Motivations at the Automatic and Deliberate level to bully

Project Information

MAD2bully

Grant agreement ID: 101075831

DOI

10.3030/101075831

EC signature date 20 December 2022

Start date 1 July 2023

End date 30 June 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordinated by

STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MAD2bully (Motivations at the Automatic and Deliberate level to bully)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Bullying among youth is a major problem with devastating consequences. In order to more effectively prevent and intervene in bullying behavior, we must first understand what drives bullying behavior.
Research has focused primarily on the deliberate level of motivation for high status, but this has been found to be weakly associated with bullying behavior. Therefore, in the present study, we will consider other (status) motivations that may have a greater impact on involvement in bullying behavior.
Specifically, we propose that the motivation to avoid low social status or to lose social status is different from the motivation to pursue high social status, and may play an important role in youth's bullying behavior and following bullies.
The main purpose of the present study is to develop and validate an innovative toolset to measure youth's motivation to avoid having low social status at different levels. In addition, the project aims to examine the relationship between youth's social status motivation and youth's involvement in bullying behavior and its moderators.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Conceptual and practical development of the explicit, implicit and physiological measures took place.
A pilot study (N = 202) has been conducted, which consisted of a classroom group session administering explicit measures, followed by individual sessions in the school administering implicit, behavioral, attention and physiological measures.

A manuscript has been written using the explicit data from the pilot study. The manuscript is available as a preprint and submitted after a second revision round at a developmental psychology journal.
Another manuscript on a related topic, using existing data has been revised and resubmitted to the developmental psychology journal it is under consideration with.

Longitudinal data collection in elementary and secondary school classrooms started in October 2025 and will be ongoing till March 2027. We already have 50+ elementary and 18 secondary classrooms participating, and recruitment is still continuing.
An additional data collection in schools for physiological data is running from March 2026 till July 2026.

There are furthermore multiple research papers in preparation:
- Paper on existing explicit and implicit data regarding popularity motivation, linked to bullying behavior (similar to data currently collected in the longitudinal data collection)
- Paper using qualitative and quantitative data examining which specific rewards and threats youth associate with high and low popularity respectively
- Paper on newly developed implicit popularity vignette measure in pilot study
- Paper on physiological data pilot study examining responsiveness to the newly developed Cyberball exclusion-invitation paradigm

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Other researchers adopting the notion that avoiding low status can be a powerful motivation affecting aggressive behavior is beyond the state-of-the-art, which in many cases is linked to my journal article that was published during the first year of the MAD2bully project.
The conceptual innovations described in the paper on the explicit pilot data, as well as other insights from the papers that are in preparation are presented to the national and international research communities on various conferences (National: ASPO and VNOP; International: SRA, ISSBD and EARA).