School climate does not buffer the association between aggression beliefs and bullying perpetration

Bullying is a pervasive issue in schools, influenced by individual cognitive factors such as normative beliefs about aggression and contextual factors such as perceived school climate. Positive school climate dimensions—including connectedness, value of learning, and quality of relationships—are generally associated with reduced bullying perpetration. Here, we analyzed data from 4919 adolescents using ordinal logistic regression to assess whether student-perceived school climate moderates the relationship between endorsement of normative beliefs about aggression and bullying perpetration frequency.

Stronger endorsement of aggression-related beliefs was associated with higher perpetration frequency, whereas several relational school climate dimensions were associated with lower perpetration frequency. However, we found no evidence that perceived school climate weakened the association between aggression-related beliefs and bullying perpetration frequency. These findings are more consistent with direct associations between perceived school climate and bullying perpetration than with a buffering effect on the belief–perpetration association.

Bullying prevention efforts may therefore benefit from integrating climate-building actions with targeted interventions addressing aggression-related norms and beliefs. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to J.K. The publication has been supported by a grant from the Faculty of Management and Social Communication under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.

Faculty of Management and Social Communication, Institute of Public Affairs, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

School climate does not buffer the association between aggression beliefs and bullying perpetration. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-69810-x DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-69810-x