Poster #49 - The Role of Aggressive Tendencies in the Relationship Between Moral Judgments of Bullying and Retaliation

• In Event: Poster Session 16

Abstract

Bullying is a common issue many adolescents face; Modecki et al. (2014) found the mean prevalence rate of bullying victimization is around 35%. Bullying leads to many negative outcomes for both victims of bullying and bullies Ttofi et al., 2014). Most perpetrators of extreme violence in schools, such as school shootings, cite perceived bullying as an influencing factor (Vossekuil et al., 2002). There is also evidence that victim status often precedes bully status and that this is just as common as going from a bully to a victim (Walters, 2021). Therefore, it is possible that a cycle of violence exists; finding bullying acceptable may lead to finding aggressive retaliation also acceptable. Since one’s judgment of the acceptability of an aggressive action influences one’s likelihood to intervene, it is important to understand what individual factors might lead to differing acceptability judgments (Frey et al., 2015). The current study aimed to investigate how acceptability of bullying relates to acceptability of retaliation against such bullying and probe what factors may influence this relationship. We hypothesized that the acceptability of the initial bullying would be positively related to acceptability of retaliation, but that temperament would moderate this relationship.
Adolescents in 6th and 9th grade (N = 896, 52.8% female) read six bullying vignettes (physical aggression, relational aggression, social exclusion, cyber aggression, relational aggression by a friend, and intimate partner aggression). They then evaluated how acceptable the bullying was using a six-point Likert scale (1 = Really Not OK to 6 = Really OK). They were then told to imagine what if the victim then decided to do something to hurt the perpetrators and were asked how acceptable this would be using the same six-point Likert scale. They completed the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire-Revised (Ellis & Rothbart, 2001) from which an aggression subscale was calculated where higher values indicate more aggressive reactivity. Next, a multi-level model was run with the six scenarios comprising Level 1 and the individual students at Level 2. The outcome was acceptability of retaliation with acceptability of the bullying act as a Level 1 predictor, aggression as a Level 2 predictor, and a cross-level interaction between these two predictors. There was a significant cross-level interaction (γ11 = .07, t = 2.78, p = .006), such that retaliation was most acceptable when the bullying act was seen as more acceptable and individuals had higher levels of aggression, as seen in Figure 1.
Overall, these results indicate that, for adolescents with an aggressive temperament, they tend to find bullying and retaliation more acceptable overall and when they think the acceptability of the bullying is high, they are more likely to find retaliation to be more acceptable. However, this is not the case for adolescents with less aggressive temperaments; they did not judge the acceptability of retaliation differently when acceptability of the bullying was high. Therefore, a potential cycle of violence is only applicable for those with an aggressive temperament and future interventions should focus on targeting those adolescents’ acceptability judgments.

Authors

• Christina Sophia Marlow, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Seçil Gönültaş, Bilkent University

• Kelly Lynn S Mulvey, North Carolina State University