Social cognition and moral cognition in bullying: What's ... - DPSS

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models have been proposed in the literature to explain the Bully’s behavior in terms of social information processing. The first model hypothesizes the presence of deficits in the social information processing of bullies, similar to those found for aggressive children (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Dodge, 1980). This model, therefore, proposes the idea of bullies as “oaf” children. They are considered deficient in their social intelligence, that is their ability to interpret and manage information deriving from social interactions with peers and to produce adequate social responses. The second model, in contrast, states that bullies are quite skilful in understanding social cues (e.g., others’ mental states) and that they exploit this ability to their own advantage, acting as “skilled social manipulators” (Sutton et al., 1999a; 1999b). However, according to these authors, bullies may lack the empathic reactivity towards their mates’ emotions and, in particular, towards victim’s suffering. In the first two hypotheses of the present study, it was anticipated that bullies may have a good theory of mind, but they may be deficient in moral cognition. The analysis of variance, indeed, indicated that the bully group did not show any difficulty, compared to non-aggressive peers, in the understanding of cognitive stories, which required them to assume the cognitive point of view of another person, that is to understand intentions, beliefs and goals that guide a determinate behavior. Moreover, correlations between the scores in each scale of the PRQ and the performance in the social cognition task indicated a positive relation between bullying behavior and the ability to understand others’ mental states. As regards the two models, therefore, our results are closer to what would be expected by the Skilled Manipulator model (Sutton et al., 1999a). The fact that our bullies did not show particular deficits in this specific area of social cognition does 22
not suggest a direct application of the Social Skills Deficit model (Crick & Dodge, 1994) to bullying behavior. Further analyses are needed into the social cognitive competence of children involved in bullying episodes. This is particularly important because theory of mind explanations per se are not likely to be very helpful for understanding the unique nature of bullying, in that having a sophisticated theory of mind can lead to highly prosocial behavior or to bullying behavior. In other words, having a “superior” theory of mind says nothing about how that knowledge will be utilized in social interactions (Arsenio & Lemerise, 2001). As regards the two other types of stories used in the present study, bullies’ performance in emotion stories and also in moral stories, a category not used by Sutton and colleagues (1999b), was found to be slightly, but not significantly lower, than the performance obtained by other groups. Contrary to our second hypothesis about the possible difficulties of bullies in moral cognition, our results do not completely confirm the literature on moral development in aggressive children and bullies (e.g., Bandura, 1991; Hart, Burock, London, & Atkins, 2003). In our sample, in fact, the bullies and their followers did not show a significant lack of ability in the attribution of appropriate moral emotions to the characters of the stories. These emotions, such as guilt and shame, play an important role in the recognition of the damage suffered by another person and are closely connected to the sense of responsibility of the person who shows the harmful behavior. Moreover, these emotions imply the need of reparation as a consequence of a negative outcome produced by one’s behavior (Bybee, 1998; Hoffman, 2000). However, for both emotion and moral stories, it is important to note that they actually assess the “cognitive” ability to process emotional information in social 23
Page 1 and 2: Social cognition and moral cognitio
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Page 5 and 6: mind task). The relevance of these
Page 7 and 8: eal conduct, which may not necessar
Page 9 and 10: Quite recently, the “traditional
Page 11 and 12: emotion as an expression of what is
Page 13 and 14: divided into six scales, which refe
Page 15 and 16: emotions (happiness, sadness, anger
Page 17 and 18: especially for younger children. Th
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Page 21: level of moral disengagement than b
Page 25 and 26: that is their thoughts, beliefs and
Page 27 and 28: emotional abilities, having psychos
Page 29 and 30: Boulton, M., & Smith, P. K. (1994).
Page 31 and 32: Gini, G., Albiero, P., & Benelli, B
Page 33 and 34: Kaukiainen, A., Björkqvist, K., Ö
Page 35 and 36: Sharp, S., & Smith, P. K. (1994). T
Page 37 and 38: Table I. Distribution of Participan
Page 39 and 40: Table III. Participant Roles and me
Page 41: Figure 1. Participant Roles and Mor

Social cognition and moral cognition in bullying: What's ... - DPSS

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