522 Part VI Learning-Cognitive Theories
adolescents. They concluded that overall levels of moral disengagement and
aggressive behavior are often higher in boys than in girls, but that the relation-
ship between moral disengagement and bullying style behaviors was the same
for both genders. Generally speaking, the meta-analysis revealed that the higher
children and teens score on the MDS, the more abusively they behave.
Other studies have explored how bullying can be carried out not just by indi-
viduals but, more typically, by groups of friends. This is known as collective moral
disengagement, where classmates or teammates influence each other in a puzzling
way; somehow the group moral disengagement is greater than all the individuals’
perspectives added together. For instance, Gini, Pozzoli, and Bussey (2015) studied
49 Italian public school 6th to 10th grade classes located in both urban and subur-
ban areas. The total sample of individual middle- and high-school students was 918.
Students completed individual measures of their own aggressive behavior, defending
and passive bystanding behavior, as well as the MDS. In addition, the authors
assessed collective moral disengagement by asking the children to rate 17 items
using the framing “In your classroom, how many kids think that....” Some items
included “it is alright to beat someone up who bad mouths your family”; “kids who
get mistreated usually do things that deserve it” (Gini, Pozzoli, & Bussey, 2014).
The results of this study showed that both individual and student-perceived
collective moral disengagement were uniquely predictive of aggressive behavior
toward peers. They found that bullying is more likely when students are both
individually liable to use disengaged justifications of their treatment of victims
(e.g., the victim “deserved” or somehow brought on their own suffering) and also
believe that others in their classroom commonly engage in these same justifica-
tions. Furthermore, and fascinatingly, only weak associations were found between
individual moral disengagement and defending or passive bystander behaviors.
Instead, a significant positive relationship was found between collective moral
disengagement and defending on the part of bystanders. Individual students were
more likely to defend victims of aggressive bullying if they perceived that their
classmates tended to morally disengage. Gini et al. (2015) suggest that young
people who step up to defend victims against bullies are able to resist the collective
pressure to be passive and accept or even justify the bullying behavior. Somehow
defenders feel more personal responsibility for standing up or calling out the bad
behavior because others are not. Finally, classroom level collective moral disen-
gagement predicted greater bullying and passive bystanding, whereas victim-
defending was more frequent in classrooms with lower shared moral disengagement.
Unfortunately, active intervention on the part of peers to protect or defend
victims of bullying is quite rare, but still other work from Bandura’s perspec-
tive has revealed that not all bystanders are created equal. Thornberg and
Jungert (2013), for example, studied over 300 teenagers in Sweden and found
that students’ levels of moral disengagement predicted how they responded to
witnessing bullying. Those who scored particularly high on moral disengage-
ment went beyond passive bystanding and actually were more likely to applaud
or encourage bullies. In contrast, young people who viewed the treatment of
victims as reprehensible were more likely to come to their aid. This was espe-
cially true among bystanders who had high feelings of self-efficacy regarding
their capacity to act as a mediator and to quiet bullies’ rage.