Poster #189 - Associations Between Generalized Peer and Friendship-Specific SIP Mechanisms Depend on (Inter)personal Power

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Contextualist approaches to the study of social information processing (SIP) have indicated that SIP mechanisms are highly sensitive to the identity of the interaction partner (e.g., Peets et al., 2008, 2011). For example, children are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt (i.e., by attributing less hostile intent) in response to a negative event caused by a peer when the peer is a friend vs. a neutral or disliked peer. Moreover, some SIP mechanisms, especially attributions of hostile intent, show little consistency across different relationship partners. This work has led some to question what traditional measures that utilize hypothetical peers in vignettes to assess SIP mechanisms might actually be measuring. Some children might be thinking of a friend, whereas others might be thinking of a neutral or disliked peer.
The purpose of this study was to test whether some children would be more likely to base their cognitions about a hypothetical peer on their cognitions about a friend. We hypothesized that children low in power (who are shy, high on internalizing, and have difficulties with their peers) would be more sensitive to context than those higher in power, and therefore show weaker associations among cognitions about a generalized peer and friend (see Keltner et al., 2003). A total of 179 participants (83 boys; aged 11.5-15.92 years) read four vignettes involving a nonspecified peer that ended with a negative event. The intent of the peer was ambiguous. Following each vignette, participants responded to three items tapping perceived stress (“How stressful would this situation be?”), attribution of hostile intent (“Why did the kid get milk all over your back?”), and expectation of angry reaction (“How mad would you feel if this really happened?”). Participants then responded to the same questions after reading similar vignettes except that participants were instructed to imagine the focal peer as their friend. Children also reported on their social difficulties, internalizing, and shyness.
Hierarchical multiple regression was used to test our hypotheses. In each analysis, a cognition about a general peer served as the dependent variable. On step 1, gender and age were controlled. On step 2, the parallel friend cognition was entered along with one of the three moderators (e.g., social difficulties), followed by their interaction on step 3. Five of the nine possible interactions were significant. Simple slopes analyses indicated, as expected, that as each moderator moved from relatively high to low power (e.g., low social difficulties to high social difficulties), the relation between the cognition about the friend and the cognition about the general peer diminished (Table 1). Shyness was a particularly robust moderator, interacting with all three cognitions. Highly shy children were less likely to base their cognitions about a general peer on their cognitions about a friend than were less shy children. This pattern of results suggests that children do indeed vary predictably in the identity of interaction partners that may be elicited when utilizing hypothetical peer vignettes to capture SIP mechanisms. Implications for theory are discussed.

Authors

• Laura K Cyran, St. John's University
  Presenting Author

• Miriam T Stotsky, University at Buffalo, SUNY
  Non-Presenting Author

• Julie C Bowker, University at Buffalo, SUNY
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katlin Peets, St. John's University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ernest Van Every Hodges, St. John's University
  Non-Presenting Author