Personality and Individual Differences 50 (2011) 603–608

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Personality and Individual Differences

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid

Bullies have enhanced moral competence to judge relative to victims, but lack
moral compassion
Gianluca Gini a,⇑, Tiziana Pozzoli a, Marc Hauser b
a
Department of Developmental and Socialization Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
b
Departments of Psychology and Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Bullying behavior is an immoral action because it humiliates and oppresses innocent victims. Presently
Received 4 October 2010 unclear is whether bullies bully because of deficiencies in moral competence (knowledge of right and
Received in revised form 23 November 2010 wrong), moral compassion (emotional awareness and conscience concerning moral transgressions), or
Accepted 1 December 2010
some combination of these two processes; the same issues arise with respect to victims. We studied a
Available online 24 December 2010
large sample of children (N = 719, 9–13 years) classified as either bullies, victims or defenders to deter-
mine whether individual differences in moral competence and compassion are related to these roles. Rel-
Keywords:
ative to victims, both bullies and defenders showed advanced moral competence, integrating information
Bullying
Victims
about beliefs and outcomes in judging the moral permissibility of an action; victims showed delayed
Moral judgment moral competence, focusing on outcome information alone. Paradoxically, despite the advanced moral
Moral disengagement competence of bullies, they were woefully deficient with respect to their moral compassion when com-
Compassion pared to both victims and defenders. These results parallel a growing body of work on adult psychopaths,
suggesting dissociation between the knowledge that guides abstract moral judgments and the factors
that mediate morally appropriate behavior and sentiments.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction create effective strategies to reduce the incidence of bullying, while

Bullying is an international problem that affects the lives of
thousands of children, often causing severe psychological (Hawker
& Boulton, 2000) and physical pain (Gini & Pozzoli, 2009) in vic-
tims, occasionally ending in suicide (Kim & Leventhal, 2008).
Though statistics vary internationally, reports suggest that be-
tween the ages of 9 and 16 years, anywhere between 10% and
30% of these youths are involved on a regular basis as bullies
and/or victims (e.g., Due et al., 2005). Longitudinal studies reveal
that, while the majority of bullies are involved in temporary or
desisting bullying, approximately 10% of the general population
consists of individuals who are persistent or stable bullies and
may follow a deviant ‘career’ path (Pepler, Jiang, Craig, & Connolly,
2008). Conversely, many children are stable victims who suffer
from re-victimization, that is, the persistence of victimization
across time (Finkelhor, Ormrod, & Turner, 2007). Thus, there is
great interest in the intrapersonal and interpersonal causes of bul-
lying, as well as the reasons why some individuals are more likely
to be targeted than others. Understanding these causes can help
⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Department of Developmental and Social
Psychology, University of Padua, via Venezia 8, 35131 – Padova, Italy. Tel.: +39
0498276398; fax: +39 0498276511.
E-mail address: gianluca.gini@unipd.it (G. Gini).
simultaneously providing potential victims with the tools to de-
fend themselves, or avoid harm altogether.
The research reported here explores a topic that has received lit-
tle attention: do bullies differ from victims and well-adjusted peers
(e.g., defenders) in their understanding of moral norms as well as
their emotional sensitivity to moral infractions? On the face of it,
one might assume that because bullies commonly engage in moral
transgressions, they either lack an understanding of right and wrong,
simply do not care, or lack some combination of these two processes.
One might further assume that victims are merely subjected to bul-
lying, but are morally competent to judge and emotionally sensitive
to the causes and consequences of moral transgressions. These are
reasonable inferences, but at present we know little about the rela-
tionship between individual differences in moral competence and
compassion, and how these differences map onto the personalities
of bullies and victims. Our initial hypothesis, based on recent work
with adult psychopaths (see Section 1.1), is that children who ac-
quire a bullying personality style are, in important ways, like adult
psychopaths: they have relatively sophisticated moral competence,
but deficient moral compassion. Consequently, bullies show a ma-
ture understanding of the factors that guide our judgments of right
and wrong (e.g., beliefs, impact on the greater good), but fail to ex-
press concern for why moral norms are important, and why trans-
gressions impact upon the well-being of others.

0191-8869/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.paid.2010.12.002
604 G. Gini et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 50 (2011) 603–608
1.1. Bullying and morality
Bullying consists of systematic peer-to-peer abuse and repre-
sents the major form of proactive aggression among children. As
such, it is an unprovoked aversive means of influencing or coercing
another person and is more goal-oriented than reactive aggression
(Sijtsema, Veenstra, Lindenberg, & Salmivalli, 2009). Thus, bullying
can be conceptualized as pre-meditated aggression, typically
accompanied by low arousal and anger (Polman, Orobio de Castro,
Koops, van Boxtel, & Merk, 2007). Moreover, bullying is character-
ized by an imbalance of power between the bully and the victim;
the powerful bully intentionally uses this inappropriate social
behavior to reach valued goals, such as dominance, resource con-
trol and popularity within a group of peers (e.g., Peeters, Cillessen,
& Scholte, 2010).
From a social-cognitive point of view, recent research has de-
scribed bullies as individuals characterized by so-called ‘cold cogni-
tion’. Indeed, they tend to show average-to-good social intelligence,
good theory of mind skills, and Machiavellianism (Gini, 2006;
Sutton, Smith, & Swettenham, 1999). Moreover, compared to reac-
tively aggressive children, bullies do not show difficulties in the ear-
lier steps of social information processing, such as the tendency to
overestimate the actor’s intentionality to harm in ambiguous social
situations. They can, however, have biases in the later steps, such as
the tendency to value instrumental goals more highly than relational
goals, or to evaluate aggressive responses favorably (Polman et al.,
2007). These social-cognitive characteristics may allow bullies to
anticipate others’ thoughts and actions, to manipulate their beliefs
and emotions and, more generally, the group processes lying
beneath bullying.
Though bullying is an immoral act, relatively little empirical re-
search has explored what bullies understand about the moral
implications of their actions, or other forms of moral transgres-
sions. Bullies often use more moral disengagement mechanisms,
egocentric reasoning and other self-serving cognitive distortions
to avoid feeling guilty, especially compared to individuals who
support victims against bullying (Gini, 2006; Menesini et al.,
2003). Arsenio, Adams, and Gold (2009) found that proactively
aggressive children, including bullies, choose instrumental goals
and aggression to react to hypothetical moral scenarios, despite
the possible victim’s plight. They are also expected to feel posi-
tively after acting aggressively, and claim that victims would not
feel angry after being victimized. Finally, Caravita, Miragoli, and
Di Blasio (2009) found that bullies attribute social-conventional
characteristics to moral norms to a larger extent than their peers.
In parallel, Blair (1997) found that adolescents scoring high on a
psychopathy screening test made a weaker distinction between
moral and conventional transgressions than adolescents with a
low score, and the high scorers were also less likely to attribute
moral emotions to the transgressors. This suggests a deficit in both
moral competence and compassion. However, a more recent study
by Dolan and Fullam (2010) failed to show a deficit in judgments of
moral–conventional transgressions among adolescents with psy-
chopathy conduct disorder, a result that is more consistent with
data on adult psychopaths’ judgments of moral dilemmas (Cima,
Tonnaer, & Hauser, 2010; Glenn, Raine, Schug, Young, & Hauser,
2009).
In contrast to bullies, victims show deficits in social skills,
social problem solving, coping strategies, assertiveness, and emo-
tional regulation (e.g., Champion, Vernberg, & Shipman, 2003;
Mahady-Wilton, Craig, & Pepler, 2000). Moreover, victims score
lower than both bullies and defenders in theory of mind tasks
(Sutton et al., 1999). Because the capacity to represent the mental
states of others is intimately tied to our understanding of social
behavior, of which moral behavior is one kind (Gini, 2006), one
might expect victims to show delays in moral competence,
evidenced by a failure to bring theory of mind information
together with outcome information.
Recent approaches to bullying have criticized the exclusive focus
on the bully–victim dyad and indicated that these social roles can be
better understood in relation with others in the peer group. Conse-
quently, and in keeping with recent studies (Gasser & Keller, 2009;
Menesini et al., 2003), our experiments included defenders as the
core comparison group. Defenders are defined as prosocial individ-
uals who actively intervene to stop the bullying, help and console
the bullied schoolmates, or ask for adults’ intervention (Salmivalli,
Lagerspetz, Björkqvist, Österman, & Kaukiainen, 1996). These chil-
dren are rarely aggressive, have good theory-of-mind and moral
understanding, low moral disengagement, high sense of responsibil-
ity, social self-efficacy and empathy, and enjoy a high status among
peers (e.g., Pozzoli & Gini, 2010; Sainio, Veenstra, Huitsing, &
Salmivalli, in press). In sum, defenders have relatively sophisticated
social-cognitive skills that extend to the moral domain, supported
by a well-developed understanding of the mental states and feelings
of others.
1.2. Hypotheses
We tested two different components of morality: competence
and compassion. We tested moral competence by asking children
to evaluate the moral permissibility of an action based on informa-
tion concerning the actor’s beliefs and the consequences of their
action, building off of work on adults (Young, Cushman, Hauser,
& Saxe, 2007). We tested moral compassion by assessing the extent
of disengagement from a moral infraction, that is, the tendency to
diminish or eliminate self-sanctions in order to justify the use of
violent and aggressive behavior (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara,
& Pastorelli, 1996). We predicted that, in the domain of moral com-
petence, bullies and defenders would be comparable, and both
would excel relative to victims. In contrast, in the domain of moral
compassion, we predicted that defenders would excel relative to
both victims and bullies, and victims would excel relative to bullies
(Gini, 2006).
The study was conducted with children in the transition be-
tween late childhood and early adolescence for three main rea-
sons: (i) this is a period in which involvement in bullying
becomes rather stable, (ii) children in this stage of development
have internalized a suite of moral rules, and (iii) cognitive abilities
allow children to reason about moral situations. We expected older
children to have a higher moral competence. Thus, before testing
for our main hypotheses, we checked for age differences in partic-
ipants’ responses.
2. Method
2.1. Participants and procedure
A total of 355 4th and 5th grade school children (50.1% girls)
aged 9–10 years and 364 7th and 8th grade early adolescents
(47.0% girls) aged 12–13 years participated in the study. Partici-
pants completed the study measures (in counterbalanced order)
during two classroom sessions. In each session, participants com-
pleted a set of moral scenarios and either the peer nomination
measure or the moral disengagement scale, alternatively.
Through peer nominations (see Section 2.2.1), 409 children
were assigned to one of the following role groups: Bullies (n =
103), Victims (n = 117), and Defenders of the victim (n = 189). We
excluded the bully–victim group (i.e., children high on both bully-
ing and victimization) because of the small sample size. Consistent
with previous studies (Gini, 2006; Salmivalli et al., 1996), victims
were equally distributed between boys and girls, whereas boys
 G. Gini et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 50 (2011) 603–608 605

were overrepresented in the bully group and girls were overrepre-

sented in the defender group, v2 ð2Þ ¼ 57:13, p < .001. Children
(n = 310) who did not receive a definite role because they did not
fit the classification criteria were not included in the analyses
comparing role groups. Due to absences, 49 children did not partic-
ipate in session one, and 61 in session two. Attrition did not vary
by role group in either session one [v2 ð2Þ ¼ 0:60, p = .74] or two
[v2 ð2Þ ¼ 0:76, p = .68].
We obtained parental consent for the children to participate be-
fore data collection. Consent letters with a description of the study
were sent home through children’s school; parents signed and re-
turned the letter to indicate their consent. Moreover, participants
were assured confidentiality and were told that they could with-
draw from the study when they wished without consequence.
None of the children refused to participate.

2.2. Experimental material and measures

2.2.1. Peer nominations

We used peer nominations to classify individuals into the roles
of bully, victim and defender. Items were derived from a validated
Italian version of the Participant Roles questionnaire (Salmivalli
et al., 1996), which allowed us to identify not only bullies and vic-
tims, but also defenders with multiple items.
We asked children to nominate classmates who conformed to
each of the nine behavioral descriptions of three types of bullying
(i.e., physical, verbal, and relational bullying). Both same-gender
and opposite-gender nominations were allowed. The nomination
items were divided into three scales, which measure the three dif-
ferent roles: Bullies (3 items, a = .79; e.g.: ‘‘In your classroom, who
are the classmates who more often hit or push other classmates?’’),
Victims (3 items, a = .77; e.g.: ‘‘In your classroom, who are the
classmates who more often get attacked hard, hit or pushed by
some other classmates?’’), and Defenders (3 items, a = .84; e.g.:
‘‘In your classroom, who are the classmates who more often defend
others who are hit or attacked hard?’’). For each participant, the Fig. 1. Experimental design for the moral scenarios, using the lemonade scenario as
nominations received in each scale were summed and divided by an illustration. The upper part of this figure shows how the scenarios were
organized. The lower part of the figure shows the 2  2 design of beliefs vs.
the number of nominators. These scores were then standardized outcomes.
by class and roles were assigned according to the original proce-
dure proposed by Salmivalli and colleagues (1996).
against outcomes. Thus, adults perceive Attempted Harms as
worse than Accidental Harms, revealing the importance of beliefs
2.2.2. Moral scenarios
and intentions relative to outcomes (e.g., Young et al., 2007).
We created four versions (types) of 12 different moral scenarios
When areas of the brain involved in mental state attribution
based on a 2 (beliefs: negative vs. neutral)  2 (outcome: negative
are damaged or suppressed by means of transcranial magnetic
vs. neutral) experimental design, for a total of 48 different scenar-
stimulation, the aforementioned pattern is reversed, with sub-
ios. Participants read four types of scenarios (3 scenarios for each
jects focused more on outcomes, and consequently, with Acci-
type), and then judged the protagonist’s action on a scale from
dental Harms perceived as morally worse than Attempted
1(very bad) to 7(very good). Participants were randomly assigned
Harms (Young et al., 2010). Convergent with these results is
to read one of four scenario sets, so that they read only one varia-
the consistent finding that very young children weight outcomes
tion of each scenario.
more heavily than mental states, such that accidental harms are
These scenarios were based on well-validated scenarios used
perceived as worse than attempted harms.
with adults and clinical samples (e.g., Young et al., 2007, 2010),
modified for use with children. Type 1 scenarios entailed Successful
Harm: the protagonist held a negative belief about the intent to 2.2.3. Moral disengagement scale
harm and the action resulted in a negative outcome. Type 2 en- As a test of moral compassion, we used the 14-item version of
tailed Attempted Harm: the protagonist held a negative belief, but the moral disengagement scale (Caprara, Pastorelli, & Bandura,
the action failed to bring about a negative outcome. Type 3 entailed 1995), specifically designed and validated for school children. Chil-
Accidental Harm: a neutral belief (did not intend any harm), but the dren rated the strength of their endorsement or rejection of moral
action resulted in a negative harm. Type 4 entailed No Harm: both exoneration of detrimental conduct on a 5-point scale (1 = strongly
the belief and outcome were neutral (see Fig. 1 for an example). In disagree, 5 = strongly agree). Higher scores indicate a higher ten-
a pilot study, adults judged protagonists more harshly in Success- dency to engage in one or more of these mechanisms (example
ful Harms than Attempted Harms, which were judged more items: ‘‘Some kids deserve to be treated like animals’’; ‘‘Kids can-
harshly than Accidental Harms, with No Harms scenarios judged not be blamed for misbehaving if their friends pressured them to
least harshly. do it’’). Even though the items describe different mechanisms, pre-
Given our hypotheses, we were most interested in the At- vious studies using this scale with children (e.g., Caprara et al.,
tempted and Accidental Harm cases as they pit mental states 1995; Gini, 2006) have demonstrated the mono-dimensional
606 G. Gini et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 50 (2011) 603–608

structure of the scale (which was confirmed also for the present
sample). Therefore, analyses were conducted on the global score
(a = .60).

3. Results

Age and gender differences were tested on the whole sample

with a repeated measure ANOVA, using type of scenario as a with-
in-subjects factor and age (two levels: late childhood vs. early ado-
lescence) and gender as between-subjects variables. There was a
significant main effect of type of scenario [F(3, 651) = 716.97,
p < .001, g2p ¼ :523], indicating that, independent of age, partici-
pants judged Successful Harm as the most morally bad situation
(M = 1.87, SE = .036) and the No Harm condition as the most mor-
ally good situation (M = 4.69, SE = .053). Accidental Harms
(M = 3.06, SE=.041) were judged as morally worse than Attempted
Harms (M = 3.49, SE = .047).
Age was only marginally significant [F(1, 653) = 3.56, p = .059,
g2p ¼ :001], whereas the type of scenario by age interaction was sig-
nificant [F(3, 651) = 27.12, p < .001,g2p ¼ :04; Fig. 2]. Follow-up Bon-
ferroni-corrected analyses revealed that participants’ judgments
did not differ by age in the Successful Harm condition (p = .23),
while early adolescents rated the No Harm condition as worse than
did younger children (p < .001). As expected, younger children
judged Accidental Harms significantly more negatively than early
Fig. 3. Moral judgments given by bullies, victims and defenders for the Attempted
adolescents (p < .001). The opposite pattern emerged for the At- Harm condition. Error bars correspond to standard error. Bullies’ and defenders’
tempted Harm condition, which was considered more wrong by judgments are significantly different from victims’ ones (⁄⁄⁄p < .05).
older participants (p < .001). Neither main effect of gender nor
interactions involving gender were significant, paralleling other
studies of moral judgment in adults (e.g., Banerjee, Huebner, &
Hauser, 2010; Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin, & Mikhail, 2007).
To test our main hypothesis, moral judgments of bullies, victims
and defenders were analyzed in a repeated measures ANCOVA,
with age and gender as covariates. The only significant effect
involving roles was an interaction between type of scenario and
roles [F(2, 369) = 5.086, p = .007, g2p ¼ :027]. Follow-up analysis
showed a significant difference among roles for the Attempted
Harm condition [F(2, 369) = 3.508, p = .031, g2p ¼ :019; Fig. 3]. Spe-
cifically, both bullies and defenders judged Attempted Harm as
more morally wrong than did victims.
We used an ANCOVA to examine whether bullies differed sig-
nificantly from victims and defenders in moral disengagement,
with age and gender as covariates. The main effect of roles was
significant [F(2, 344) = 4.293, p = .014, g2p ¼ :024], revealing that

Fig. 4. Moral disengagement in bullies, victims and defenders. Error bars corre-
spond to standard error. ⁄⁄⁄p < .05.

bullies disengaged significantly more than both victims and

defenders, whereas there was no significant difference between
victims and defenders (Fig. 4).

4. Discussion

Fig. 2. Moral judgments given by participants for the four types of scenario. Error The current findings complement recent research on the social-
bars correspond to standard error. ⁄⁄⁄p < .001. cognitive and moral competencies of children who bully peers,
 G. Gini et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 50 (2011) 603–608
showing that bullies are skilled in understanding social cues (e.g.,
others’ mental states, beliefs and intentions), exploiting this ability
to their own advantage (Gini, 2006; Sutton et al., 1999). We dem-
onstrated that bullies, at least starting from late childhood, do not
have the socio-moral developmental delay that characterizes other
antisocial youths (e.g., Gibbs, 2010). Indeed, compared to the well-
adjusted defenders, they were equally able to judge the moral per-
missibility of harmful actions based on the beliefs and intentions of
the actor, performing at the level of normal adults (Young et al.,
2007) and better than peer victims. This is particularly important
since the intention to harm a weaker peer, rather than the negative
outcome per se, is a critical definitional feature of bullying
behavior.
In this task, bullies showed normal moral competence to judge.
Where bullies deviated from others, including both victims and
defenders, was in the significance they attached to such knowl-
edge, especially in terms of motivating morally appropriate behav-
ior. Because bullies show significant deficiencies with respect to
moral sentiments and caring, and higher levels of moral disengage-
ment (Gini, 2006), their ‘real-world’ behavior focuses on instru-
mental social goals and the positive outcomes gained through
bullying (Sijtsema et al., 2009). In essence, when it comes to engag-
ing in morally appropriate behavior within peer relationships, the
mind of a bully fails to access the knowledge they bring to bear on
judgments of moral scenarios. Consequently, the lack of moral con-
science facilitates the use and justification of violence by bullies to
achieve their selfish ends (Bandura et al., 1996). This idea is
consistent with recent findings demonstrating a positive associa-
tion between callous-unemotional traits (i.e., lack of guilt, lack of
empathy, and uncaring) and peer assessed bullying behavior in a
sample of early adolescents, over and above the association be-
tween conduct problems and bullying (Viding, Simmonds, Petrides,
& Frederickson, 2009). Thus, in the same way that recent studies
suggest that psychopaths, including both adults and adolescents,
may know right from wrong, but not care about such moral dis-
tinctions (Cima et al., 2010; Dolan & Fullam, 2010; Glenn et al.,
2009), so too may bullies have a sophisticated understanding of
the moral domain without having the requisite emotions to inhibit
their aggressive urges. At present, which aspects of moral knowl-
edge are preserved, and which damaged, is unclear, given that
some studies suggest impairments in moral competence (Blair,
1997) and others do not. Some of the variation observed in the lit-
erature may be due to differences in approach, and in particular the
presentation of different moral scenarios (e.g., moral dilemmas vs.
moral–conventional transgressions). Also unclear is the relation-
ship between what we know and how we act, and specifically
how variation in emotional sensitivity influences our actions. Cal-
lous-unemotional traits, in particular, may increase the likelihood
of bullying because of the reduced salience of people’s distress
cues, low capacity for affective empathy and lack of guilt. Studies
on bullying among children should test this hypothesis more di-
rectly. Moreover, future research should test whether bullies –
especially those who persist in this role throughout development
– show the neuro-cognitive impairments seen in adults with psy-
chopathic tendencies (de Olivera-Souza et al., 2008).
4.1. Limitations and implications
One limitation of this study is the cross-sectional nature of our
data. Longitudinal studies may help in tracing developmental
trends, especially the relationship between moral knowledge and
bullying behavior. A second limitation is that we measured chil-
dren’s responses to third-person actions in hypothetical moral sce-
narios. Even though this is a commonly used methodology in the
field (see Gasser & Keller, 2009; Gini, 2006), the current findings
607
need to be replicated with different tasks measuring children’s
judgment of first-person actions.
There are at least two critical implications of our findings. First,
given that bullies show normal or advanced moral competence, but
diminished moral compassion, whereas victims show the reverse,
we have identified two distinctive mechanisms in our moral psy-
chology, one subserving abstract judgment and the other subserv-
ing the emotional and motivational systems that drive morally
appropriate action. What is presently unknown is the extent to
which the observed role-specific deficits are in place earlier in life,
and whether there are environmental factors that interact with
personal characteristics placing some children more at risk to de-
velop such deficits and, consequently, to be socially maladjusted.
In other words, to what extent are bullies born with a heightened
capacity for moral judgment and compromised capacity for moral
compassion? How, and to what extent, do early environmental
conditions (e.g., parental practices) influence these capacities?
However these questions are resolved, it will greatly contribute
to studies aimed at intervention.
Second, anti-bullying programs must, on the one hand, provide
bullies with the means to appreciate the harms they cause and fo-
cus on mitigating the effect of self-justifying mechanisms, thus
weakening the association between moral disengagement and bul-
lying behavior. Parents and teachers are encouraged to make ef-
forts addressing these distortions in morality, in order to favor
youths’ moral engagement, while avoiding egocentric reasoning
and facilitating their understanding of responsibility. On the other
hand, interventions must also educate victims to sharpen their
moral competence by revealing the significance of considering
both means and outcomes in moral evaluation. Given the possible
parallels between the psychology of bullies and that of adult psy-
chopaths, finding a successful intervention program would play a
major role in reducing the high levels of bullying observed interna-
tionally, and consequently reducing one of our greatest sources of
violence.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by Grant CPDA085704 from
the University of Padova to GG and by an NSF-HSD grant to MH.
Thanks to Ryan DeChant and David Harris for help in creating
the moral scenarios and for testing them on adults.
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