Bullying among college students : do moral courage and empathy affect the likelihood that a bystander will intervene?

The current study sought to better understand the phenomenon of bullying at the college level and to seek potential strategies to combat this bullying. Some K-12 schools have successfully incorporated bystander intervention as a means of stopping or reducing bullying (Coker, et al., 2017). Bystander intervention is the act of aiding an individual in distress in a high risk – low reward situation (Latané & Darley, 1970). This exploratory study examined a theoretically-guided model of how moral courage, empathy, and other factors relate to bystander intervention intentions for college-level bullying. Data were collected from 733 undergraduate students who completed an online questionnaire. Multiple regressions were used to analyze the data. Findings demonstrate that moral courage strongly and positively relates to the intention of engaging in bystander intervention. Empathy also positively relates to the intention of engaging in bystander intervention, but to a lesser degree. These findings align with current conceptual frameworks of moral courage, a relatively new construct in psychology (Press, 2018; White, 2015), and with the theory that empathy is altruistic (Batson, 1989). Further, these results specifically demonstrate that moral courage and empathy are key factors to reducing bullying via bystander intervention. Importantly, these study findings also demonstrate that bullying is still present at the college level, most frequently in the forms of verbal and social bullying. These results suggest boosting college students’ moral courage and empathy could lead to more frequent bystander interventions and thereby reduce bullying.