Bystanders play a crucial role in encouraging or preventing bullying situations and feature prominently in several international antibullying programs (e.g., KiVa). Despite a surge of recent interest in bystanders, relatively little is known about the functional reasons why individuals choose to engage with or ignore bullying incidents. Given the importance of bystanders’ influence on bullying, we argue that further consideration needs to be given to the individual costs and benefits of bystanders’ intervention. Adolescents in our study (N = 101, M = 15.37 years) read different bullying scenarios and were then asked to respond with how the bystander would react in each scenario while considering and explaining potential personal costs and benefits. We focused on the cognitive reasoning of important factors adolescents may consider when faced with the decision of whether to intervene or not in a bullying situation. Our study provides novel evidence that adolescents engage in quite explicit cost–benefit decisions regarding their decisions of whether or not they would intervene in bullying. The content and structure of these cost–benefit decisions support an adaptive model of bullying behavior and may be helpful in developing more targeted peer-based antibullying programs.

中文翻译：

---

我应该捍卫还是应该去？对与欺凌干预相关的个人成本和收益的适应性，定性检查

旁观者在鼓励或预防欺凌情况中起着至关重要的作用，并且在一些国际反欺凌计划（例如KiVa）中占有重要地位。尽管最近对旁观者的兴趣激增，但人们对于选择参与或忽略欺凌事件的功能性原因知之甚少。考虑到旁观者影响欺凌的重要性，我们认为需要进一步考虑旁观者干预的个人成本和收益。我们研究中的青少年（N = 101，M = 15.37岁）阅读了不同的欺凌情景，然后被要求回答旁观者在每种情景下的反应，同时考虑并解释潜在的个人成本和收益。我们将重点放在青少年在决定是否要在欺凌情况下进行干预时可能考虑的重要因素的认知推理上。我们的研究提供了新颖的证据，表明青少年参与了相当明确的成本–福利决策，这取决于他们是否干预欺凌行为的决策。这些成本－收益决策的内容和结构支持欺凌行为的自适应模型，并且可能有助于开发更具针对性的基于同级的反欺凌程序。