Over the past several years, I got to experience high school
again through the eyes of my kids.
Though I have enjoyed going to band concerts and choir concerts and
plays, I am glad that I am beyond my high school years. There is a lot of aggression in high
school. Kids can be flat-out mean to
each other. Some of it is just
good-natured fun, as kids test out their ability to hurl verbal insults. But, some of it is nasty.
There are always a few kids who find themselves to be the
object of a lot of teasing and bullying.
Those kids can suffer through their time in high school. They experience symptoms of depression. They can also lash out at the people who
torment them, acting aggressively toward them.
Is there any way to break this cycle of aggression?
A fascinating paper by David Yeager, Kali Trzewniewski, and
Carol Dweck in the May/June, 2013 issue of Child
Development explored this question.
I have written about Carol Dweck’s research in this blog
before. She and her colleagues argue
that people tend to think about psychological traits in one of two ways.
Sometimes they adopt an entity
mindset, in which they believe that the trait is a permanent fixture of
someone’s psychology. Sometimes they
adopt an incremental mindset, in
which they believe that traits change over time.
Most psychological traits can change, and so an incremental
mindset is probably closer to the truth.
Yet, many children and adults adopt an entity mindset for all kinds of
traits including intelligence, trustworthiness, and aggression.
To make kids less aggressive, you might think that the best
strategy is to teach them skills for coping with disappointments and conflicts
with other kids. Perhaps they could use
those skills to think differently about their behavior.
If you have spent any time recently with teenagers, though,
you know that they resist almost any attempt to tell them what to do. So, it may not be that effective to just give
teens strategies to deal with conflicts.
Instead, if you give them information about how personality traits like
being aggressive can change over time, you may help them to deal more
effectively with other people.
In their study, about 250 students from a city high school
participated in this study. Some
students were in a control condition whose behavior was measured without any
intervention. Other students
participated in a 3-week program teaching them coping skills. They learned about things like hot to deal
with social rejection and how to focus on positive aspects of their life. A third group participated in a 3-week
program teaching them about the incremental mindset. They learned that personality traits can
change over time, because people’s brains are always changing. They also learned about the many factors that
affect people’s behavior and how changes in motivations can change their
behavior.
Several weeks after the intervention, participants were given
the chance to display aggressive and pro-social behavior. They played a computer game called
“Cyberball.” In this game, three players
seated in different rooms play a game in which they pass a ball around. The other players are actually controlled by
the computer. After the first few
passes, the two other players pass the ball only to each other. This game has been shown to make people feel
excluded.
After playing this game, participants did a taste testing
activity in which they prepared food for one of the people they were supposed
to have played Cyberball with. The
participant was given information about the other person including the fact
that the person does not like spicy food.
The participant was given the chance to put hot sauce on the food, and
they could put on as much hot sauce as they wanted. The idea is that the more hot sauce they put
on, the more aggressive they are being toward this person who had just excluded
them from a game.
Before the food was “delivered” to the other person, the
participant also had a chance to write a note to accompany the food. This note allowed participants to give either
prosocial messages (“I didn’t add much hot sauce, because I know you don’t like
it”) or antisocial messages (“I put a lot of hot sauce on, because you were
mean to me.”)
Finally, a few months after the intervention, teachers were
given the chance to identify students whose behavior had changed positively
over the last few months of the year.
These students were also less likely to be absent or tardy from school
in the months after the intervention.
Overall, participants given the incremental theory training
put less hot sauce on the food after the game of Cyberball (so they were less
aggressive toward others) than those who got the coping skills training or
those in the control group. The
participants given the incremental theory training also wrote more positive
messages in their note than those in the other groups. At the follow-up later, the participants in
the incremental theory group were also more likely to be identified by teachers
as improving their behavior than those in the other groups.
However, this training had a specific benefit. The students who were most likely to show
improvements in their behavior were the ones who were often the victims of
aggression, teasing, and bullying by other students. This training was particularly effective at
helping victims of bullying to realize that the people around them can change,
and so they did not need to lash out at these people.
This study adds to the benefits of thinking about
psychological traits as being malleable rather than fixed. The more that you believe that your own
behavior and other people’s behavior can change, the more willing you are to
deal positively with interpersonal problems and to work harder to improve
yourself.
