Moral Disengagement and Risk Prototypes in the Context of Adolescent Cyberbullying: Findings From Two Countries

Cyberbullying is associated with a wide range of mental health difficulties and behavioral problems in adolescents and research is needed to better understand psychological correlates of this behavior. The present study used a novel model that incorporated Social Cognitive Theory and the prototype/willingness model to identify the correlates of behavioral willingness to engage in cyberbullying in two countries. Adolescent students were randomly selected from secondary schools in Italy (n = 1710) and Greece (n = 355), and completed anonymous measures of moral disengagement, descriptive norms, risk prototype evaluations and behavioral willingness to engage in cyberbullying. Hierarchical linear regression analyses showed that willingness to engage in cyberbullying was associated with moral disengagement, prototype evaluations and descriptive social norms in Italy, and with gender, moral disengagement and descriptive social norms in Greece. Regression-based multiple mediation modeling further showed that the association between moral disengagement and cyberbullying willingness was mediated by prototype evaluations in Italy and by descriptive norms in Greece. The implications of our findings are discussed in the context of self-regulating cyberbullying perpetration in adolescents and informing school-based policies and interventions to prevent cyberbullying behavior.

"The results supported the first hypothesis of the study by showing that moral disengagement was positively associated with willingness to engage in cyberbullying in both countries. Instead of TPB-based intention measures, in the present study we employed a more situation-based behavioral willingness measure to reflect the behavioral tendency to engage in cyberbullying perpetration in specific situations and social contexts in the future (Gibbons et al., 1998; Todd et al., 2016). [...] The present findings only partially supported the second hypothesis of the study. In particular, different variables emerged as mediators in the two countries. More specifically, in the Italian sample, moral disengagement retained a significant effect on willingness after PWM constructs were controlled for and this is in line with previous research. [...] Overall, the findings of the present study indicated that although moral disengagement is a strong predictor of willingness to cyberbully, its effect can be mediated by different constructs under different circumstances." (Lazuras et al., 2019, pp. 6-8).