The Role of Perceived Social Injustice in Cyberbullying

Abstract

This dissertation explored the relationships among social injustice, social dominance orientation, aggression, and cyberbullying across Chinese and American populations. Direct effect and mediation models were proposed to test the explanatory power of perceived social injustice on the likelihood of cyberbullying. Twelve hypothesized social injustice scenarios written with first person perspective and based on three types of perceived social injustice (distributive, procedural, interactional), two social settings (pay, power), and two levels of injustice (high, low) were created to test four groups of hypotheses on the relationship between social factors and cyberbullying. Data were collected from an online survey site. A total of 639 Chinese participants and 484 American participants were randomly assigned to one of the 12 scenarios and then instructed to complete the survey based on the way they were treated in the scenarios. Participants were asked to report the level of their social dominance orientation, perceived injustice based on the scenarios, level of aggression, and likelihood of cyberbullying. Demographic characteristics of the participants were also recorded. Results revealed that (a) perceived distributive injustice positively predicts likelihood of cyberbullying among both American and Chinese participants, (b) perceived interactional injustice positively predicts the likelihood of cyberbullying only among Chinese participants, (c) the level of proactive aggression mediates the effect of perceived distributive injustice on the likelihood of cyberbullying, (d) the level of reactive aggression mediates the effect of perceived procedural and interactional injustices on the likelihood of cyberbullying, and (e) social dominance orientation negatively predicts three types of perceived social injustice and positively predicts the likelihood of cyberbullying. The theoretical and practical contributions of the dissertation are discussed.