The bystander effect in cyberbullying on social network sites: Anonymity, group size, and intervention intentions

The bystander effect posits that people are less likely to help others who are in need as the number of bystanders increases. However, studies that have examined this phenomenon in the online context have often used arbitrary numbers of bystanders and a single measure of intervention. Drawing on the cognitive and strategic aspects of anonymity from SIDE, this study conducted a 2 (anonymity) × 4 (bystander number) factorial experiment that simulated an online cyberbullying scenario and examined bystanders' intentions toward four different intervention behaviors that ranged from passive attention to active confrontation. The findings indicated that anonymity should be integrated as an essential feature in examining bystander effect in CMC. Also, the number of bystanders and online anonymity do not affect people's intentions to intervene in a passive or non-confrontational manner. Instead, anonymity and the number of bystanders affected people's intentions to engage in direct interventions, such as confronting the bullies. The relationship between the number of bystanders and people's intentions to intervene was not a linear relationship. Initially, intentions to intervene increased with bystander numbers but dropped off after a critical point. By including varying levels of bystander numbers and varying degrees of intervention behaviors, this study suggested that bystander decisions depend on people's combined consideration of anonymity, bystander numbers, and intervention behaviors.