Morally disengaged and unempathic: do cyberbullies fit these definitions? An exploratory study

In recent years, the phenomenon of cyberbullying has been gaining scholars’ growing interest under variousaspects, including its overlap with face-to-face bullying. Nevertheless, its relationships with cognitive andaffective empathy, proactive and reactive aggression, and moral disengagement, constructs that proved to becrucial in distinguishing aggressive subjects from their targets and nonaggressive peers in traditional bullying,still represent, to some extent, an unexplored domain. The main purpose of the present exploratory study was toinvestigate the associations between cyberbullying and the mentioned constructs among Italian adolescents. 819high-school students (mean age 16.08) were administered a battery of standardized tools, along with Cyberties, anew instrument created to assess the prevalence of (and the type of involvement in) different forms of electronicassaults. Analyses of variance were conducted to compare four roles (‘‘pure’’ bullies, ‘‘pure’’ victims, bullyvictims, and noninvolved subjects). Participants who identified themselves as cyberbullies or cyberbully victimsshowed significantly higher levels of overall moral disengagement and of both types of aggression. Cyberbulliesalso displayed a lack of affective empathy. Our findings are in line with the ones in extant literature aboutcorrelates of traditional and electronic forms of bullying. Implications for prevention strategies are discussed.