Morality in context: do adolescents’ prosocial bystander judgments and responses vary depending on reality and group membership contexts?

Abstract

Various social-cognitive and contextual correlates of bystander judgments and responses were studied in bullying literature. However, our knowledge is still limited in understanding how the interaction between reality context and group membership might shape bystander judgments, responses, and likelihood of future helping behavior in bullying contexts. This study focused on this gap by employing a between-subject design in which group membership and reality context varied depending on the context condition. In the ingroup conditions, participants read a repetitive bullying scenario in which an ingroup member was excluded and teased by ingroup peers for being perceived as boring either in a real-life or VR environment. In outgroup conditions, participants read the same scenario for an outgroup member who was excluded and teased by ingroup peers for being a foreigner either in a real-life or VR environment. In the end, adolescents showed more prosocial bystander judgments, responses, and likelihood of future helping behavior in VR contexts compared to real-life contexts. Moreover, results documented that group membership processes might be perceived differently in VR and real-life contexts. More specifically, adolescents showed more prosocial bystander judgments, responses, and likelihood of future helping behavior towards outgroup members over ingroup members in VR contexts. Adolescents also demonstrated more prosocial bystander judgments and responses when they observed the repetitiveness of bullying. Socio-cognitive factors (ToM, empathy, rejection sensitivity) and contextual factors (dehumanization) were important predictors of the relationship between bystander responses to bullying. Overall, our findings provide implications for the importance of understanding the interaction between group membership and reality contexts by adopting more technology-based methodologies.