Demonstration Motivation Encourages Aggressive Reactions To Peer Rejection and Victimization

Some, but not all, children who experience rejection or victimization by peers develop aggressive habits in response. This dissertation study tested the hypothesis that children who possess demonstration self-guides—cognitive structures that motivate a child to display behaviors and attributes that bring attention, admiration, or subservience from peers—are particularly at risk for such aggressive reactions. Children with such self-guides, it is suggested, experience adverse treatment by peers as particularly frustrating, humiliating, and shameful, and these reactions increase the children’s threshold for exhibiting aggression during peer interactions. Participants were 195 children in the fourth through seventh grades of a school serving an ethnically and racially diverse student population (94 girls and 101 boys; M age = 10.1 years). Children completed self- and peer-report questionnaires in the fall and spring of a school year. Measures included rejection and victimization by peers, demonstration self-guides (narcissism, self-efficacy for demonstration attributes, felt pressure for gender conformity, and sexist ideology), aggression toward peers, and other variables testing secondary hypotheses. Consistent with the focal hypothesis, children with demonstration self-guides were more likely than other children to increase their aggression following peer rejection or victimization. However, this result was more common for girls than for boys; for boys, increased aggression more often reflected additive rather than interactive effects of peer rejection/victimization and demonstration motivation. Support for the focal hypothesis also depended on additional moderator variables, including gender of the peer group rejecting or victimizing the child, the nature of the demonstration self-guide, and gender of the target of the child’s own aggression.