The study of moral disengagement has greatly informed research on aggression and bullying. There has been some debate on whether cyberbullies and other cyber-aggressors show more or less of a tendency for moral disengagement than traditional aggressors and bullies. However, according to the triadic model of reciprocal determinism, an individual's behavior influences and is influenced by both personal factors and his/her social environment. This article reviews the literature to propose a new conceptual framework addressing how features of the online context may enable specific mechanisms that facilitate moral disengagement. Specific affordances for moral disengagement proposed here include the paucity of social-emotional cues, the ease of disseminating communication via social networks, and the media attention on cyberbullying, which may elicit moral justification, euphemistic labeling, palliative comparison, diffusion and displacement of responsibility, minimizing and disregarding the consequences for others, dehumanization, and attribution of blame. These ideas suggest that by providing affordances for these mechanisms of moral disengagement, online settings may facilitate cyber-aggression and cyberbullying.

Aggression in online contexts has received much attention over the last decade, yet there is a need for measures identifying the proximal psychological drivers of cyber-aggressive behavior. The purpose of this study was to present data on the newly developed Cyber-Aggression Typology Questionnaire (CATQ) designed to distinguish between four distinct types of cyber-aggression on dimensions of motivational valence and self-control. A sample 314 undergraduate students participated in the study. The results confirmed the predicted four-factor structure providing evidence for distinct and independent impulsive-aversive, controlled-aversive, impulsive-appetitive, and controlled-appetitive cyber-aggression types. Further analyses with the Berlin Cyberbullying Questionnaire, Reactive Proactive Aggression Questionnaire, and the Behavior Inhibition and Activation Systems Scale provide support for convergent and divergent validity. Understanding the motivations facilitating cyber-aggressive behavior could aid researchers in the development of new prevention and intervention strategies that focus on individual differences in maladaptive proximal drivers of aggression. Aggr. Behav. 43:74-84, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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