Hostile attribution bias

Common card · No. 493537

Hostile attribution bias, or hostile attribution of intent, is the tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign. For example, a person with high levels of hostile attribution bias might, on noticing two people laughing, immediately assume that the people are laughing about them. The term "hostile attribution bias" was coined in 1980 by Nasby, Hayden, and DePaulo who noticed, along with several other key pioneers in this research area (e.g., Kenneth A. Dodge), that a subgroup of children tend to attribute hostile intent to ambiguous social situations more often than other children. Since then, hostile attribution bias has been conceptualized as a bias of social information processing (similar to other attribution biases), including the way individuals perceive, interpret, and select responses to situations. While occasional hostile attribution bias is normative (particularly for younger children), researchers have found that...

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