Girls Show Aggression Across Cultures

Nov. 3, 2002

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — A cross-cultural study of children in the United States and Indonesia has concluded that girls in both cultures engage in relational aggressive behavior more frequently than do boys. Relational aggression includes behavior that aggresses against another using behavior such as ostracizing another from groups, spreading malicious rumors, and manipulating social relationships.

According to the study conducted by researchers at Illinois Wesleyan University and reported in Child Development, almost 20 percent of the girls reported that their peers engaged in some form of relational aggression compared with only 5 percent of the boys.

Doran French, professor of psychology at Illinois Wesleyan and a co-author of the study, said that the research shows that relational aggression is a salient feature of the girls’ lives in both cultures.

Past studies have drawn comparisons between children in the United States and Europe. A key factor in the current study, said French, is that Indonesian society places a premium on maintaining social harmony and avoiding interpersonal conflict. The fact that girls in this society report comparable levels of socially aggressive behavior is significant since it points to the likelihood that gender differences in relational aggression are frequently present.

"I don't know that we could go so far as to call this behavior universal, but we can certainly say that our study shows it is widespread," said French.

The study, which is part of ongoing cross-cultural research, involved fifth- and eighth-graders in Indonesia and the United States with data collected through individual interviews in which the subjects were asked to describe peers they did not like.

In three different categories of relational aggression — relationship manipulation, social ostracism, and malicious rumors — girls reported that this occurred more often than did boys. For example, 31 percent of girls described social ostracism compared with 5 percent of the boys; 27 percent of the girls cited malicious rumors compared with 11 percent of the boys.

French noted that the significant presence of these forms of aggression among girls should not necessarily be construed as meanness on the part of girls.

"Part of this behavior might be meanness, but part of it is girls trying to figure out a social structure," said French. "Girls during the late elementary school and junior high school age are often more interested in understanding social relations than boys are, so we would expect that they might use these forms of aggression more often." Moreover, French indicated that these behaviors may also serve functions other than meanness. For example, children sometimes try to figure what is socially acceptable by gossiping about the inappropriate behavior of others. By isolating people from groups, they may also be maintaining social structures and boundaries.

"We wish that kids wouldn't behave in these ways — spreading malicious rumors, isolating unpopular kids," said French. "But the fact is adults engage in these same behaviors, but they are more sophisticated in their use of these tactics than are children ."

While relational aggression was more prominent among girls, physical aggression was cited more often by boys, adolescents and Indonesians than by girls and Americans.

The fact that Indonesian children mentioned physical aggression more often than did U.S. children was seen as paradoxical by the researchers since the impression is that the actual level of aggression among U.S. students is greater than that of Indonesian students. Consequently, French and the researchers hypothesize that Indonesian children were more apt to cite physically aggressive behavior because it is more uncommon and, hence, more noticeable in their society.

In addition to French, the authors of the article are Elizabeth A. Jansen, a 2001 Illinois Wesleyan graduate and a current Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota , and Sri Pidada of Padjadjaran University in Bandung, Indonesia.