Why do victims of bullying not seek help? The impact of underestimating bystanders' willingness to protect

Seeking help from others is an important strategy for overcoming difficulties; however, bullied individuals' willingness to seek help is often low in bullying incidents. This study employed a series of behavioral experiments with 968 primary and secondary school students as participants to examine individuals' predictive bias regarding bystanders' willingness to protect from the perspective of the bullied, and its impact on willingness to seek help, and conducted an intervention experiment based on an information prompt framework. The results showed that individuals' reported bystander protection willingness from the perspective of the bullied was significantly lower than the protection willingness reported from the perspective of bystanders, indicating an underestimation predictive bias in protection willingness; this bias existed stably across different bullying types, genders, and educational stages. Bullied individuals...