Undergraduate students’ attitudes toward celebrities-cyberbullying:

Abstract: The research problem of the current study was the lack of information about the relationship between the Egyptian university students’ use of social networking sites and both attitudes towards celebrities-cyberbullying and behavioral intentions to commit it. The current study relied in proposing its hypotheses and measures on the hypotheses of the theories of moral disengagement and planned behavior. The importance of the study was the scarcity or the absence of the Arab studies on cyberbullying against celebrities. The study aimed to identify the attitudes and the behavioral intentions of the study sample towards celebrities-cyberbullying, and how they perceive the society’s opinion about it, and the extent to which they apply the dimensions of moral disengagement on that issue. The field survey approach was applied through an electronic questionnaire sent to an available and purposeful sample of social media users from the Egyptian undergraduate students, consisting of 200 male and female respondents. The results showed that: the largest percentage of the study sample had negative attitudes towards celebrities-cyberbullying (62% of the total sample) and had low behavioral intentions to commit it (67.5% of the total sample), most of the sample believed that it was an incorrect behavior from a moral standpoint (65% of the total sample). Moreover, the results showed that the perception of the society’s opinion as negative towards celebrities-cyberbullying, and the non-use of moral disengagement, are correlated with negative attitudes towards celebrities-cyberbullying and low behavioral intentions towards committing it. On the other hand, perceiving society’s opinion toward celebrities-cyberbullying as normal, usual, or positive, and believing that celebrities-cyberbullying doesn’t have any dimensions relevant to morals and values, both are correlated to positive attitudes towards celebrities-cyberbullying and the formation of behavioral intentions to commit it.