Blaming the Victim: The Effects of Extraversion and Information Disclosure on Guilt Attributions in Cyberbullying

Abstract

Cyberbullying victims' success in coping with bullying largely depends on schoolmates and other bystanders' social support. However, factors influencing the degree of social support have as yet not been investigated. In this article, the concept of victim blaming is applied to cyberbullying incidents. It is assumed that a cyberbullying victim receives less social support when the victim's behavior is perceived as very overt. It is further assumed that this effect's underlying process is the partial attribution of responsibility for the incident to the victim and not to the bully. The hypotheses are tested with a 2×2 online experiment. In this experiment, varying online self-presentations of a fictitious female cyberbullying victim were presented to 586 Germans aged 16–22. The victim's public Facebook profile was manipulated in terms of the victim's extraversion and the amount of personal information disclosed. The results support the hypotheses. Participants attributed more responsibility for the bullying incident to the victim when the victim was presented as extraverted and very open in revealing personal information. This diminished social support for the victim. The effect was partially mediated by the victim's perceived attractiveness. The study implies that concepts from victimization research can enhance our understanding of cyberbullying incidents. Among other factors, the victim's specific personal characteristics deserve more consideration—not only with regard to the incident itself but also regarding subsequent social dynamics and coping mechanisms.

Introduction

Bullying is commonly defined as repeated hostile or aggressive acts that intend to “inflict harm or discomfort on others.”^1–3 Such acts are likely to cause significant psychosocial and behavioral consequences for the victims.^4–6 For example, many bullying victims experience anxiety and depression or a long-lasting reduction of self-esteem.⁷ Furthermore, bullying experiences have been linked to an increase in medicine use (e.g., against sleeplessness) and suicidal thoughts.^6,8,9

In recent years, bullying incidents have increasingly appeared online. Internationally, the proportion of children and adolescents who experience some form of online victimization ranges from 9 to 40 percent.^1,10 When perpetrators use electronic media to harass their victims, these acts are labeled as cyberbullying.^{1,2,5,11–13} Cyberbullying is usually conceptualized as an extension of traditional bullying (for a critique, see Law et al.¹²). As such, it involves repetition of aggressive acts, involvement of psychological torment, and the perpetrator's intention.^1,11,13 Some authors include a perceived or actual power asymmetry between perpetrator and victim as a fourth necessary condition.⁴ Contrary to traditional bullying, cyberbullying does neither require spatial nor temporal proximity between the persons involved.⁴ Additional characteristics of online communication spaces, such as their relative anonymity or their public or semi-public nature, may amplify the reach of cyberbullying.^14,15

In the case of a cyberbullying incident, social support strategies (e.g., telling friends or parents about the incident) have empirically been found to be particularly important when victims try to evaluate the effects and cope with them.^13,16–18 In particular, support provided by friends and the general peer group plays a crucial role when cyberbullying occurs.^1,19 In contrast, a lack of support can pose an additional threat to the victim as it may result in social exclusion, which further intensifies the victim's suffering. However, little is known about the conditions under which friends and peers are willing to provide social support. Much of the research on cyberbullying, even though it is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, is rather descriptive and lacks theoretical arguments.^5,10,16 Necessary conditions for social support are that friends and peers do not underestimate the impact of cyberbullying and that they do not shift the blame for the cyberbullying incident in part onto the victim.¹⁹ Thus, in this text, the psychological approach of victim blaming is used as a theoretical framework for an examination of the circumstances under which bystanders tend to support a cyberbullying victim.

Victim Blaming

Victim blaming is one prominent form of lack of social support. It describes the attribution of (a share of) responsibility for a violent offense to the victim. It may be interpreted in terms of attributional theory as an attribution error. Therefore, the victim's personality is perceived as the incident's cause rather than circumstantial factors.^20–22

Several proposed theories seek to explain this phenomenon. Among these, the most prominent are the Just World Theory^23,24 and the Defensive Attribution Hypothesis.^25–27 The former states that individuals hold beliefs about the world being a just place. People usually get what they deserve. It seems inappropriate that something unwanted or negative happens to an innocent person.²⁸ “If others can suffer unjustly, then the individual must admit to the unsettling prospect that he too could suffer unjustly.”²³ The belief in a just world is central for individuals to cope with their lives. If negative things can happen to someone through no fault of their own, individuals are not in control of their well-being. Blaming victims for their suffering can help reducing dissonance and maintaining that view of a just world.^23,28 The extensive body of research on the Just World Theory in connection with victim blaming focused on situations where the respondents were not personally affected by the incident.²⁹ These situations are comparable to the current case of bystanders in cyberbullying. The research, however, centered on physically more severe victimizations, for example, poverty in developing countries, diseases like AIDS, or rape cases.²⁹

The Defensive Attribution Hypothesis assumes that victim blaming is increased for observers who may encounter the same situation in the future. By attributing blame to the victim, they maintain the illusion that the reasons for the incident are dispositional. Therefore, they can prevent a similar misfortune from happening to themselves because they are different from the victim. Thus, similar to the Just World Theory, defensive attribution is based on self-protective needs.²⁵

Victim blaming research has mainly focused on rape cases. The main interest of previous research has been to identify factors that decrease or increase the probability and intensity of victim blaming.^20,22,30,31 Regarding the victim's characteristics, victim blaming is particularly common when the victim's behavior is perceived as provocative, for example, in terms of clothing style, openness, outgoingness, and sociability.^22,32,33 These factors are associated with an extraverted personality.^34,35

Based on the importance of peer-group social support, the findings of victim blaming in rape cases were applied to cyberbullying. As there is no empirical research on this topic so far, our hypotheses are based on general behavioral patterns that can indicate an overt behavioral style in an online environment and that observers might misinterpret as provocative. Our study focuses on two factors, namely, the quality and the quantity of information that a cyberbullying victim discloses online. In terms of quality, this refers to information that can be interpreted as more or less extraverted, that is outgoing, sociable, etc.³⁵ Based on the results from sexual assault cases, hypothesis 1 states:

H1: The more a cyberbullying victim appears to be extraverted, the more likely bystanders are to attribute responsibility for the victimization to the victim.

Based on the literature on self-disclosure and privacy issues, it may be further assumed that the quantity of information disclosed can be interpreted as provocative and overly open behavior. A high degree of self-disclosure is associated with several risks; for example, unwanted contact and cyberbullying can result from too much self-disclosure.^36–38 Thus, hypothesis 2 states:

H2: The more personal information a victim discloses (to strangers) online, the more likely it is that bystanders will attribute responsibility for the victimization to the victim.

It has been shown that personality traits cannot be strictly separated from other aspects of a person's general appearance. More specifically, someone who is perceived as being extraverted is generally perceived as being attractive as well—at least compared to a physically similar but introverted counterpart.³⁹ This finding is important for the hypotheses because it has also been shown that attractive victims of sexual offenses are less likely to be attributed responsibility for the victimization than less attractive victims.⁴⁰ Thus, a third hypothesis is added with reference to the interrelation of extraversion, attractiveness, and victim blaming:

H3: The relationship between extraversion and attribution of responsibility for victimization is partially mediated by the victim's perceived attractiveness. An extraverted victim is perceived as more attractive. This attractiveness contributes to less attribution of responsibility for victimization.

All hypotheses will be tested as part of a structural equation model (Fig. 1).

FIG. 1.

Hypothesized model.

Methods

Sample and procedure

A 2×2 online experiment was conducted, with extraversion (high vs. low) and degree of personal information disclosed (high vs. low) as independent variables. During December 2011 and January 2012, 1,825 young Germans aged 16–22 were invited via e-mail and social network sites to participate in a survey. The present study fully complied with German legal standards and ethics guidelines for empirical social research with adolescents.† The survey topic was introduced as “conflicts at the school.” The following analysis is based on 586 completed questionnaires. Participation rates did not differ significantly between treatment conditions. Hence, the percentage of participants who started answering the questionnaire but who did not complete the survey after all was about the same in the four experimental conditions. A selective dropout, as indicated by different participation rates in different groups, can be ruled out. Of the participants, 65% were women. The average age was 19.8 years. A vast majority (93%) visited a Gymnasium (similar to high school) at the time of the survey or had visited a Gymnasium before graduation.

Scenario and treatment

Participants were given a scenario describing a fictive cyberbullying incident as follows: A 17-year-old girl (“Sophia”) is part of her school's yearbook committee. The students regularly fight over the design and content of the yearbook. After a particularly heated debate, Sophia decides to quit the committee. Following her withdrawal, several e-mails circulated among Sophia's classmates. Each e-mail contains offensive comments and an intimate photograph of Sophia, which a classmate took secretly in the school bathroom.

After having read the scenario, participants were shown one out of four versions of Sophia's alleged public Facebook profile. One version revealed only a little personal information about Sophia (her name, gender, and number of friends) as well as a profile picture, showing Sophia's portrait and a club or discotheque in the background (condition: high degree of extraversion/low degree of personal information revealed). A second version of the profile included the same information as the first one, only the profile picture depicted Sophia with books and papers (condition: low degree of extraversion/low degree of personal information revealed). The third version was identical to the first one, only that Sophia openly revealed her interest in partying and popular films and music (condition: high degree of extraversion/high degree of personal information disclosed). Likewise, the fourth version was identical to the second one, only that Sophia revealed in detail her interest for cultural activities as well as for films and music that are not part of the cultural mainstream, for example, classical music (condition: low degree of extraversion/high degree of personal information disclosed).

Measures

Victim blaming

Two types of measures were established to ascertain the degree of responsibility for the victimization that respondents attributed to the victim. Four items were used to measure respondents' tendency to directly blame Sophia for the incident. The respondents were asked to indicate their agreement on a five-point scale that Sophia “had it coming,” “had provoked the incident,” “has herself to blame,” or “could have prevented the incident.” The items were intended to constitute the factor of “direct victim blaming” and are based on the Just World Theory.^23,24 Likewise, two indicators were established to measure victim blaming based on the participants' overall judgment of the incident. The first one asked for the incident's severity (five-point scale: 1 “not severe at all” to 5 “very severe”). The second one asked to indicate the severity of a just punishment for the person who had sent the e-mails (five-point scale: 1 “no punishment at all” to 5 “very hard punishment”). Inversely scaled, these two items were intended to constitute the factor of “indirect victim blaming.” Finally, victim blaming was measured directly by asking the respondents who they blame for the incident. Respondents indicated their answer on a five-point scale from 1 “only Sophia is to blame” to 5 “only the person who sent the e-mails is to blame.” This indicator was mainly used to estimate the validity of the two aforementioned factors as victim blaming measures. Indeed, the direct measure could be well explained through both factors (R²=0.29; direct victim blaming: β=0.44, p<0.001; indirect victim blaming: β=0.20, p=0.004). The factors were successfully established through confirmatory factor analysis as part of the hypothesized model (cf. Results section).

Perception of the victim's attractiveness

The participants were asked to rate Sophia's attractiveness on a five-point scale from 1 “Sophia is attractive” to 5 “Sophia is unattractive.”

Sociodemographics

Respondents were asked to indicate their gender, age, and the school type¹ they visited or graduated from.

Results

A structural equation model was calculated using AMOS 19.0. The single model included the confirmatory factor analyses (factors: “direct victim blaming” and “indirect victim blaming”), the two independent variables (“personal information revealed” and “extraversion”), and the hypothesized paths between them (Fig. 2). The model fit the data well: χ²=37.637 (29, n=586), p=0.131, comparative fit index (CFI)=0.99, root-mean-squared error of approximation (RMSEA)=0.02, standardized root mean of the residual (SRMR)=0.03.⁴¹ The independent variables significantly contributed to explaining the degree of victim blaming. Six percent of the factor “direct victim blaming” and five percent of the factor “indirect victim blaming” were related to Sophia's presentation as an extravert or her disclosure of a large amount of personal information. However, H1 was only partially supported. Extraversion significantly increased respondents' tendency to perceive the cyberbullying incident as harmless and to demand only a mild punishment (“indirect victim blaming”: β=0.11, p=0.047). In contrast, the victim's extraversion did not significantly increase the respondents' tendency to directly accuse Sophia of being (partially) responsible for the incident (“direct victim blaming”). H2 was supported regarding both measures of victim blaming. Participants who were shown a high degree of publicly available information about Sophia were significantly more likely to find her (partially) responsible for her own victimization (“direct victim blaming”: β=0.10, p=0.040; “indirect victim blaming”: β=0.10, p=0.054).

FIG. 2.

Observed model. Maximum likelihood estimation, X²=37.637 (29, n=586), p=0.131, comparative fit index=0.99, root-mean-squared error of approximation=0.02, standardized root mean of theresidual=0.03. Completely standardized estimates reported. *p<0.05, **p<0.01; solid arrows indicate hypothesized paths that were confirmed by the observed model. Broken arrows indicate hypothesized paths that have not been confirmed.

Finally, the mediation hypothesis H3 was also supported. The extraverted Sophia was perceived as significantly more attractive compared to her introverted counterpart (R²=0.05, β=0.22, p<0.001). Perceived attractiveness significantly diminished the probability that participants would attribute responsibility for the bullying incident to Sophia (“direct victim blaming”: β=0.23, p<0.001; “indirect victim blaming”: β=0.18, p=0.001).

Both H1 (extraversion has a direct positive effect on victim blaming) and H3 (extraversion has an indirect negative effect on victim blaming) were at least partially confirmed. Thus, extraversion simultaneously induces two distinct and counteracting influences on victim blaming. This might imply that, regarding the overall effect of extraversion, the two influences neutralize each other. If this is the case, no effect of extraversion on victim blaming should be detectable once the mediating path through the victim's perceived attractiveness is ignored. The results confirmed this assumption. When the same model was recalculated without the mediating path, the model still fits the data well (χ²=32.821 (23, p=0.08); CFI=0.98; RMSEA=0.03; SRMR=0.03). However, the paths between extraversion and both measures of victim blaming no longer differ significantly from zero (“direct victim blaming”: β=0.01, p=0.862; “indirect victim blaming”: β=0.07, p=0.198).

Discussion

Victim blaming processes are effective in cyberbullying incidents. A victim's characteristics can decrease or increase the probability and intensity of victim blaming in cyberbullying. Victim blaming in turn influences the degree of social support that the victim is likely to receive. This study's results indicate that the (online) appearance of cyberbullying victims can increase or diminish the amount of responsibility that bystanders attribute to them. Both an extraverted self-presentation and a large amount of publicly disclosed information lead to more direct and indirect victim blaming. However, the effect is partially suppressed by the victim's attractiveness. Bystanders perceive extraverted victims as more attractive, and bystanders give more social support to attractive victims.

Thus, the basic assumptions of the Just World Theory can be applied not only to serious victimizations such as rape cases or accidents, but also to less severe victimizations such as cyberbullying (at least in a physical sense). Some bystanders show a tendency to reinterpret the victimization by shifting some of the blame onto the victim. This behavior may very well be explained as a means of protecting just world beliefs. However, the present study also corroborates the conditional character of victim blaming processes: Bystanders' tendency to blame the victim is more pronounced when the victim's characteristics facilitate the attribution process. In the specific case of this study, the extraverted personality and the information disclosure behavior of the victim serve bystanders as rationalization for victim blaming. Hence, bystanders infer potentially provocative behavior from the victim's general extraversion. For future studies, it might be helpful to include standard measures of participants' general beliefs in a just world. Such a measure could help applying the assumptions of the Just World Theory to victim blaming processes in cyberbullying more comprehensively.

A first limitation of the present study is that the alleged victim is unknown to the observers. In actual cyberbullying incidents, at least most bystanders are acquainted with the victim. The most important implication for this study is that observers have more cues with which to evaluate the victim's personality and behavior (e.g., from personal contact). A victim's online self-presentation—on which this study focused—may be only one out of many cues on which bystanders judge the victim in terms of victim blaming. Current research, however, indicates that a person's self-presentation on social network sites such as Facebook reflects the profile owner's personality quite well.⁴² Thus, it may be assumed that offline and online cues are rather similar and lead to comparable consequences.

A second limitation of the present study is that it cannot assess the impact of the victim's gender on victim blaming processes. Due to gender stereotypes, a female victim might be perceived as more innocent than a male victim.⁴³ Thus, bystanders might generally shift a greater amount of blame on male victims than on female victims. As both males and females seem to be equally represented among victims of cyberbullying,¹ addressing the gender issue for victim blaming in cyberbullying is an important task for future studies.

A third limitation is that the age range of the sample (16–22 years) excludes younger persons. They are, however, a relevant group when studying cyberbullying since these incidents predominantly take place in school environments. Additionally, the sample is biased toward participants with higher education‡ (93% college-preparatory high school). Although these two factors do not influence internal validity, future research should include a broader age range as well as different educational levels to increase external validity.

A fourth limitation is that the results may be afflicted with case category confounding due to the study's design. Replicating the results with other cases is necessary to ensure external validity. Finally, a fifth limitation is that the measured effects may be short-term priming effects. Their strength and stability under realistic circumstances must be validated by non-experimental research on actual cyberbullying incidents.

Despite these limitations, this study contributes to the understanding of factors that decrease or increase the degree of attribution of responsibility in cyberbullying incidents. The results provide a starting point for developing better intervention strategies at schools as well as enabling adolescents to adapt their (online) behavior accordingly in order to protect themselves from this additional threat. Adolescents in general and victims of cyberbullying in particular should carefully ponder which information they disclose online. Certainly, other factors are likely to play a significant role in the victim blaming process. Nonetheless, since social network sites are used to get an impression of other people, reckless privacy behavior and potentially provocative self-presentations can worsen cyberbullying consequences.

Further research in this field should include additional variables potentially correlated with victim blaming (e.g., other victim characteristics and characteristics of the bully and bystanders). The present study should encourage future studies to adapt concepts from other research fields to cyberbullying. An interdisciplinary approach may contribute to developing cyberbullying as a field of study transcending mere descriptive and atheoretical approaches.

Footnotes

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

†

As a substitute for an institutional approval (which is not required in Germany for studies with participants above the age of 15), our research design underwent an institutional peer review and was approved regarding soundness of method and compliance with ethical standards.

‡

In Germany there are different types of high schools: Gymnasium (comparable to college-preparatory high schools); Gesamtschule (comparable to high schools); Hauptschule/Realschule (comparable to middle schools); Berufsschule (comparable to vocational schools).

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