ارزیابی اخلاقی و رتبه بندی مزاحمت سایبری نوجوانان : بررسی اثر صحت هدفمندی و پشت رویداد

The constant exposure to electronic media has increased the likelihood of adolescents experiencing hurtful events such as cyberbullying. The current study examined how adolescents’ moral evaluations of cyberbullying are affected by different aspects of the event including falsity of posts, power imbalance and intention to harm. Adolescents between 12–13 years of age (n = 77) and 15–16 years of age (n = 77) read moral vignettes and were asked to evaluate the actions of the protagonist. They were also asked if the behaviour in the vignette was an incident of cyberbullying. Participants also filled out a questionnaire about their own experiences with cyberbullying. It was found that adolescents evaluated as more negative those situations depicting false stories, imbalance of power, and intention to harm; Younger children had difficulties recognizing the intentions behind on-line posts. Adolescents who have cyber-intimidated others were less severe in their evaluations and less likely to rate vignettes as cyberbullying compared to other youth.

Communication technologies are the prevalent mode of communication among today’s youth. The on-line world is a new setting where youth engage with peers and adults. Engaging on-line can provide students with opportunities to develop academically, socially and their own identity. Pew Internet Research Center (Pew, 2009) reports that 93% of American teens use the internet. For example, social network sites (SNS) such as Facebook have more than 750 million active users (Facebook 2011), and more than 60% of 13–17 year olds have personal SNS profiles. The majority of research examining youth’s on-line use has focused on adolescents between 14 and 16 year olds (e.g., Aricak et al., 2008 and Li, 2007). However, young people’s use of on-line technology is growing and expanding to increasingly include younger children under 14 years of age (Print Measurement Bureau, 2013). As a result, educators and other professionals working with adolescents have grown increasingly concerned about how technology affects social relationships given the amount of time that is spent engaging in online activities and the risks involved. Although most youth communicate responsibly, cyberbullying has become a significant concern of parents, educators, and policy makers. Cyberbullying has been defined as any intentional and aggressive message, repeated over time against someone who is not able to defend him or herself using electronic communication devices (Menesini and Nocentini, 2009 and Smith et al., 2008). However, Shariff and Sheikh (in progress) explain that cyberbullying can also be unintentional as digital natives, namely, children growing up immersed in digital media (Prensky, 2001) often fail to appreciate the difference between jokes and intentional harm. Cyberbullying is an extension of traditional bullying using digital media (Li, 2007). Both result in exclusion, isolation, lost reputations, loss of self-esteem, physical and emotional harm, and in tragic cases, death from video-taped beatings or suicide (Hinduja and Patchin, 2010 and McQuade et al., 2009). However, unlike traditional bullying which decreases during adolescence, cyberbullying appears to increase over the secondary school years (Smith & Slonje, 2010).

The current study examined the effect of characteristics of events, age, sex and experience with cyberbullying on moral evaluation of online interactions. Results revealed several significant findings. Adolescents tend to evaluate as more negative those situations depicting false stories, imbalance of power, and intention to harm; It was also found that those participants who have cyber-intimidated others are less severe in their evaluations than those who have not. As expected based upon previous research on moral evaluations of lying (Bussey, 1992), situations where the perpetrator posted false information or rumours were considered more serious by adolescents than those situations in which the characters told the truth. Furthermore, true posts were rated more positively when there was a balance of power than when there was an imbalance. The majority of adolescents rated false posts as instances of cyberbullying. However, participants rated as cyberbullying instances where posts were true only approximately half the time. Thus, it appears that adolescents see false posts as negative and potentially cyberbullying. However, they are less certain if the information posted happens to be true about the target. In such cases, other elements of the situation may inform their evaluations. Overall, participants rated vignettes where there was a balance of power less negatively than when there was an imbalance of power. They were also more likely to see vignettes where there was an imbalance of power as instances of cyberbullying. Notably, when there was psychological harm to the targeted individual this appeared to supersede all other considerations in terms of participants’ evaluations. Regardless of other characteristics, when there was harm to target almost all adolescents rated such vignettes as most serious. This finding is consistent in part with the definition of bullying relating to the presence of a power imbalance (Olweus, 1993) and empirical evidence in the field of teachers’ and students’ perception about bullying (Hazler et al., 2001; Bauman & Hurley, 2005). There was also almost universal agreement among adolescents that such events were cyberbullying. Significantly, when there was no harm to the target, however, ratings were affected by other factors. Harmless teasing posts where there was a balance of power between perpetrator and target were rated more positively than when there was an imbalance. Harmless false posts where there was an imbalance of power were rated as cyberbullying more than when there was a balance of power. True harmless teasing posts were rated more positively than false posts, although this was affected by age. Adolescents tended to rate false harmless posts as instances of cyber-bullying. However, very few rated true harmless posts as cyberbullying. Thus, it seems that adolescents recognized cases where the perpetrator posted true harmless material as teasing rather than aggressive acts. However, when the information was false (though harmless), they paid attention to the balance of power between the perpetrator and target as key in deciding whether it was cyber-aggression or not. As suggested by previous research on traditional bullying (Harvey et al., 2001 and Tisak and Jankowski, 1998) we found some support for differences in evaluations for adolescents who had been aggressive on-line. Overall, they appeared to evaluate the different vignettes less negatively and less likely to see such events as cyberbullying. However, this seemed particularly true for females. While females who did not engage in cyberbullying evaluated more cases as instances cyberbullying, females who had engaged in cyberbullying were the opposite. Furthermore, females who engaged in cyberbullying were more likely to give positive ratings than males who cyberbullied. They were also less likely to rate true posts as cases of cyberbullying. Among those who did not bully, males were more likely to rate vignettes with balance between the two characters as cyberbullying compared to females. Thus in accordance with the literature on bullying behaviour, there appear to be gender differences in perceptions of cyberbullying (e.g., Perren et al., 2012 and Tangney et al., 2007). As hypothesized there were differences between younger adolescents’ and older adolescents’ evaluations of bullying. While 15–16 year-olds were more likely to rate stories where there was harm to the target negatively regardless of other factors such as veracity or balance, 12–13 year-olds paid less attention to harm when making their evaluations. For instance, younger adolescents rated false posts more negatively than true posts regardless of whether there was harm or not. There were also no differences found in the younger group amongst those who cyberbullied and those who had not. Only in the older group of adolescents, were there differences. Older adolescents who cyberbullied had less negative ratings than those who had not cyberbullied. The results of our recent study suggest that there are developmental differences in adolescents’ perceptions of on-line behaviours and their understanding of cyberbullying events. Young adolescents may have a hard time understanding the intentions behind on-line interactions and are less likely to consider the intention to harm in their evaluations. Older adolescents have had more experience on-line which may make them more sensitive to different types of on-line behaviours. This may lead younger adolescents to be less aware of potential hostile intentions underlying messages and interactions online. Thus, young adolescents would be at higher risk of receiving real threats and harassment and mislabelling them as simple jokes. These results support the necessity of designing intervention programs aimed to help younger adolescents to discriminate between harmless messages and real online threats. Overall, little is known about how youth perceive on-line activities and their view of their moral and ethical responsibility engaging on-line. The current study suggests more research is needed to fully understand how adolescents perceive and evaluate on-line activities and cyberbullying. Future research should examine adolescents’ moral justifications for their evaluations of different types of on-line behaviour. Furthermore, the current study did not include an exhaustive list of on-line activities or include all potential aspects of on-line behaviour that may affect adolescents’ perceptions. It also did not include the range of technologies (e.g., cell phones) that may be used to cyberbully. Future research is needed to examine how a wider range of behaviours across different technologies influences adolescents’ perceptions. Investigating moral aspects of cyberbullying is important so that we can understand why adolescents engage in these kinds of actions. This also has important implications for designing interventions that address this behaviour. Such knowledge on how adolescents perceive on-line behaviour can be incorporated into values and character education to address specifically on-line aggression. By knowing how adolescents judge events online, educators can design more effective developmentally appropriated educational tools that address students’ perceptions and educate them on the risks of using digital media and the consequences of on-line actions as well as promote student awareness and prevention of cyberbullying.