Public Shaming and Moral Narcissism: Community Justice Among Bystanders of Peer Aggression

Background and Purpose:

Studies of bystander involvement in bullying, cyberbullying, and other forms of peer aggression tend to focus on the potential for individual bystanders to intervene directly to stop aggression. They rarely account for the broader ways power is informally regulated within groups, often through conscious ethical reasoning. Restorative justice theory has contributed important conceptual tools for understanding informal group mechanisms of community justice within peer groups: These include “reintegrative shaming”—rejecting the offending behaviors and not the person, as opposed to “disintegrative shaming”—rejecting and stigmatizing the offending person, separating the person from the group.

This study sought to explore the moral reasoning and action responses of bystanders of peer aggression who reported at least once trying to help peers when they witnessed them being targeted. This paper reports unanticipated qualitative findings of public shaming, understood by participants as a form of retributive community justice.

Methods:

Grounded theory methods were employed at each stage of sampling and analysis. Following IRB approvals, thirty-one undergraduate student participants from 7 campuses in 2 states in the northeastern U.S. participated in 60-90 minute semi-structured interviews. Participants were recruited using theoretical sampling, allowing in some cases for interviews with different bystanders of the same incidents. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Line-by-line, case-by-case, and axial coding allowed for identification of themes. Qualitative social network analysis facilitated further examination of the function of participants’ social networks in relation to their moral reasoning and action responses.

Findings:

The analysis contributes new and unexpected findings related to collective campaigns aiming to punish a peer identified as an aggressor—for example, labeled as “a racist” or “a homophobe.” These efforts crossed online and offline boundaries: organizing meetings to demand that the student be expelled, excluding the person, ostracizing others who continued to be seen with the person, leaving harassing notes, threatening violence, organizing hashtag campaigns on Twitter, and leaving anonymous messages with apps such as Yik Yak.

These campaigns were organized strategically to punish the person accused of targeting a peer. Sometimes groups of peers also used the internet to “make public” more discreet targeting. In cases when peers transferred after being accused of bullying and cyberbullying, sexual assault, or other forms of peer aggression, participants reported alerting others at the new school both to protect people from future victimization and to continue punishing the person.

A few participants experienced ambivalence witnessing collective campaigns against individuals, describing the phenomenon variously as “vigilantism” and “scapegoating.” As one participant reflected, “Forget two wrongs don’t make a right. They were trying to make a right out of a wrong by piling 50 more wrongs on top of it.”

Conclusion and Implications:

Informal retributive community justice based in scapegoating and disintegrative shaming may be common in increasingly polarized schools, campuses, and workplaces. Beyond ethical reasoning, this may be understood to reflect a form of moral narcissism—a desire to be seen in groups as personally blameless, inhibiting collective accountability. Group-based interventions should build on prosocial community capacity through mediation and moral reflexivity.