Research On The Licensing Effect Of Bystander Helping Behavior In Cyberbullying

Previous studies have found that in cyberbullying,three behaviors of bystanders have different impacts on the development of bullying events.One is to promote bullying,which means that thumb up,forwarding and other behaviors will aggravate bullying incidents and increase the harm to the victims.One is the outside behavior,that is,only pay attention to,do not do any response,the attitude of indifference will make similar things happen more frequently;The other is protective behavior(helping others),that is,bystanders can help and protect the victims,which will reduce the harm of bullying to the victims and reduce the probability of bullying at the same time.Therefore,bystander behavior plays a very important role in the development of cyberbullying incidents,which has attracted the attention of scholars and the society.It is hoped that bystander can show more protective behaviors and increase the pro-social behaviors of Internet users.However,the original study suggested that individuals who had once performed moral ACTS tended to continue moral ACTS in order to maintain self-consistency.However,research on moral self-permission has found that individuals who engage in moral behavior are less likely to be prosocial later on.For this contradiction,the current research does not get a unified conclusion.So in cyberbullying,is it possible that the bystander’s helping behavior also has this kind of contradictory expression? Is it consistent? Based on this,this article will study whether there is consistency in bystander helping behavior from the perspective of cyberbullying,and try to explain the performance patterns of bystander helping behavior from the perspective of internal factors(moral identity)and external factors(recognition by others)Study 1 explores whether there is consistent behavior of bystander’s willingness to help in cyberbullying,and investigates whether the subjects reduce their willingness to help after confirming the bystander’s attitude to help.This study used a case study method to measure participants’ willingness to help victims of cyberbullying.The results showed that the individuals who activated the helping attitude showed lower willingness to help others in the subsequent helping tasks.The priming unhelpful individuals did not differ from thenon-priming group in the task.Study 2 further explores what kind of people are more likely to exhibit a licensing effect in helping bystanders with cyberbullying.In this study,the classic recall paradigm of permission effect was adopted to measure the participants’ willingness to help after activating their recall of moral behaviors.Found that symbol of moral identity and memory types exist interaction,the low level of moral identity symbol of individual’s positive memories,compared to neutral memories of individuals,in help others tasks showed lower ’willingness to help others,and showed no difference in high symbol of individuals,but high symbol of individuals’ willingness to help others is significantly higher than low symbol of individuals.Therefore,symbolic moral identity can adjust individuals’ willingness to help others.Research 3 makes further research and analysis on the results of study 2 and adds recognition to analyze the psychological mechanism of symbolic moral identification regulating the licensing effect.Using the gratitude paradigm,the study found that individuals with higher symbols exhibited lower willingness to help after recalling an event that had been approved by others,while those with lower symbols showed no such difference.Therefore,symbolic moral identity can regulate individuals’ willingness to help others.To sum up,in cyberbullying,bystander’s helping behavior also has a licensing effect.When a high level of moral identity symbols by individuals recall his done good,especially the good praise and recognition,get others before aware of their moral self image has been confirmed,in the act of after will allow yourself to reduce that willingness to help others,and low level of moral identity symbol of individuals simply by memories moral behavior will reduce the willingness to help others.