Negative Bystander Behavior

Trivialization refers to the event not being viewed as an emergency situation (Thornberg, 2007), and one of the students attributed his lack of helping behavior to this concept in his claim that the distressed student usually lays on the floor so this was not out of the ordinary for this bystander. In dissociation the bystander is aware that the event is an emergency or distress situation, but dissociates themselves from the individual in distress either because they had nothing to do with causing the distress, or because they do not view themselves as a friend to the individual in distress; this was found to be the case with two of the bystanders. Bystanders viewing the event as an emergency or distress situation, but not wanting to cause …show more content…
(2013), the likelihood of negative bystander behavior in online and face-to-face interactions, were asked to either share, pass, or put in a school hallway a derogatory message about a classmate from another peer or they could just delete or throw the material away. This portion of the study revealed that negative bystander behavior, sharing of the derogatory material, was more likely to occur in the online medium than in the face-to-face medium. This study also revealed that gender played no role in the decision making process, the medium was the main contributor to the exhibited behavior. In the second study, empathy in the context of cyberbullying, the pupil was sent a derogatory message regarding another peer strictly through the online medium and had the option to either forward or delete the message. There were 296 participants in this study, 189 male and 107 female, and half of them viewed a 2-minute video of cyberbullying to activate affective empathy. The results of this portion of the study showed those exposed to the video were significantly less likely to demonstrate negative bystander behaviors, but once again gender did not have a significant effect. In the third and final portion of the study, cognitive empathy on negative bystander behavior, the same video was viewed by all participants, but with different sets of instructions. The first group was told to identify with the cyberbullying situation in the video and focus on the victim’s emotions, and the second group was told to focus on the behavior. The results of this study show that both conditions significantly reduce negative bystander behaviors, and again gender played no role in this determination. The overall results of this study show that three factors are likely to increase negative bystander behavior: the online medium, the private nature of the act, and the experience of being a cyberbullying perpetrator. Two factors were