Copyright Malvin Porter, Jr. 2010 - acumen - The University of ...

Lindenberg and colleagues (2007) suggest that goal framing leads to both rational and irrational
expectations of children who are perceived as either bullies or victims.
Social Information Processing Factors that Influence
the Generation of Solutions in Response to Bullying
Several individual and contextual factors influence children’s ability to generate prosocial
responses to being victimized or bullied. These include the child’s history of aggression and
victimization, the reality of the bully/victim episode (i.e., actual versus perceived), the nature of
the victim’s relationship with the bully, and the form of bully victimization (M. S. Tisak et al.,
2006). Many studies have been conducted in which children who vary in aggressiveness were
asked to generate solutions to hypothetical situations in which they imagine themselves as the
victims of bullying.
Level of Aggressiveness. A consistent finding among these studies is that the child’s
level of aggressiveness is related to both the quality and the quantity of responses. In particular,
aggressive children often select responses with unwarranted aggression in ambiguous situations
(i.e., situations in which the intent of the provocateur is unknown). Moreover, aggressive
children tend to be limited in the number of effective solutions that they produce. In contrast,
nonaggressive children tend to produce many more nonaggressive prosocial solutions to
hypothetical situations involving peer conflict or bullying (Dodge, 1980a, 1987; Richard &
Dodge, 1982).
History of Aggression. The bully’s history of aggression is also an individual child factor
that influences how victimized children respond to bullying. Victimized children consider the
bully’s past behavior when inferring the intent that motivates the bully’s behavior. Hostile intent
is more likely perceived when the bully has a reputation for engaging in physical aggression
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