Online celebrity aggression: A combination of low empathy and high moral disengagement? The relationship between empathy and moral disengagement and adolescents' online celebrity aggression

Abstract

Adolescents regularly become involved in online aggression. While existing research mainly concentrated on online peer aggression, some studies pointed to adolescents' aggression toward other targets, such as celebrities. It is known that socio-cognitive characteristics such as empathy and moral disengagement are associated with adolescents' aggression toward peers, but so far it remains unexplored if these traits can also explain celebrity aggression. The current study investigated the relationship between affective and cognitive empathy, moral disengagement and online celebrity aggression. The sample consisted of 1,255 adolescents with a mean age of 14.17 years (SD= .47).Participants completed the Moral Disengagement Scale adapted to a celebrity context, the Emotional Quotient and a scale measuring mild and severe online celebrity aggression. Structural equation analysis in Mplus indicated that, when controlling for gender and celebrity media consumption, affective empathy was associated with severe and not with mild online celebrity aggression. The cognitive component of empathy was unrelated with online aggression toward celebrities. Moral disengagement was related with mild and severe online celebrity aggression and also mediated the relationship between affective empathy and both mild and severe celebrity aggression. Following these results, strategies aiming at reducing celebrity aggression may benefit from a focus on sociocognitive characteristics.

Moral Disengagement, Empathy, and Cybervictim’s Representation as Predictive Factors of Cyberbullying among Italian Adolescents

“…Compared to the moral dimension, the potential invisibility of the victim might be a condition for a lack of empathy, which would not be activated. In the web scenario, the lack of direct contact (such as in face-to-face bullying and a normative social context-peer and adult), allows the subject to act immorally, without any perception of the suffering the victim might experience [9,44,45]. As previous studies have already shown, the mechanism of distorting consequences has been identified among the predictors of CB [27].…”

Intranasal Oxytocin Administration Reduces Bystanders’ Acceptance of Online Celebrity Bashing

“…The oxytocinergic system is known to regulate empathy and intranasal OT administrations were shown to enhance both affective empathy (Hurlemann et al 2010;Geng et al 2018) and cognitive empathy (Domes et al 2007;Shahrestani et al 2013). Therefore, based on the hypothesis that the perception of celebrity bashing is also grounded in human capacity for empathy (Ouvrein et al 2018a), we hypothesized that OT administration will decrease bystanders' acceptance of online celebrity bashing. A doubleblind, placebo-controlled experiment was performed to test this idea.…”

“…Having less empathy for the victim, on the other hand, increases the acceptance towards the behavior (Obermann 2011), which in turn reduces the motivation to support the victim (Thornberg et al 2012). Recently, Ouvrein et al 2018a demonstrated that empathy is also an important explaining variable for celebrity bashing. The authors found that lower selfreported empathy is a predictor of participation in severe types of online aggression towards celebrities.…”

“…Contrary to most peer aggression incidents, in online aggression towards celebrities, perpetrators are mostly unknown (anonymous) to the celebrity-victim, maintain high distance towards the celebrity, and are unable to observe the negative consequences of their actions. As a result, it is possible that there are less feelings of empathy towards the celebrity compared with a situation in which the perpetrator knows the victim personally (Ouvrein et al 2018a). Despite the fact that contemporary psychophysiological research provides tools to study the biological foundations of empathy, such an approach had not been yet used to address the problem of online aggression.…”

“…Celebrity bashing clearly differs from cyberbullying on this point, as the perceived distance between the perpetrator and the celebrity-victim is quite high. Due to this higher perceived distance, audience members seem to show less empathy and are less able to correctly estimate the potential impact of the behavior (Ouvrein et al 2017(Ouvrein et al , 2018a.…”