Biased perceptions of girls' relationally aggressive behavior: Reputation and affective biases

Researchers define relational aggression as an intentional act with the potential to harm another person's relationships or social status in the peer group. Contemporary peer nomination measures of relational aggression require that the rater make inferences about the intention of the person being rated. These ratings can be subject to bias. Two possible contributors to raters' inferences are affective bias (i.e., whether the rater likes the person being rated) and reputation bias (i.e., the popularity of the person being rated).;Much of the previous research on biases in evaluations of aggressive behavior has focused on overt, not relational, aggression. In addition, previous research has confounded affective and reputation biases by using sociometric status (which identifies popular children based on ratings of who is liked and disliked) as an index of reputation. The present study evaluated how reputation and affective biases relate to girls' perceptions of their peers' relationally aggressive behavior using perceived popularity rather than sociometric status as an index of reputation.;Participants included 61 girls (38% Caucasian; 38% Latino) in the fourth and fifth grades. Girls completed (a) peer nomination measures assessing perceived popularity and relational aggression of other participants, (b) liking ratings for each participating classmate, and (c) the Perceived Aggression Questionnaire, a series of hypothetical vignettes describing an ambiguous situation in which an unknown girl experiences a potential relational insult done by one of the girls' classmates. After reading each vignette, girls rated the intent of the classmate depicted in the vignette (4 questions) and the level of harm (3 questions) likely to be caused by her behavior.;Analyses employed cross-classified hierarchical linear modeling, which permits assessment of the contribution of characteristics of both the child being rated and the rater herself Furthermore, one can simultaneously examine predictors both at the dyad level (i.e., dyadic liking) and at the group level (i.e., perceived popularity). Results showed that how much the girl liked the person being rated (i.e., dyadic liking) significantly predicted judgments of harmful intent and level of harm, with greater liking associated with lower ratings of intent and harm. But, perceived popularity of the girl being rated moderated the relationship between liking and perceived intent. For girls with low popularity, the relationship between liking and intent was strong, whereas for girls with high popularity this relationship was not significant. Perceived popularity was not related to girls' judgments of level of harm.