Biais d’attribution d’intention et comportements agressifs chez les élèves de la ville de Yaoundé.

Abstract

Violence is a phenomenon that is increasingly taking on enormous proportions in our societies. This phenomenon is the result of various aggressive behaviors. These behaviours do not spare any environment, including the school environment. Over the past ten years in Cameroon, there have been several forms of aggressive behaviour in schools, ranging from insults between peers to the killing of teachers. The literature in social psychology gives pride of place to aggressive behaviors and underlying processes. In line with this perspective, this research investigates the relationship between intention attribution bias and aggressive behaviors in students. Through the convenience sampling technique, 260 students aged between 13 and 24 years (M = 18.63 years) including 104 girls were selected to participate in this study. The data were collected using a composite questionnaire containing the social informational processing-Attribution and Emotional Response Questionnaire (Coccaro et al. 2009) and the Reactive-Proactive Aggression Questionnaire (Suter et al., 2019), to measure intent attribution bias and aggressive behaviours, respectively. Data were analyzed using regression analysis and the structural equation model (Hayes, 2018) via SPSS.23. The results show that hostile intent attribution bias and negative emotional response predict aggressive behaviors in students. It also appears that the negative emotional response mediates the relationship, the bias of attribution of hostile intention and aggressive behaviors in students. These results are discussed in the light of previous work.