For schools and youth-facing organisations seeking to reframe anti-bullying and character frameworks for young people, an important starting point is to distinguish rule compliance from moral awareness and ethical judgement.
A young person may comply with expected standards of conduct in one context and behave differently in another. In such cases, the person may be weighing the consequences of their actions rather than engaging in authentic moral reasoning.
Research suggests that even from the age of three, a person can discriminate between rule violations and behaviours that cause harm to others. When rule-breaking and harm are treated as equivalent, however, compliance can be reinforced without necessarily developing moral awareness or ethical judgement.
This distinction has important implications for anti-bullying and character education. Three principles emerge:
- Calling out harm as a moral issue, not simply as a policy violation.
- Tackling self-justifying thinking, not just moral reasoning. Anti-bullying and character education programs are unlikely to address harmful behaviour fully if they overlook the ways young people rationalise it.
- Addressing bystander behaviour, because group silence can reinforce harmful conduct.
Peer bullying in schools is typically an ecosystem comprising those who bully, those who are targeted, bystanders and upstanders. Some bystanders participate by joining in or encouraging bullying behaviour; others remain passive, contributing to a code of silence; while upstanders attempt to intervene. Even those not present may be aware that the abuse is occurring.
Research involving more than 500 secondary school students found that, while young people who engage in bullying recognise that their behaviour causes harm, they may justify it through self-serving excuses, for example, minimising, mislabelling or reframing the behaviour as ‘only a joke’ or ‘banter’; blaming the victim; or appealing to peer pressure and group culture, ’everyone does it’. Such distortions suggest that harmful actions may arise less from an inability to understand moral principles than from the ways young people rationalise behaviour that conflicts with their self-interest. Moral judgement, reasoning and evaluation, and self-serving cognitive distortions therefore both need to be considered in anti-bullying interventions.
This discrepancy is important for parents, teachers, coaches and managers working with young people aged 14-25 years, particularly when behaviour occurs in increasingly complex social environments.
The challenge becomes even more pronounced online. Our moral instincts evolved largely within small, face-to-face communities, rather than algorithmically amplified environments operating at global scale. The sheer magnitude of the internet exposes people to information ranging from large-scale disasters to extremist views and everything in between, potentially contributing to compassion fatigue and public shaming. Physical and psychosocial distance between moral actors online can also make cooperative action more difficult, while behaviours such as liking or sharing content can become performative rather than translating into meaningful moral action.
There is a further complication: fervent moral conviction may be associated with a reduced willingness to critique one’s own beliefs. This makes metacognition, the capacity to evaluate one’s own reasoning and consider evidence that might warrant changing one’s view, an important component of character formation.
For parents, teachers and coaches, therefore, rule compliance should not be assumed to correspond with good character, nor should strong moral conviction automatically be equated with sound judgement. Providing scenarios and role-playing exercises can be valuable, but an even more powerful question to pose to young people may be: ‘What have you done in a situation similar to this one?’
That question moves character education beyond what young people say they would do and towards how they understand, justify and evaluate their own behaviour. Developing that capacity may be one of the most important skills we can assist in cultivating in young people.
Brugman, D., van der Meulen, K., & Gibbs, J. C. (2024). Moral judgment, self-serving cognitive distortions, and peer bullying among secondary school adolescents. Journal of Moral Education, 53(3), 412–432; Gibbs, J. C. (2019). Moral development and reality : beyond the theories of Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt (Fourth edition.). Oxford University Press.
Turiel, E. (2024). Looking Back and Moving Forward: Historical Lessons for Current Research on Moral Development. Human Development, 68(3), 103–120.
Robertson, C. E., Shariff, A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). Morality in the anthropocene: The perversion of compassion and punishment in the online world. PNAS Nexus, 3(6), 1-12.
Decety, J., Cohen, M. S., & Cao, Q. (2025). The Dark Side of Moral Conviction—Integrating Political Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1553(1), 5–20.