Educate. Don’t Annihilate: A Narrative Inquiry into Students with Dark Personality Traits Who Orchestrate Bullying Campaigns Against a Target Through Mob Formation

Less is understood about how peer relationships can escalate into coordinated exclusionary dynamics and sustained group-based targeting within student populations than about acceptance into a higher education program. Moreover, existing literature grounded in Social Identity Theory and Organizational Ostracism has primarily focused on workplace and organizational settings, leaving a gap in understanding these processes in higher education contexts. This study addresses that gap using Dark Personality Framework, Social Identity Theory, and Conflict Escalation Theory to explain how and why this phenomenon occurs. The study asks, “What happens when a higher education student with dark personality traits orchestrates a coordinated bullying campaign against a target through mob formation?” Using Narrative Inquiry, data were collected through an autoethnographic narration. The author used extracts from her journal and lived experiences of having been the target of a higher education bullying campaign. Because the study examines both individual meaning-making and socially embedded peer-group processes, narrative inquiry informed by ethnographic sensitivity provided an appropriate interpretive framework. Findings indicate that the participant describes movement between bystander, participant, and supporter positions. Group cohesion pressures, fear of social exclusion, and reputational concerns were reported as influential in shaping engagement and silence. Rather than fixed individual intent, coordinated peer aggression was often constructed as an emergent social process embedded in peer-group identity and informal norms. This study also challenges Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism Theory. Limitations of this study include reliance on a self-reported account, potential recall and interpretation bias, and limited generalizability due to the qualitative design. Further exploration into whether currently applied education theories need to be aligned with who higher education students are now.