Abstract:

Negative interaction events involving employees and customers in the service industry have become increasingly frequent, and the mechanisms of moral judgment among cyber-bystanders after witnessing such incidents and their subsequent behaviors—specifically online commentary—exerting a significant influence on the escalation of these events. Methodologically, this study first selected a typical negative interaction case. It then employed Python to crawl online comments from five related sample videos and conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 cyber-bystanders who had engaged in commenting. The combined qualitative data were then analyzed using a three-stage coding process guided by grounded theory. The findings reveal that the moral judgments of cyber-bystanders are formed through three distinct pathways: the direct effect of intuitive appraisal, the direct effect of moral reasoning, and an interaction between the two. These judgments, in turn, drive four typical categories of bystander behavior: moral reflection, moral assistance, moral punishment, and social interaction. Collectively, these behaviors contribute to a“destructive spiral effect”that exacerbates the development of negative interaction events.

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