Emotional inteligence

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themselves as victims and can recite a list of instances
when, say, teachers blamed them for doing something
when in fact they were innocent. Another trait of such
children is that once they are in the heat of anger they
can think of only one way to react: by lashing out.
These perceptual biases can be seen at work in an experiment
in which bullies are paired with a more peaceable
child to watch videos. In one video, a boy drops his
books when another knocks into him, and children
standing nearby laugh; the boy who dropped the books
gets angry and tries to hit one of those who laughed.
When the boys who watched the video talk about it afterward,
the bully always sees the boy who struck out as
justified. Even more telling, when they have to rate how
aggressive the boys were during their discussion of the
video, the bullies see the boy who knocked into the other
as more combative, and the anger of the boy who struck
out as justified. 12
This jump to judgment testifies to a deep perceptual
bias in people who are unusually aggressive: they act on
the basis of the assumption of hostility or threat, paying
too little attention to what is actually going on. Once
they assume threat, they leapfrog to action. For instance,
if an aggressive boy is playing checkers with another
who moves a piece out of turn, he'll interpret the
move as "cheating" without pausing to find out if it had