Abstract:
Bullying is a significant issue that not only affects students' academic achievement but may have an impact on their study motivation. As the forms of bullying evolve in a rapidly changing world, this study examines how some variations can influence the academic motivation of bystanders, shedding light on the broader implications for educational environments. According to Self-Determination Theory, academic motivation is facilitated by the satisfaction of the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. If these needs are frustrated or undermined, it has a negative impact on motivation. Witnessing school bullying in the classroom could potentially undermine the basic psychological needs. Thus, we experimentally tested whether witnessing different types of bullying in the classroom would lead to decreased academic motivation and self-esteem and to examine whether need frustration moderated this effect. In different vignettes, we manipulated type of bullying (direct and indirect bullying). The study, which has been approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority, was carried out in classrooms to increase ecological validity. Altogether, 252 students from 12 ninth-grade classes in five schools in Sweden participated. Participants were 15.3 years old, 55 percent were girls, 40 percent boys, 2.5 percent other, and 2.5 percent preferred not to say. We found an effect for type of bullying on extrinsic motivation, where extrinsic motivation was lower in the direct bullying condition compared to indirect bullying and the control condition. Moreover, need frustration was associated with extrinsic motivation, indicating that it had a unique contribution to the variance in extrinsic motivation, while witnessing direct bullying had a robust and negative effect on extrinsic motivation. There were also some tendencies, such as need frustration tending to negatively influence intrinsic motivation and type of bullying tending to negatively impact on self-esteem and interacting with need frustration on self-esteem, even if these results were not significant. The study benefitted from a decent sample size, experimental methods, and the employment of standardized measures. However, results may vary throughout different intergroup contexts such as ethnicity and additional investigations are required in other countries and involve more diversity. The study contributes by adding valuable insights into the complex dynamics of academic motivation and highlights the importance of being observant of the variations of school bullying. Moreover, findings have implications for students’ academic motivation and schools’ anti-bullying interventions.