Implicit and explicit peer evaluations were assessed among 120 early adolescents (56 boys, 64 girls; M age = 11.1 years). Explicit peer evaluations were round-robin ratings of likeability; implicit peer evaluations were assessed with an approach-avoidance task, also using a round-robin design. Prosocial behavior, aggression, and bullying were assessed with a standard peer nominations procedure. Prosocial behavior predicted explicit positive evaluations given and received. Bullying and physical aggression predicted receiving explicit negative evaluations from peers. Implicit negative biases were found for girls but not boys. Relationally aggressive girls and bullying girls showed a negative implicit bias toward their peers. Possible implications for intervention are discussed.
Adolescents value some peers more than others. Prosocial peers are valued positively; aggressive peers negatively (see, for a review, Newcomb, Bukowski, & Pattee, 1993). Individual differences among youths in these evaluations have been examined infrequently. This is surprising because starting with Moreno’s (1934) concept of social expansion, there has been an interest in whether youths who have positive characteristics themselves, such as helpfulness, also view their peers more positively. Research on the hostile attribution bias has shown that youths who are identified as aggressive tend to show more negative views of ambiguous situations involving peers (de Castro, Veerman, Koops, Bosch, & Monshouwer, 2002; Dodge, 1980; Dodge & Frame, 1982; Horsley, de Castro, & van der Schoot, 2010; Weiss, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1992). This has been shown for youths characterized by aggression in general, physical aggression, bullying (Camodeca & Goossens, 2005), and relational aggression (Crick, 1995). These studies have linked aggression to the interpretation of ambiguous situations and detection of aggressive cues. However, this negativity bias may exist beyond aggressive situations. If a hostile bias is not limited to specific situations but is also present as a generalized response to peers, it may greatly affect adolescents’ social lives.
The authors are grateful to the school administrators, teachers, parents, and students who made this research possible. Requests for reprints should be sent to Tessa A.M. Lansu, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 HR Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail:
[email protected]
In contrast to aggressive youths, prosocial youths may have a positive perception bias. Indeed, Nelson and Crick (1999) found a benign attribution bias in prosocial early adolescents. Their prosocial early adolescents (identified by 1 SD above the mean on peer nominated prosocial behavior) were less likely to attribute hostile intent or feel distressed in provocative situations. If prosocial adolescents show a benign bias in hypothetical situations, they may also respond positively to their peers in general. The current study extended research on the links of aggression and prosocial behavior with attributional biases beyond hypothetical situations. We examined whether aggression and prosocial behavior are associated with negative or positive biases to peers in general. It was also examined whether such biases can be identified in both explicit and implicit processing of peers. EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT PROCESSES IN PERSON PERCEPTION Recent social psychological research distinguishes two types of person perception processes (e.g., Bargh, 1994; Strack & Deutsch, 2004; Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Although the labels sometimes differ; we refer to them as explicit and implicit. Explicit processes are deliberate, controlled, and with awareness, as measured, for example, with self-report questions on a standard questionnaire. Implicit processes are nondeliberate, automatic, © 2013 The Authors Journal of Research on Adolescence © 2013 Society for Research on Adolescence DOI: 10.1111/jora.12028
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and often without awareness. They can be measured with reaction time paradigms that capture automatic evaluations that are not consciously reflected upon during measurement (De Houwer, 2006). Implicit measures have been used successfully in studies with children and adolescents to study attitudes toward race (Baron & Banaji, 2006; Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2006), gender (Skowronski & Lawrence, 2001), bullying (van Goethem, Scholte, & Wiers, 2010), and victimization (Rosen, Milich, & Harris, 2007). These studies did not examine implicit processing of peers in general, although such processing is likely. It can be expected that much of youths’ responses to peers are subject to implicit or automatic processes. Bargh (1994) argued that automatic processes are especially important when: (1) a person has low awareness, controllability, and intentionality and (2) it is efficient to process information quickly. Because such conditions characterize everyday peer interaction, it is likely that automatic or implicit processes affect peer perceptions and the resulting interpersonal behaviors. Implicit evaluative reactions can be measured with an approach-avoidance task (AAT; Chen & Bargh, 1999). This paradigm assumes a link between the evaluation of an object or person and one’s tendency to bring that object or person closer (an approach movement indicating a positive evaluation) or move it away (an avoidance movement indicating a negative evaluation). The idea behind the measurement of approach and avoidance is that behavior is motivated by positive, desirable, or negative, undesirable events or possibilities (Elliot, 1999). Chen and Bargh indeed found that participants pulled a joystick faster toward them than they pushed it away in response to a positively valenced stimulus on a computer screen and pushed a joystick away faster than that they pulled it toward them in response to a negatively valenced stimulus. Clinical studies on emotion, addiction, and phobia have successfully used this method (Heuer, Rinck, & Becker, 2007; Marsh, Ambady, & Kleck, 2005; Rinck & Becker, 2007). The AAT has also been used to measure youths’ implicit responses to fantasy animals (Huijding et al., 2009), spiders (Klein, Becker, & Rinck, 2010), and popular and unpopular peers (Lansu, Cillessen, & Karremans, 2012). In the current study, the AAT was used to examine adolescents’ evaluative response to all their classmates rather than to a selection of classmates based on a specific characteristic. This makes it possible to measure an implicit response tendency toward peers in general.
Examining positive and negative biases at both explicit and implicit levels can shed light on their perseverance. Do biases only work in situations requiring cognitive resources? Are they already present in a first encounter with a peer, when there has been no time to think about how to interpret and evaluate the peer? For a complete understanding of biases and to develop effective interventions against negative biases, we need to know at what level they take place. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS The study had three goals. First, to assess how prosocial behavior, physical and relational aggression, and bullying are related to receiving explicit and implicit positive or negative evaluations from peers. Explicit evaluations were liking ratings received from classroom peers. Implicit evaluations were peers’ approach-avoidance responses to participants’ names in a joystick computer task. We expected that prosocial behavior would be positively, and aggression and bullying would be negatively related to explicit peer evaluations received. These effects could also occur implicitly, but just the names of peers in a computer task, without making their behaviors salient, might not be sufficient for an implicit effect. The second goal was to assess how prosocial behavior, physical and relational aggression, and bullying predict giving explicit and implicit positive or negative evaluations to peers (i.e., bias). Explicit evaluations now were participants’ own likeability ratings of their classroom peers; implicit evaluations were participants’ own approach-avoidance responses to their classroom peers in the computer task. We expected that the biases previously demonstrated with hypothetical scenarios would generalize to explicit and implicit peer perceptions. That is, we expected prosocial adolescents to show positive biases to peers, and aggressive adolescents to show negative biases, at both explicit and implicit level. The third goal of the study was to examine the role of participants’ gender in the associations of prosocial and aggressive behavior with evaluations given to and received from classmates. Gender differences have been found in research on the hostile attribution bias. Hostile attributions in ambiguous situations involving physical aggression tend to be stronger for boys than girls (Crick, Grotpeter, & Bigbee, 2002; Dodge & Frame, 1982). In ambiguous conflict situations involving relational aggression, however, girls experience more distress (Crick,
IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT PEER EVALUATION
1995; Crick et al., 2002) and report more hostile intent than boys (Godleski & Ostrov, 2010). Furthermore, an association between relational aggression and hostile attribution bias has been found for girls who are relationally victimized and emotionally distressed (Mathieson et al., 2011). Given these findings, the association of aggression with explicitly or implicitly biased perceptions of peers in general could also be gender-specific. For example, physical aggression might be more predictive of a negative bias in boys than girls, whereas relational aggression might be more predictive of a negative bias in girls than boys. Because not much is known about gender differences in the association of prosocial behavior with a benign bias, the examination of gender differences in this association was exploratory.
METHOD Participants and Procedure Participants were 120 early adolescents (56 boys, 64 girls; M age = 11.1 years, SD = 0.8 years) from six 5th and 6th grade classrooms (M group size = 20.7, SD = 5.3) of four elementary schools in middleclass communities in the southwestern Netherlands. The sample was 98% Caucasian, representing the ethnic composition of the schools’ municipality. First, 116 of the 122 students in the classrooms (95%) participated in sociometric data collection. In the following days, 120 of the 122 students (98%) completed computer tasks measuring likeability ratings and approach and avoidance responses to classmates. Passive consent was obtained for all adolescents in the classrooms. After providing the parents with a letter containing information on the study, none of the parents denied participation. Due to absenteeism on the day of testing, six adolescents did not complete the sociometric questionnaire and two did not complete the computer tasks. Measures Peer assessments. Unlimited peer assessments, allowing same-sex and other-sex choices, were collected with classroom as the reference group (Bukowski, Cillessen, & Velasquez, 2011). For each question, nominations received were counted for each student and standardized to z-scores within classrooms. Two prosocial behavior items (“who helps others” and “who shows interest in others”)
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were aggregated to one prosocial behavior score (Cronbach’s a = .87). Three relational aggression items (“who argues with others,” “who excludes others,” and “who gossips about others”) were aggregated to one relational aggression score (a = .74). Olweus defined bullying as “aggressive behavior or intentional harmdoing, carried out repeatedly and over time in an interpersonal relationship characterized by an imbalance of power […] carried out by physical contact, by words, or in other ways, such as making faces or mean gestures, and intentional exclusion from a group” (2006, p. 265–266). Thus, physical aggression can be part of bullying but is not interchangeable with it. Therefore, the items for physical aggression (“who hits or kicks others”) and bullying (“who bullies others”) were treated as separate predictors. Approach-avoidance task. After the peer assessments, adolescents individually completed tasks on a laptop computer in a quiet room at school. The AAT (Rinck & Becker, 2007) was completed with the laptop and a joystick. Adolescents were told that they were going to play a computer game involving the names of their classmates. They were told that the names would appear in color on the screen and that they should respond as quickly as possible to the color by pulling the joystick toward them if it was blue (approach response) and pushing the joystick away if it was yellow (avoidance response). Central in this instruction was the request to respond to an element of the stimulus presentation (its color) rather than its content (the name). Other AAT studies have used similar stimulus features as response cues (Langner et al., 2010; Woud, Becker, & Rinck, 2008). Responding to presentation features interferes with the explicit categorization of stimuli. It directs attention away from the stimulus content, thereby making the processing of the names less deliberate and more implicit. Students played with their dominant hand. The experience of approach and avoidance when pushing or pulling a name was enhanced visually by a zoom effect, in which a name would become gradually larger when pulled and gradually smaller when pushed. All classmates served as targets in the AAT. After 10 practice trials, participants completed 10 blocks of experimental trials with short breaks after every two blocks. Each block contained the names of each classmate in yellow and blue. Across all blocks, each name appeared 10 times in blue and 10 times in yellow. The dependent variable in each trial was the response latency for
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completing the appropriate arm movement with the joystick. Latencies were removed if shorter than 300 ms (to control for reactions without perceiving the stimulus) or larger than 2000 ms (to control for fatigue or distraction). This resulted in the removal of
