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

Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990; Dodge & Newman, 1981). According to the same
approach, victims, who are shy and withdrawn and lack social skills of assertiveness,
show high levels of anxiety and loneliness, and have less experience in social interaction
and play fighting (which may enhance social skills), as well as control and interpretation
of emotional expression (Hodges, Malone, & Perry, 1997; Smith, Bowers, Binney, &
Cowie, 1993).
Some authors tried to apply this model to a particular kind of aggressive
phenomenon: school bullying (Boulton & Smith, 1994; Slee, 1993; Smith et al., 1993).
However, despite the popular view of the bully as an “oaf” boy, that is an intellectually
simple or backward boy (Besag, 1989), very few studies confirmed that Dodge’s model
can be applied to bullies in exactly the same way as to aggressive children (e.g., Hazler,
1996; Randall, 1997). On the contrary, some other authors stressed the role of adaptive
motivation to explain bullying behavior, arguing that bullying may be seen as an
inappropriate way to reach a socially effective goal, such as leadership within a group.
As a consequence, these authors stated that the bully should not necessarily to be seen as
an individual with specific difficulties. On the contrary, he or she may sometimes be a
skilled individual who takes advantage of his/her high social-cognitive competence to
reach personal benefits, such as interpersonal dominance, through a “Machiavellian”
conduct (Sutton, Smith, & Swettenham, 1999a).
Some data presented by Sutton and colleagues (Sutton, Smith, & Swettenham,
1999b) empirically support this view; in fact, they found that 7-10-year-old bullies
performed better than other classmates in a social cognition task that required the
understanding of mental states and emotions of the main character of a story (theory of
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