Improving adolescent moral reasoning versus cyberbullying: An online big group experiment by means of collective intelligence

Abstract

Collective Intelligence (CI) is identified as the group capacity to come up with responses to complex tasks that are not accomplished or are of worse quality if performed cooperatively or individually. Based on this premise, we considered knowing if adolescents’ moral reasoning would increase when a big group faces a topical moral dilemma: a sexting-centered cyberbullying case. To do so, the CI platform Thinkhub was used with an online group of 793 simultaneously connected year-1 Higher Secondary Education students. This platform contemplates an initial individual work phase, and another dynamic work group phase in which responses gradually appear. The system finally presents the most valued responses to the participants. The obtained results revealed a significant rise in the individual moral development levels that emerged during the interaction process when the participants engaged in one of the three posed questions, for which the response rate was also higher. The promising potential of the CI generated during online interaction processes followed to solve complex tasks, their weak points and future research in this field, are discussed.