Moral Disengagement in Cyberbullying Perpetration: The Role of Gender
Author(s):
İbrahim Tanrıkulu (presenting / submitting) Özgür Erdur-Baker
Conference:
ECER 2015
Network:
Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Format:
Paper

Session Information

ERG SES G 07, Gender and Education

Paper Session

Time:
2015-09-08
09:00-10:30
Room:
324. [Main]
Chair:
Iveta Kestere

Contribution

Cyberbullying which is defined as repeatedly and willfully harming a person or a group of people by using information and communication technologies has been a concerning issue among the educators regardless of the age groups that they work with. Existing prevention and intervention literature mostly includes research on victims of cyber bullying due to its negative impacts on victims’ psychological, social and physical well-beings as well as their academic achievement. However, understanding more about the characteristics of cyber bullies can add up to prevention and/or intervention of cyberbullying among young people. Therefore, this study aims to examine how cyberbullying perpetration is related to the variables of gender and moral disengagement.

The motivation of this study comes from the evidence emerged from the previous studies which reported that cyber bullies displayed higher levels of moral disengagement compared to the other groups involved in a cyberbullying incident. Yet, less is known about the role of gender in moral disengagement regarding cyberbullying perpetration. Thus, this study aims to contribute to the extant literature by investigating the moderating role of gender on the relationship between cyberbullying perpetration and moral disengagement. In accordance with this purpose, the present research investigated how gender moderates the association between cyberbullying perpetration and moral disengagement. Moral disengagement can be described as cognitive processes to justify damaging behaviors which usually violate a person’s moral standards. The digital environments seem to encourage the cyber bullies to engage in behaviors which can disagree with their moral agency. As the actions are happening in a virtual world, where there is no face-to-face contact, cyber bullies cannot witness the victim reactions or the impacts of their bullying behavior on the victims. These inabilities may lead the cyber bullies to justify their harmful behaviors since they seemingly did not physically hurt anyone. 

Method

The relationship between the acts of cyberbullying and moral engagement was examined in this study with regard to gender differences because previous studies reported inconsistent results in terms of gender. The data were collected via convenient sampling strategy. The data of this study were part of a doctoral thesis. For this reason, cyberbullying section of the Revised Cyberbullying Inventory-III (Tanrıkulu, 2015, manuscript in preparation), Propensity to Morally Disengage Scale (Moore, Detert, Treviño, Baker, & Mayer, 2012) and variable of gender from the demographic information form of the questionnaire were used for this current study. The participants were 635 Turkish university students (365 females and 270 males with a mean age of 21.32) who filled out an anonymous self-report, paper-based questionnaire. Of the participants, 23% (n = 146) were not involved in any cyberbullying incident as a victim or a bully, 18.4% (n = 117) were pure cyber victims who were cyber victimized twice or more but never bullied others online, 2.4% (n = 15) were pure cyber bullies who cyber bullied others twice or more but were never victimized online and 43.1% (n = 274) were cyber bully-victims who not only cyber bullied others but also were victimized online twice or more and there were a total of 13.1% (n = 83) participants who cannot be put under any of these groups. To assess whether cyberbullying perpetration differed significantly between females and males depending on their moral disengagement levels, a moderation analysis was performed by using PROCESS macro of Hayes (2013) via SPSS 22. While the dependent variable was cyberbullying perpetration, the independent variable was moral disengagement. The moderator variable was gender, namely being a female or male. The moderating role of gender on the link between cyberbullying perpetration and moral disengagement was tested. The independent variable of moral disengagement and moderator variable of gender were centered prior to the analysis.

Expected Outcomes

According to the results, gender (b = 2.15, 95% CI, [1.45, 2.84]), t = 6.07, p < .001) and moral disengagement (b = 0.19, 95% CI, [0.12, 0.26]), t = 5.57, p < .001) were individually significant. The interaction between gender and moral disengagement was also significant (b = 0.18, 95% CI, [0.03, 0.33]), t = 2.44, p < .05). When gender was female, there was a significant positive relationship between moral disengagement and cyberbullying perpetration (b = 0.11, 95% CI, [0.44, 0.19]), t = 3.18, p < .01). When gender was male, there was a significant positive relationship between moral disengagement and cyberbullying perpetration (b = 0.30, 95% CI, [0.17, 0.42]), t = 4.57, p < .001). Both gender and moral disengagement were statistically significant associates of cyberbullying perpetration. However, the effect of moral disengagement was larger for males than females. On average, the likelihood of males with higher levels of moral disengagement was 2.15 point greater than females. And for both females and males, on average, each 1 point of additional moral disengagement predicted a 0.19 point in cyberbullying perpetration. The findings suggest that moral disengagement seems to have a significant role increasing the likelihood of cyber bullying perpetration. Although higher levels of moral disengagement appears to increase the risk of cyberbullying perpetration both for females and males, males with higher levels of moral disengagement seem to have greater risk. For this reason, researchers should consider gender and moral disengagement as potential factors of cyberbullying perpetration. Helping the cyber bullies become aware of the negative influences of their bullying perpetration behaviors on victims can lead them to behave more morally. Considering that cyberbullying incidences negatively influence bullies and victims, university counseling centers should develop awareness and prevention programs against cyberbullying with the goal of creating safer university campuses.

References

Hayes, A. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. New York: Guilford Press. Moore, C., Detert, J. R., Treviño, L. K., Baker, V. L., & Mayer, D. M. (2012). Why employees do bad things: Moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior. Personnel Psychology, 65, 1-48. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.93.2.374 Tanrıkulu, İ. (2015). Manuscript in Preperation.

Author Information

İbrahim Tanrıkulu (presenting / submitting)
Middle East Technical University
Educational Sciences, Psychological Counseling and Guidance
Ankara
Özgür Erdur-Baker
Middle East Technical University, Turkey

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