To date, we have completed a series of studies investigating cyberbullying and bystander interventions. The goal of this research is to investigate bystander interventions online, and the ways in which interventions can be encouraged in cyberbullying situations.
One study, led by former SML post-doc Dominc DiFranzo, explored the effects of design on bystander intervention using a total social media simulation (Truman). Depending on the experimental condition, participants were given varying information regarding audience size and viewing notifications, intended to increase the sense of personal responsibility in bystanders. Results from this study indicate that design changes that increased the participants’ feelings of accountability prompted them to accept personal responsibility in instances of cyberbullying.
Another study, led by recent PhD Sam Taylor, examined the role of empathy and accountability in bystander intervention. In this study, design interventions were developed that aimed to increase accountability and empathy among bystanders. The results indicate that both accountability and empathy predicted bystander intervention, but the types of bystander actions promoted by each mechanism differed.
A different study, led by former PhD student Franccesca Kazerooni, investigated how different forms of cyberbullying repetition influenced the appraisal of instances of cyberbullying, and the bystanders’ willingness to intervene. This study found that increasing the number of aggressors on Twitter does increase the likelihood of each stage of the bystander intervention model, but only under certain conditions.
Taylor, S., DiFranzo, D., Choi, Y. H., Sannon, S., and Bazarova, N. (2019). Accountability and Empathy by Design: Encouraging Bystander Intervention to Cyberbullying on Social Media. Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction Journal (PACM CHI Journal), 3, 1-26.
DiFranzo, D., Taylor, S. H., Kazerooni, F., Wherry, O. D., & Bazarova, N. N. (2018). Upstanding by Design: Bystander intervention in cyberbullying. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’18).
Kazerooni, F., Taylor, S. H., Bazarova, N. N., & Whitlock, J. L. (2018). Cyberbullying bystander intervention: The number of offenders and retweeting predict likelihood of helping a cyberbullying victim. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 23(3), 146-162.