Introduction

Cyberbullying is a sub-component of aggression that occurs repeatedly with the intent to harm another by a more powerful person using electronic means (Kowalski & Limber, 2013). It is prevalent among youth, particularly in late adolescence and affects their social relations, school achievement, and psychological adjustment (Kim et al., 2017; Samara et al., 2021). Although there are increasing numbers of school-based intervention programs that address cyberbullying, most show only modest benefits (e.g., Cross et al., 2016; Tanrikulu, 2018). One way to increase the effectiveness of such programs is to elucidate the psychological and social processes associated with cyberbullying in order to target those processes in interventions to achieve higher and more lasting reductions in cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying and Moral Disengagement

One psychological process that has been consistently associated with higher levels of cyberbullying is moral disengagement (Bussey et al., 2015; Killer et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2017; Wang & Ngai, 2020). It is a self-regulatory process that is part of the broader Social Cognitive Theory that enables the perpetration of bullying without feeling remorse for engaging in such negatively sanctioned behavior (Bandura, 2002, 2016). Moral disengagement strategies involve reconstruing the bullying behavior, obscuring personal causal agency, misrepresenting or disregarding the injurious consequences of bullying, and vilifying the bullying recipients by blaming and devaluing them. When activated, moral disengagement overrides moral standards by allowing the conduct of behavior contrary to one’s moral standards without feeling any remorse for not adhering to those moral standards.

The association between higher levels of moral disengagement and higher levels of bullying has been well established for offline bullying and for online cyberbullying (Bussey et al., 2015; Gini et al., 2014; Killer et al., 2019; Lo Cricchio et al., 2021). This linkage between moral disengagement and bullying has also been found in studies using diverse methodologies including meta-analyses (Gini et al., 2014; Killer et al., 2019), systematic reviews (Lo Cricchio et al., 2021), cross-sectional (Bussey et al., 2015) and longitudinal surveys (Gini et al., 2022; Thornberg, 2023; Wang et al., 2017), and experimental designs (Bandura et al., 1975; Luo & Bussey, 2019). Importantly, moral disengagement is not automatically activated in all situations. Rather, its activation is selective depending on situational and personal factors (Luo & Bussey, 2019, 2023). Therefore, it is important to understand those factors that deter and those that promote its activation in cyberbullying episodes. One possible attenuating factor is mindfulness.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is conceptualized as moment-to-moment awareness or paying attention to the present moment (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). It is expected to promote the experience of present moments non-evaluatively and non-defensively (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). An increasing number of studies have established an association between mindfulness and lower levels of aggressive behavior (e.g., Borders et al., 2010; Heppner et al., 2008) and bullying (Abid et al., 2017; Georgiou et al., 2020) using surveys and experimental studies. These associations have been further supported by studies showing that mindfulness training reduces aggressive behavior (Faraji et al., 2019; Fix & Fix, 2013; Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015; Singh et al., 2013).

Most research investigating associations between mindfulness and bullying has been conducted offline (e.g., Borders et al., 2010; Georgiou et al., 2020; Heppner et al., 2008). Increasingly, however, due to the increasing focus on cyberbullying, largely driven by the uptake in social media use by youth (Kowalski et al., 2019), researchers are investigating the relationship between mindfulness and cyberbullying (e.g., Abid et al., 2017; Royuela-Colomer et al., 2018; Yuan & Liu, 2021). Further extending this line of research, Paciello et al. (2023) have shown the mediational role of moral disengagement between impulsivity and cyberbullying with this association mitigated by adolescents’ self-regulatory capabilities to resist peer pressure. It is possible that mindfulness may delay the tendency to impulsively respond aggressively to provocation thereby enabling greater self-reflection about adhering to moral standards rather than defensively justifying their dismissal through using moral disengagement processes.

Mindfulness, therefore, is expected to function in the opposite direction to moral disengagement in its relationship with cyberbullying perpetration. That is, mindfulness is expected to reduce cyberbullying perpetration, whereas moral disengagement is expected to heighten it. Mindfulness allows individuals to think about the present in thoughtful ways thereby enabling them to think more deeply about adhering to moral standards rather than invoking self-serving justifications for behavior that is counter to their moral standards. This non-defensive mindful approach to thinking about cyberbullying perpetration may attenuate the use of moral disengagement strategies and hence dampen the association between cyberbullying and moral disengagement for those who are more mindful. That is, mindfulness may moderate the link between moral disengagement and cyberbullying.

The aim of this study therefore was to investigate, using a questionnaire study with adolescents, the potential of mindfulness to moderate the association between moral disengagement and cyberbullying. It was expected that the association between cyberbullying and moral disengagement would be weaker at higher than at lower levels of mindfulness.

Three covariates were also included in the analyses. The first involved gender. Previous research has established higher levels of moral disengagement among males than females (Bussey, 2020), and there is mixed evidence relating to gender differences in cyberbullying and in mindfulness (Lo, 2021; Navarro, 2016; Tasneem & Panwar, 2019). In view of these findings and that gender was not a major variable of interest in this study, it was covaried in all analyses. Age was also included as a covariate as age trends have been reported for cyberbullying with it increasing over the adolescence years before declining in late adolescence (Wang et al., 2017). In addition, victimization was a further covariate due to the correlation between perpetration and victimization in cyberbullying studies (Kowalski et al., 2014). Taking account of these considerations, the following hypotheses were proposed:

  1. 1.

    Moral disengagement will be positively associated with cyberbullying.

  2. 2.

    Mindfulness will be negatively associated with cyberbullying.

  3. 3.

    Mindfulness will moderate the relationship between moral disengagement and cyberbullying. Specifically, the association between moral disengagement and cyberbullying will be weaker at higher than at lower levels of mindfulness.

Method

Participants

A total of 586 students (239 girls and 347 boys, Mage = 13.24, SD = 1.34) from five independent (non-government fee paying) schools in a large Australian city participated in the study. The number of participants from each school was as follows: School 1 (n = 94; 16.0%), School 2 (n = 90; 15.4%), School 3 (n = 227; 38.7%), School 4 (n = 58; 9.9.0%), and School 5 (n = 116; 19.8%). In Australia, 34.4% of Australian students attend independent schools according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2020). A list of independent schools in the broad metropolitan area was compiled, and a random selection of schools was contacted by the research team for their participation. Once the principal’s agreement for the school’s participation was obtained, consent letters were sent to parents to obtain permission for their child’s participation. Verbal assent was also obtained from each student participant.

Approximately half (55.3%) of participants were of Anglo/Celtic descent, followed by European (13.5%), East or South East Asian (7.5%), and Middle Eastern (2.4%), with the remainder from other ethnic groups.

Measures

Cyberbullying Roles

Cyber perpetration and cyber victimization were assessed using the Revised Cyberbullying Questionnaire (CBQ-R; Gamez-Guadix et al., 2014). Participants were asked about their frequency of involvement in cyberbullying over the last school term. The perpetration measure included 14 items (e.g., “I deliberately excluded someone from an online group”), and victimization was measured with nine items (e.g., “Other people have hacked my email or social networks to send messages that could be troublesome for me”). Items were scored on a 6-point scale (1 = it hasn’t happened at all to 6 = many times a week), and total scores for each measure were calculated using a summation of ratings on their respective items. In Gamez-Guadix et al. (2014), Cronbach’s alpha for perpetration and victimization was .90 and .79, respectively. In the present study, Cronbach’s alpha for the perpetration measure was .80 and .79 for victimization.

Moral Disengagement

Moral disengagement was measured with the Cyber Bullying Moral Disengagement Scale used by Allison and Bussey (2017) which was adapted from the Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement Scale (Bandura et al., 1996) to reflect the cyber context. The scale consisted of 16 items, with two items representing each of the eight moral disengagement mechanisms. Students were asked to show how much they agreed with each statement (e.g., “posting a mean message about a cyberbully is just to teach them a lesson”) by rating their response on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Total scores were obtained by summating individual items, with higher scores indicating greater individual moral disengagement. Luo and Bussey (2019) reported Cronbach’s alpha as .91. In this study, Cronbach’s alpha was .91.

Mindfulness

The Child Acceptance and Mindfulness Measure (CAMM; Greco et al., 2011) is a 10-item scale assessing one’s contact with the present moment and acceptances of thoughts and feelings ( e.g., “I stop myself from having feelings that I don’t like”). Items were rated on a 5-point scale (1 = never true to 5 = always true) and were reverse coded prior to analysis. In Greco et al. (2011), Cronbach’s alpha was .81. In this study, the alpha was .87.

Procedure

Ethics approval was granted by the authors’ Human Research Ethics Committee. Informed consent from school principals and parents was sought prior to survey commencement. Questionnaires were administered online using the Qualtrics platform during the school year under the supervision of a teacher or researcher. To ensure confidentiality during questionnaire administration, children were seated at a distance from each other and asked not to talk during the session. For those students who did not participate in the study, the teacher arranged an alternate activity. Participants were provided with an information and consent form, and students were required to provide their active informed assent before accessing the measures. After entering basic demographic data, participants received the measures in a randomized format.

Data Management

Missing data (0 to 1.7% between items) were imputed using the expectation-maximization procedure in SPSS as it is deemed as an effective method when imputing data that are not completely missing at random within a linear model (Schafer & Graham, 2002). Variables of perpetration, victimization, and moral disengagement were positively skewed. To account for skewness, variables were bootstrapped prior to analysis (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). Bootstrapping aided but did not entirely resolve issues with non-normality.

Results

Data Analytic Strategy

Descriptive statistics and bivariate Pearson correlations between all variables were first computed. Then, a hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to examine the impact of moral disengagement and mindfulness on cyberbullying perpetration, controlling for age, gender, and previous experience of cyber victimization as these variables were significantly related in the correlations but were not the main focus of this study. Finally, significant interactions were probed at one standard deviation around the mean using the PROCESS macro in SPSS.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations

Descriptive statistics and bivariate Pearson correlations are shown in Table 1. Cyber perpetration was significantly associated with greater cyber victimization, and moral disengagement was positively linked with both perpetration and victimization. Mindfulness was negatively associated with perpetration, victimization, and moral disengagement. Age was positively associated with perpetration, and finally, gender was negatively associated with moral disengagement and mindfulness.

Table 1 Means, standard deviations, and bivariate Pearson’s correlations
Full size table

Hierarchical Regression

A four-step hierarchical regression was conducted to examine the moderating role of mindfulness on the relationship between moral disengagement and cyber perpetration. Variables were centered prior to analysis (Aiken & West, 1991). In Step 1, effects of age and gender on cyber perpetration were included as covariates. In Step 2, cyber victimization was added to the model as a covariate. In Step 3, main effects of moral disengagement and mindfulness were included. Finally, Step 4 included the interaction term between moral disengagement and mindfulness, representing the full model. Bootstrapped coefficients and 95% confidence intervals for the full model are displayed in Table 2.

Table 2 Hierarchical regression predicting to cyber perpetration
Full size table

The overall model predicting to cyberbullying perpetration was significant (F(6, 579) = 31.08, p < .0005). Main effects of age, victimization, moral disengagement, and the interaction between moral disengagement and mindfulness were significant predictors. The significant interaction was probed at one standard deviation above and below the mean. It was found that at low levels of mindfulness, there was a significant positive relationship between moral disengagement and cyber perpetration (B = .10, SE = .01, p < .0005, 95% CI [.07, .13]). In contrast, at high levels of mindfulness, the relationship between moral disengagement and perpetration was non-significant (p = .08). This relationship is depicted in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Moral disengagement × mindfulness predicting to cyber perpetration

Full size image

Discussion

The results from this study confirm the predicted association between moral disengagement and cyberbullying perpetration (Hypothesis 1). Higher levels of moral disengagement were associated with higher levels of cyberbullying perpetration. Also, this relationship was sustained in the regression analysis in the presence of the other study variables. The association between moral disengagement and bullying is well established for offline bullying (Barchia & Bussey, 2011; Gini et al., 2014; Killer et al., 2019), and these findings add to the growing literature establishing this link with cyberbullying perpetration (Bussey et al., 2015; Paciello et al., 2020; Runions & Bak, 2015; Wang et al., 2016). This study also partially confirmed the predicted association between mindfulness and cyberbullying perpetration (Hypothesis 2). Higher levels of mindfulness were associated with lower levels of cyberbullying perpetration in the correlation analysis thereby adding to the research showing a negative relationship between mindfulness and bullying perpetration in the cyber context (e.g., Abid et al., 2017; Royuela-Colomer et al., 2018; Yuan & Liu, 2021). This association, however, was not confirmed in the regression analysis when other variables were included. It may be that the moderate correlation between cyberbullying victimization and mindfulness suppressed the relationship between mindfulness and cyberbullying perpetration. This interpretation is supported by the regression analysis in which cyberbullying victimization was removed (see Supplementary Material A). In this analysis, mindfulness was associated negatively with cyberbullying perpetration. This points to the importance of examining mindfulness in the context of other study variables.

Further highlighting the importance of context, the predicted interaction between mindfulness and moral disengagement was confirmed (Hypothesis 3). It showed that the two-way interaction between mindfulness and moral disengagement was significant. This interaction revealed that the association between moral disengagement and cyberbullying perpetration was significant at low levels of mindfulness but not at high levels. That is, moral disengagement was not related to cyberbullying perpetration the more that students reported using mindfulness techniques. In contrast, at low levels of mindfulness, the relationship between moral disengagement and cyberbullying perpetration was evident. This finding is consistent with research showing that mindfulness inhibits spur of the moment and impulsive behaviors that are associated with the adoption of moral disengagement strategies that enable conduct with negative consequences for others without the perpetrator feeling any remorse (Georgiou et al., 2020; Weare, 2013). Mindfulness, with its focus on self-observation, provides an opportunity for individuals to reflect on their behavior and align it with their moral standards rather than acting in self-interested and impulsive antisocial ways that are justified through the activation of moral disengagement mechanisms.

The findings from this research show that it is not only imperative to reduce the use of moral disengagement in the context of cyberbullying but also to encourage the use of mindfulness to attenuate its use. Apart from research focusing on ways to attenuate the effects of cyberbullying on victims, it is essential to reduce the amount of cyberbullying that occurs in the first place. These findings point to the development of cyberbullying prevention programs involving mindfulness training in conjunction with cognitive behavioral techniques to reduce the use of moral disengagement processes. For example, the cognitive restructuring training program developed by Tolmatcheff et al. (2022) to reduce the use of moral disengagement mechanisms could be extended to include a mindfulness training module.

Strengths and Limitations

As with most studies, this one is not without its limitations. The study relied on self-report data with the potential of shared method variance. However, the use of an analytic technique focusing on moderation is less subject to such biases (Evans, 1985). Further, the cross-sectional design inhibited drawing causal inferences about the relationships between moral disengagement and mindfulness with cyberbullying perpetration. Although unlikely, it is possible that lower levels of cyberbullying perpetration increased mindfulness and decreased moral disengagement use. Future longitudinal studies need to examine this possibility. In addition, as in many studies on cyberbullying, gender and age effects were controlled to focus on the major issues under investigation. Further research designed to uncover specific potential gender and age patterns is warranted. Further research is also needed with a more diverse sample to include government school students to confirm the generalizability of these results.

The study has many strengths. It contributes to the sparse literature examining mindfulness in the context of cyberbullying. It paves the way for future cyberbullying interventions to include a mindfulness component in conjunction with cognitive reconstruction to reduce the activation of moral disengagement processes that enable cyberbullying. The study was theoretically based in Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986, 2023) which is one of the major theories in psychology and used pre-validated measures to assess mindfulness, moral disengagement, and cyberbullying with a large sample of adolescents. In this study, as in other cyberbullying studies, cyberbullying victimization was strongly associated with cyberbullying perpetration and was therefore controlled. This enabled an assessment of the unique associations of moral disengagement and mindfulness with cyberbullying perpetration.

Conclusion and Future Directions

This study adds to the growing literature on moral disengagement and factors that are associated with its activation (Bussey, 2023). As noted by Bandura (2002), moral disengagement is not automatically engaged but rather there are some situations in which it is more likely to be engaged. In this study, mindfulness provided an avenue for inhibiting its engagement. These findings have important implications for the development of cyberbullying intervention and prevention programs. The development of these programs may benefit from focusing on moral standards and the non-acceptability of bullying under any circumstances by using mindfulness techniques to help youth stay on message rather than invoking justifications that are inconsistent with their moral standards. Mindfulness techniques may assist young people to adhere to their moral standards even when there is the temptation to rationalize and excuse their antisocial cyberbullying behavior. This study supports calls for mindfulness training to be included as part of school-based anti-bullying programs (e.g., Foody & Samara, 2018). These techniques could become an integral part of anti-bullying interventions focusing on the immorality of cyberbullying and helping children to better manage bullying situations.