Longitudinal Links of Individual and Collective Morality with Adolescents’ Peer Aggression

Abstract

Adolescents’ aggressive behavior has been often linked to biases in morality. However, limited knowledge is available regarding the relative strength of different moral correlates, both at the individual and class-level, in predicting different types of aggressive behavior over time. To address this gap, the present study tested the prospective associations of moral identity and moral disengagement with reactive and proactive aggression in a short-term longitudinal study. The sample consisted of 1158 Italian adolescents (48.7% females; Mage = 13.6 years, SD = 1.1). Participants completed self-report measures of moral identity, moral disengagement, perceived collective moral disengagement in the fall, and reactive and proactive aggression in the fall and in the spring. Multivariate multilevel analysis indicated that, at the individual level, after controlling for the stability of aggressive behavior, T2 (Time 2) reactive aggression was higher for students who reported lower moral identity and higher moral disengagement at T1 (Time 1). For proactive aggression, a significant interaction effect indicated that the negative association between T1 moral identity and T2 aggression was apparent only at high levels of T1 moral disengagement. Moreover, proactive aggression was significantly predicted by higher perceived collective moral disengagement. At the class-level, T1 collective moral disengagement helped explain between-class variability of T2 reactive and proactive aggressive behavior. How these results expand previous research on morality and aggressive behavior and their potential implications for prevention and intervention programs is discussed.

The association between moral disengagement and bullying in early adolescence

“…The first result suggests that, in classrooms where students more commonly perceive that classmates justify peer aggression in different ways, bullying is more common. This is a salient result that supports the emerging theorizing of moral disengagement as not merely an intrapsychic phenomenon, but also a phenomenon that occurs across individuals within groups (see Gini et al, 2015Gini et al, , 2021. Additionally, our results support the hypothesis that students were more prone to bully others in classrooms where classmates more commonly reported that they assisted and reinforced bullying, a finding that is coherent with earlier studies (Nocentini et al, 2013;.…”

“…The focus in this thesis is on bullying perpetration, although it should be noted that I do not classify the participants as "bullies," but have examined the level of bullying perpetration measured as a quantitative variable. This allowed for a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of bullying involvement (Demaray et al, 2021;Gini et al, 2021). Furthermore, all four studies examined bullying among early adolescents (age span 10-14) and focused on the school context and bullying among students.…”

“…Indeed, in Gini et al's study, the amount of variance that could be attributed to the classroom level was three times larger than the variance of individual moral disengagement aggregated to the classroom level. Findings from studies adopting this latter approach indicate that, in addition to individual moral disengagement, both student-perceived moral disengagement and classroom collective moral disengagement play significant roles in bullying Thornberg, Wänström, & Hymel, 2019;Thornberg, Wänström, et al, 2021), as well as aggressive behavior more generally (Gini et al, 2015(Gini et al, , 2021. Classroom collective moral disengagement has also been found to be negatively associated with defending, and positively associated with passive bystanding (Gini et al, 2015;Sjögren et al, 2021a) and with pro-aggressive bystander behavior (Sjögren et al, 2021a).…”

“…In Thornberg, Wänström, and Hymel's study, initial levels of classroom collective moral disengagement were found to be positively associated with students' involvement in bullying, whereas a change in classroom collective moral disengagement between fourth and fifth grades was not associated with a change in bullying. In addition, one Italian study has examined the role of both student-perceived collective moral disengagement and classroom collective moral disengagement in both reactive and proactive aggression over the course of six months (Gini et al, 2021). The results of Gini et al's study suggest that students who perceive the mechanism of moral disengagement to be more common among classmates also tend to engage in more aggressive behavior themselves.…”

“…To illustrate "everyone," all the people were shaded, whereas to illustrate "about three quarters," three fourths of the people in the picture were shaded. At the individual level, this scale represented a student's perception of the extent to which moral disengagement mechanisms are common among classmates (cf., student-perceived collective moral disengagement; Gini et al, 2021). Classroom collective moral disengagement was obtained by computing the average score for each student within the classroom, and then computing the classroom mean.…”