How students react to different cyberbullying events: Past experience, judgment, perceived seriousness, helping behavior and the effect of online disinhibition

Abstract

This study designed three scenarios related to cyberbullying (CB) to examine the relationship between self-reported CB experience, overall judgment of CB, perception of CB seriousness, helping behavior, and two types of online disinhibition (benign and toxic). A total of 415 Chinese students in three different educational stages (junior high school, senior high school and university) completed a questionnaire. The results showed that compared to girls, boys were more likely to bully others on the Internet, and they perceived the toxic disinhibition effect more strongly. In contrast, girls more easily recognized the behaviors that occurred in harassment and denigration scenarios as bullying instances, and they tended to have strong judgments of these behaviors. Although no gender difference was observed in helping behavior, junior high school students had higher intentions to protect victims than university students in denigration and exclusion scenarios. Correlation analysis revealed that almost all variables were closely connected with each other, and the regression models of our research variables effectively predicted three forms of CB. Perception of seriousness and toxic disinhibition were common predictors in these scenarios. Based on the results, suggestions for reducing bullying incidents and future research directions are provided.