Hostile attribution bias
Also known as: Hostile attribution of intent
Reading hostile intent into behavior that is actually ambiguous.
What it means
The tendency to interpret others' ambiguous actions as deliberately hostile or aggressive rather than accidental or benign. Within social-information-processing models of aggression, it is a bias at the interpretation stage: ambiguous cues are encoded as threats, which then justifies a retaliatory response. The bias is a well-replicated correlate of reactive aggression in children and adults and a target of cognitive-behavioral intervention. It can be situationally primed by prior provocation, rejection, or a threatening environment, and it tends to be self-perpetuating, since hostile responses provoke real hostility in return. It illuminates cycles of conflict, bullying, intimate-partner violence, and intergroup suspicion.
Examples
A child bumped in a hallway assumes the other kid did it on purpose and shoves back, though the contact was accidental.
A colleague answers your message with a single word, 'Fine.' You read contempt into it, fire back something sharp, and turn two ambiguous letters into a genuine feud.
Cut off on the motorway, a driver assumes deliberate malice rather than a missed mirror check and retaliates by tailgating — provoking exactly the aggression he thought he saw.
First described in Kenneth Dodge (1980).