Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 31, February 2014, Pages 259-271
Computers in Human Behavior

Cyberbullying on social network sites. An experimental study into bystanders’ behavioural intentions to help the victim or reinforce the bully

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.10.036Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We assessed young bystanders’ behavioural intentions towards Facebook harassment.

  • Contextual factors were manipulated in an experimental scenario design.

  • Incident severity and other bystanders’ identity influenced helping intentions.

  • Other bystanders’ identity and behaviour influenced joining in the bullying.

  • Gender influenced helping and reinforcing intentions.

Abstract

Cyberbullying on social network sites poses a significant threat to the mental and physical health of victimized adolescents. Although the role of bystanders in solving bullying instances has been demonstrated repeatedly in research on traditional bullying, their role in cyberbullying remains relatively understudied. Therefore, we set up an experimental scenario study in order to examine the influence of contextual factors (severity of the incident, identity and behaviour of other bystanders) on bystanders’ behavioural intentions to help the victim or reinforce the bully in cases of harassment on Facebook. Four hundred and fifty-three second year students of Flemish secondary schools participated in the study. The results on the one hand showed that bystanders had higher behavioural intentions to help the victim when they witnessed a more severe incident. Incident severity also interacted with other bystanders’ identity in influencing behavioural intentions to help the victim. On the other hand, bystanders had higher behavioural intentions to join in the bullying when other bystanders were good friends rather than acquaintances. In addition, an interaction effect was found between other bystanders’ identity and behaviour on behavioural intentions to join in the bullying. Furthermore, both helping and reinforcing behavioural intentions differed according to gender.

Section snippets

Introduction: cyberbullying on social network sites (SNS)

Information- and communication technologies (ICT) offer this generation of youngsters ample opportunities to communicate with peers. However, in their social interactions via ICT youngsters can be confronted with undesirable phenomena such as cyberbullying. The large-scale EU Kids Online study on internet safety (Livingstone, Haddon, Görzig, & Olafsson, 2011) revealed that 9% of children between nine and sixteen years old had been bullied through the internet or mobile phones within the past

Role of bystanders in cyberbullying on SNS

Research on traditional bullying has shown that bystanders are important actors in bullying instances. Since perpetrators often engage in bullying to achieve a higher status, exert dominance, gain prestige or demonstrate social power in the peer group, they are dependent on the members of this peer group – the bystanders – to achieve their goal (Pepler et al., 2010, Salmivalli, 2010, Sijtsema et al., 2009). Bystanders can respond to incidents of bullying in roughly three different ways:

Determinants of bystander behaviour in cases of cyberbullying on SNS

In order to understand bystander behaviour in bullying, scholars until now have mainly complemented research on socio-demographic and psychological/personality determinants with an examination of the socio-cognitive processes that determine bystander behaviour (Van Cleemput, Vandebosch, & Pabian, Under review). With regard to socio-cognitive processes, cyberbullying research has investigated the influence of empathy (Barlińska, Szuster, & Winiewski, 2013), emotions and group norms (Jones,

Stimulus materials and manipulations

In order to test the aforementioned hypotheses, we set up an experimental design with a 2 (low vs. high perceived severity) × 2 (other bystanders reinforce the bully vs. defend the victim) × 2 (other bystanders are acquaintances vs. good friends) between-subjects design. These factors were manipulated in a scenario that reported a harassing incident on Facebook, involving one perpetrator and one victim and other bystanders reacting to it. We chose to use a Facebook setting, since it is the most

Equality of treatment groups

In order to ensure that the groups of participants assigned to the different conditions were comparable, Pearson Chi-square tests were performed for each background variable separately (see Section 4.2. for an overview of the background variables). These tests showed no significant background differences between the treatment groups (1.02  χ2  52.84, all p > .05).

Manipulation check: perceived severity

In the questionnaire perceived severity was measured using the same items as in the pre-test (see Section 4.1). Reliability analysis

Conclusion and discussion

In this study we used an experimental design to examine contextual influences of a harassing incident on SNS on bystanders’ behavioural intentions to help the victim or reinforce the bully. In total, three contextual influences were examined: the severity of the incident, the identity of other bystanders who are present and the behaviour of these other bystanders. In addition, gender was added to the models as a control variable.

Strengths and limitations

In this study, we aimed to contribute to existing research on harassing online incidents and cyberbullying by investigating a fairly new type of ICT (SNS) and by focusing on the behaviour of a group that remains relatively understudied (bystanders). In contrast to most other studies on cyberbullying bystanders that present correlational findings, this study employed an experimental design with a large number of participants. As it allows making causal inferences about behavioural determinants,

Recommendations and implications for cyberbullying research and interventions

The experimental scenario design used in this study could be applied to investigate the influence of other contextual factors of a harassing incident on SNS, such as the identity and behaviour of perpetrators and victims. A similar scenario could also be implemented in virtual reality, as has recently been done by Slater et al. (2013) in order to investigate bystander responses to a violent incident. Such an approach would allow the scenario to be described in a more realistic way, while at the

Acknowledgements

This study was conducted within the scope of the Friendly ATTAC SBO-project, founded by IWT Flanders (Belgium). The authors sincerely thank all students, teachers and school administrators for participating and cooperating.

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