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.

We would like to thank the editor of Media Psychology Rick Busselle and the reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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We would like to thank the reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

In cultivation research, differentiation is made between first- and second-order cultivation questions. However, their definition and relation remain unclear. This paper proposes a differentiation that focuses on the type of judgment underlying the respective cultivation questions. The former are frequency and probability judgments, while the latter are evaluative and address attitudes or values. Current theory in the field of cultivation research argues that these types of judgments are tied to on-line (second-order) and memory-based (first-order) processing. Based on psychological literature and a study on the cultivation of crime-related perceptions representative for the German population, we demonstrate that second-order judgments can also be built memory-based. Furthermore, we argue that the interrelation of first- and second-order judgments depends on whether judgments are built on-line or memory-based (especially in the case of second-order judgments). This may account for divergent empirical evidence in the field.