“To understand why some young people end up attacking their peers, both physically and online, it’s not enough to study aggressive behavior on its own. We also need to understand if there are underlying emotional and cognitive factors driving these behaviors.”
So said Antonio Cabrera Vázquez, co-author of a study — which was published in the journal Psychology of Violence — that looked into bullying/cyberbullying, and whether current discourses on this needs to go deeper.
To this end, the study used a survey involving nearly 2,000 elementary and secondary school students from 27 schools in Córdoba. It examined emotional variables, such as schadenfreude, a moral emotion associated with satisfaction at the suffering of others; cognitive variables, such as moral disengagement, understood as strategies that allow one to justify harm caused to others; and behavioral variables, represented by aggression in bullying and cyberbullying.
This integrative approach is aligned with the latest research, which addresses bullying from a more comprehensive perspective by considering the interplay of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral factors. “We wanted to see whether the combination of different levels of bullying, cyberbullying, and schadenfreude led to different student profiles, and if the moral disengagement strategies assessed a year earlier could predict belonging to those profiles,” said Vázquez.
The research team — which also included Daniel Falla and Eva Romera from the University of Córdoba and Robert Thornberg from Linköping University — identified three distinct student profiles, two of which exhibited low levels of bullying and cyberbullying, while the third displayed more concerning characteristics, reflecting a more hostile and malicious affective pattern associated with greater involvement in aggressive behaviors. This profile was specifically characterized by a combination of high levels of bullying and cyberbullying, with a greater tendency to experience schadenfreude at the suffering of others, especially when that emotion was associated with feelings of rejection, dislike, or aversion toward the victim.
Furthermore, considering how students justify these aggressive behaviors, the study examined whether various moral disengagement strategies assessed a year earlier could predict subsequent classification into these profiles.
The results showed that blaming the victim was the only strategy that significantly predicted belonging to the profile characterized by high levels of schadenfreude, bullying, and cyberbullying.
Specifically, students who were more inclined to dehumanize victims and hold them responsible for what happened to them were nearly four times more likely to fall into this highly concerning profile a year later.
Thus, dehumanization emerges as a relevant factor in understanding the development of profiles where schadenfreude and aggressive behaviors converge. “If we curb the tendency to blame victims for what happens to them, or to think they deserve the harm they suffer, we may reduce the likelihood of students falling into higher-risk profiles,” concluded Vázquez.
