UC Berkeley

In the current study, I examined students’ judgments as well as assessed if there are differences in the judgments among three groups of middle and high school and college students ages 12-23 who reported having (a) engaged in bullying, (b) experienced bullying victimization, and (c) had no experience of bullying. I employed social domain theory as my theoretical framework and a mixed method approach that consisted of statistical analyses and a semi-structured interview with questions about hypothetical bullying situations. I conducted a combination of Fisher’s exact tests, McNemar’s test, and logistic regression to analyze participants' judgments. I found that students with bullying experience, just like their peers with victimization experience and no experience, disapproved of unprovoked bullying and aggression in general primarily due to concerns about injuries and harm. Similar to their peers, students with bullying experience also disapproved of bullying even in situations with mitigating factors, such as when the intention of the protagonist was to avoid becoming the target of bullying or when the protagonist was less physically strong than the target. The current study adds to the growing body of evidence that people with aggressive behaviors do engage in moral judgments and are just as concerned about the potential harm from bullying and aggression as their peers without bullying experience.