School bullying and cyberbullying – associations of student’s roles with social-cognitive and affective reactions

Abstract Bullying is a widespread phenomenon at schools and in digital media. Many adolescents come into contact with bullying and must react to it. Social-cognitive and affective reactions to bullying incidents (SCARB) might determine which roles classmates adopt. The current study investigates school bullying and cyberbullying within the class community on the basis of peer nominations and associates pupils’ roles with self-reported SCARB. Roles were assigned in a sample of 1506 pupils. It was hypothesized that defenders stand out in terms of high levels of empathy, feelings of responsibility and defending self-efficacy as well as low levels of moral disengagement and low apprehensions of negative outcomes of defending. Multilevel analyses controlling for gender and grade showed that defenders especially differed from bullies and reinforcer-bullies in terms of empathy, responsibility, defending self-efficacy and moral disengagement for both forms of bullying. Only moral disengagement differed between defenders and other bystander roles (outsiders, reinforcers) and only for cyberbullying. Regarding apprehensions, only victims of school bullying reported significantly higher levels than defenders. The results suggest that strengthening empathy, feelings of responsibility and defending self-efficacy might be pertinent for reducing bullying behavior and fostering defending behavior. Moreover, counteracting moral disengagement may be relevant to prevent undesirable bystander behaviors such as passivity and reinforcing.