Imagined and extended contact experiences and adolescent bystanders' behavioral intentions in homophobic bullying episodes

Abstract

Bystanders' helping interventions in bias-based bullying are rare, although they have the potential to intervene on behalf of the victim and quickly stop the aggression. Two studies tested, experimentally, the impact of adolescents' imagined (Study 1, N = 113, M age = 16.17) and extended contact experiences (Study 2, N = 174, M age = 15.79) on assertive bystanders' behavioral intentions in the context of homophobic bullying, an underresearched but highly detrimental behavior that emerges mainly during early adolescence.Potential mediators (empathic concern, social contagion concerns, and masculinity/ femininity threat) were also examined. Results showed that female younger participants revealed more behavioral intentions to help victims of homophobic bullying when asked to imagine an interaction with an outgroup member (Study 1). Younger participants revealed less masculinity/femininity threat in the positive extended contact condition, and female participants revealed less empathic concern in the negative extended contact condition (Study 2). Overall, these findings identify specific conditions (e.g., younger females) where indirect contact interventions (i.e., extended and imagined) are likely to have a stronger impact. Age and sex differences were found to illustrate how adolescents vary in their behavioral intentions, empathic concern, and threat; and also highlight the need to further examine age and sex differences regarding responses to homophobic bullying episodes.

Once upon a time…: Using fairy tales as a form of vicarious contact to prevent stigma‐based bullying among schoolchildren

“…These findings are in line with studies showing that empathy is an important antecedent of bystanders' reactions to bullying (Zych et al, 2019). They are also in line with initial evidence that intergroup empathy mediates the effects of direct (Abbott & Cameron, 2014) and extended contact (Antonio et al, 2017) on intentions to react to stigmabased bullying (but existing studies showed it for a different age group). It is the first time, however, that intergroup empathy emerges as mediator of vicarious contact on intentions to counteract stigma-based bullying.…”

“…For instance, Caravita, Di Blasio, and Salmivalli (2009) found that these two variables were associated with increased intentions to defend victims of bullying in a sample of primary and secondary school students (see also Eisenberg, Eggum, & Di Giunta, 2010;Van der Ploeg, Kretschmer, Salmivalli, & Veenstra, 2017; for a meta-analysis, see Zych, Ttofi, & Farrington, 2019). Two correlational studies provided preliminary evidence that intergroup empathy can mediate the effects of direct contact (Abbott & Cameron, 2014) and extended contact (Antonio, Guerra, & Moleiro, 2017) on defending behaviour in favour of stigma-based bullying victims.…”

Performance-Based Measures, Experimental Approaches, and Intensive Repeated Measures to Examine Interpersonal Characteristics of Victims

“…Another way to study interpersonal responses to social rejection is to use vignettes, which are short fictional scenarios describing different bullying situations. Before being presented with these vignettes, participants are asked to imagine that they are the target of bullying (Huang & Bellmore, 2020;Palomares & Wingate, 2020), the perpetrator of bullying (Thornberg et al, 2020), a bystander to a bullying situation (António et al, 2023;Choi & Park, 2021;Fousiani et al, 2019;Fousiani et al, 2020), or a witness to self-defense following bullying (Fousiani et al, 2020). These bullying vignettes are most often presented in a written format but have also been shown as visual stimuli, such as screenshots of received hypothetical Facebook or text messages (Palomares & Wingate, 2020).…”

The benefits of common inclusive identities for adolescent bystanders’ intentions to help homophobic bullying victims

“…Understanding this decline and how to improve middle and late adolescents' intentions to help homophobic bullying victims is important when creating effective interventions to be implemented in schools. We also considered potential sex differences, considering that research suggests that male adolescents exhibit more negative attitudes towards sexual minorities (e.g., Costa & Davies, 2012), while female adolescents tend to score higher in defending behaviors during bullying incidents than their male counterparts (e.g., António et al, 2022;Pouwels et al, 2016;Pozzoli & Gini, 2012).…”