Personal and perceived peer norms in bullying and sexual harassment perpetration.

Nickerson, Jenkins, Bellavia, Manges, Livingston, & Feeley (2022) published “The Role of Personal and Perceived Peer Norms in Bullying and Sexual Harassment Perpetration” in School Psychology. The effects of bullying and sexual harassment have been exacerbated by cyberbullying. I previously talked about this in the piece titled “Why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media.” What I like about this study is its focus on social psychological phenomena including personal normative attitudes and perceptions of peer norms. The study is cross-sectional and includes only 233 high school students. Here’s part of the abstract:

Consistent with social norms theory, students perceived themselves to hold more prosocial (i.e., antibullying/antisexual harassment) personal normative attitudes than they perceived the typical student in their school to hold (i.e., peer norms). Path analyses revealed that students’ personal normative attitudes (e.g., antibullying/antiharassment) were negatively related to their bullying, cyberbullying, and sexual harassment perpetration, although perceived peer norms were negatively related to sexual harassment perpetration only. Multiple-group path analysis revealed significant gender differences. Personal normative attitudes related to females’ behavior for all forms of perpetration and only sexual harassment and cyberbullying for males (with more antibullying/antiharassment attitudes relating to less perpetration), although associations for males were stronger. Perceived peer norms related to bullying perpetration for males only.  

It’s not surprising that students see themselves as more opposed to bullying and sexual harassment than their peers. It also makes sense that, when teens hold antibullying and antiharassment attitudes, they are less likely to report being perpetrators of bullying, cyberbullying, and sexual harassment. The fact that perceived peer norms are only believed to oppose sexual harassment perpetration suggests that teens see peers as more tolerant of both bullying and cyberbullying. The data also suggest that perceived peer normative attitudes are important in reducing bullying by males. Obviously, future research should examine behavior not just self-reported behavior. It would also be interesting to see if the prevalence of antibullying and antiharassment attitudes in a high school differentially relates to the prevalence of bullying, sexual harassment, and cyberbullying. Teens are very susceptible to perceived social norms and, while it’s easy to argue that teens who are perpetrators rationalize their behavior as normative, it’s much harder to create an environment with pervasive prosocial norms. This is especially true if teens see bullying, harassment, and cyberbullying as commonplace in media and the culture.