There's far too many people who think that bullying is a rite of passage. If you have severe bullying, other researchers have shown that it affects your immune response for decades. It affects the expression of your genes for decades. It's not a minor thing.
Why did you get interested in studying bullying? It actually was kind of by accident. Wendy Craig at Queens University had a whole pilot data and she needed a PhD student to work on it. I was friends with her and I said, sure, I'll look at it.
So I ended up looking at it. And then over time, as I was a professor, more and more students wanted to do research on bullying and it eventually became my main focus. What do you think is unique or novel about the approach that you've taken to looking at bullying? The biggest thing is that our group really asks why bullying happens.
Seeing as it's ubiquitous over time, across culture, and really hard to prevent, it seems like either development has gone wrong for so many people or maybe there's something in it for the bullies. Okay, so how do you define bullying? What is it? Another great question.
We define bullying as a deliberate, aggressive attempt against a weaker individual that causes harm. So it's got to be gold directed. It's got to be something that causes harm so it can't be a meaningless thing. And most importantly, it has to happen in the context where the victim has a hard time defending themselves.
That's the power amount. So bullying in that regard can't happen to somebody who is of equal status or highest status than you. Exactly. That would be general aggression, but that wouldn't be bullying.
Interesting. Okay, so what's the evolutionary hypothesis behind bullying? What have you come to believe about it? So bullying first seems a little counterintuitive from an evolutionary perspective in that what you often find is that in nature there's dominance hierarchy.
Bullying is often confused with the alpha male, beta male, et cetera. But it's really unusual in dominance hierarchies for number two to pick on number 17 and higher at the whole point of the dominance hierarchy. They should be fighting. So we think bullying has a few different functions.
Some of them depend on that hierarchy and some don't. The ones that don't are pretty easy to explain. You're bullying somebody to get something that you want. So you want their resources.
You want the best spot in the play yard. You want that scholarship that you're going for that you're interested in. But when it comes to bullying for dominance, we actually don't think that it's a direct competition between competitors. Instead, what bullying is, it's a way of signaling how dangerous you are to compete with.
So why is number two punching number 17? Number 17 is a threat. Number 17 doesn't have things that they need socially. But what number two is doing is showing number one and number three, what they're capable of doing.
And they're picking a target that's a reasonable threat. So if you were a 10-year-old and you're beating up a four-year-old, that's not really impressive. If you're grade 12 and you're picking on a grade nine, that's not really going to intimidate the other people. But on the other hand, if you're a grade 12 or a 12-year-old, picking on up here, then not showing your peers what you're willing and capable of doing to other peers.
And it seems to be quite effective. Does that mean that bullying is increased when there is an audience of some kind? That's a really great question. A lot of bullying that we've observed happens with an audience over 80%.
A bullying that we've observed. Again, colleague Wendy Craig, a dead pep with a beautiful study, kind of like a BBC documentary where they put microphones on kids, sent them into the playground, and then filmed them from a distance. And they saw that 85% of the time when somebody was bullying somebody else, they were surrounded by peers. That would explain this sort of almost performative aspect of it.
It's a very heavy signal. Yeah. We can talk about private bullying. So you could bully your sexual partner into things that you might not want public.
But as far as the majority of bullying that you see on the playground, especially in schools, as well as in a lot of workplaces, is done performatively to show other people what you're capable of and that they should not mess with you. Interesting. What are the most common setups or dynamics between a bully and a victim? Yeah, we for a long time thought that the problem was a one of a relationship, that the bullying the victim didn't get along.
And if we could somehow sit down the land with a lion, then things would be better. But recent research has shown a few really interesting things that go against the idea that there's this perfect setup or mismatch between individuals. Number one is that interventions that sit the land down with a lion are iatrogenic, which means they make things worse. So what happens is for the next few weeks, the bullying goes down and then the bullying goes to higher than it was beforehand, which sort of makes sense.
But to the bully with a victim in front of adults and the bully plays nice for two weeks, and as soon as adults are done looking, they get their revenge. The other thing that some Dutch researchers have done is shown that bullies cycle victims. They don't just pick one victim and they cycle through one victim after another and the more that they do that, the higher their reputation increases, the greater their popularity and their dominance. So it really seems like it's a signal.
Beyond that, victims tend to have weaker levels of power so they're less socially connected. They're more likely to have mental health issues to begin with that bullying exacerbates. And then, bullies are very good at finding victims that they can target. So if you have a bully who's physically strong, they'll pick on a physically weak individual.
So if you're socially strong, they're going to socially isolate a individual. Somebody who's mentally and socially quick will pick on somebody who doesn't have strong mental or social skills. So that bullies are very flexible in choosing the right target for them. What else predicts a bully victim?
You've mentioned what seems to be social isolation, lack of a support network. I'm going to imagine that the fewer friends you have, the more likely you are to be bullied. Yeah, absolutely. Physical size, not surprisingly, younger age, if you're younger within the grade or younger overall.
And then now we're currently looking at adolescents with the data in, but I suspect we're going to find that being isolated from the data game is also an important factor. Now for aggression, you tend to find that being involved in the data game makes you more likely to be targeted by aggression. But that's by equal level peers. So being picked on by stronger people is usually, again, these kids who are sending the right cost benefit signal.
So somebody who's strong enough that the signal has meaning, but somebody who's weak enough that the bully isn't going to be successfully retaliated. And bullies will look at your social network and say, okay, well, those people who the victim is connected with, I don't care about their opinions, they're a safe target. But that kid over there, he's friends with a girl who I like, so they're off-limits. It's very strategic.
It's interesting that there's almost like this Goldilocks zone where below a particular threshold of weakness or vulnerability, there is no point in the bully doing it because what are you signaling? You can obviously beat up. Now imagine that you would maybe verbally take the piss because I guess that that shows still that you're quick comparatively, but certainly doing something physical wouldn't make sense. I guess this must raise some questions for kids being skipped ahead a year or two in school because what you're doing is immediately putting somebody who is physically, mentally, socially less adept in where the pool of people that are more likely to be bullied.
Yeah, that's a good example of a situation that can vary easily backfire because it's very, it believes it's very skilled at saying, oh, we're just taking the piss out of this guy. We're just having fun. We're teasing the group around. And they're especially as kids get older, they do less physical bullying.
They do more physical bullying than girls. It's a surprise they do more physical aggression of all kinds. But as kids get older, if you have a couple of eight year old punching another kid, it's not that bad in terms of the physical damage. You have a couple of 18 year old wailing away on some of the bones or broken teeth or chips.
So they shift to these verbal and social forms of bullying that are in a sense less risky for the bully, but they're also much harder to detect and prevent. Okay, so what sort of people bully? What are the typical characteristics of someone that is a bully? Yeah, one of the things that we went into this was the assumption that these are the aren't broken kids.
And the first thing that steered me in this direction was I was working on that original dataset, 10,000 kids from the World Health Organization. They look at kids school health and 10,000 kids in Canada. And I noticed that bullies, yes, are more likely to smoke, more likely to drink alcohol, but they had better mental health than average, which didn't fit with the picture that these are kids who have poor self-esteem, who have poor social skills. And in fact, research has shown that they don't have deficits in mental health.
They don't have deficits in social skills. They don't have deficits in things like theory of mind, understanding other people's thoughts and ideas. They don't even necessarily have deficits in empathy and in anger. What they have is low levels of a trait that we call honesty humility.
So honesty humility is part of the hexaco, it's a six factor personality scale, really new dynamic personality scale that really captures any social behavior with this trait. And essentially honesty humility, I like it because it sounds innocuous. What does that have to do with anything? But really, if you take the belief that you're better than other people, you deserve more than other people, and you're willing to act on that belief, then that sets you up for saying, number 17, sorry, this is the way the world works.
It's doggy dog, nothing personal, but I'm better than you, and I'm going to show people it. And if you weren't such a crappy kid or stupid, slow, ugly, you know, no friends, then this would be happening to you. So that's really the biggest predictor that we find across cultures. We've seen it now in Chinese data and in Dutch data and in Canadian and North American data that this honesty humility is really what's driving individuals to engage in a behavior, along with having power.
So another really interesting study from the Netherlands showed that not only do police gain in popularity when they engage in bullying, but kids who become more popular, power corrupts them, and they become more likely to be police themselves. Right. So there are a lot of incentives here for bully to bully. Aside from presuming that you have low honesty humility, which I'm going to guess would be associated with things like guilt, shame, regret for social infractions and treating somebody miserably, if you're not feeling the pain from that, if you're benefiting by having more social prowess by rising up through your own dominance hierarchy, more prestige, greater social circles, so didn't you do something that looked at more access to sexual partners, they have sex sooner or more regularly or something?
Yeah, that's one of the main benefits from an evolutionary perspective. All this other stuff is nice, but if you don't translate it to passing on your genes, it doesn't matter. So we did a study that kind of surprised us, hit number seven on Reddit when it came out, that bullies have more sex than non-bullies, and that accounted for both early adolescents and in later adolescents. Both boys and girls, so it wasn't a case that it was just dominant boys monopolizing the gene pool, but both dominant boys and dominant girls use bullying to get sex.
And then recently, a team from Europe, again, Netherlands and some folks from the UK as well, looked at, I'm trying to think of them, it was almost 50 years ago, at least 40 years ago, data on bullies from the late 70s, and they showed that these bullies actually have more kids. And we've done this follow up study looking at 30 year olds and 30 year olds who are bullies in high school have more kids. That's very interesting. I'm trying to work out what direction this arrow of causation goes.
For instance, you could just have people who are more likely to bully are more tapped in socially, therefore their social sexuality would be higher. It's not necessarily that by bullying, you gain more access to mates, which means that you then get more sex, which means that you then have more kids. Because I don't think that that would explain particularly well why goals would get more access. Maybe some intersectional competition stuff here that you've irrigated some female rivals and you rise up.
But I don't know, man, even when I was a young full of magic and runescape 15 year old, I don't think I thought the goals that bullied were more hot or charming. I can see it in reverse. Everybody could understand why the dominant guy that wears the leather jacket with cut off sleeves and stands with one foot up against a wall smoking a cigarette, why he might be highly prized by the women. But I don't think that it would work in reverse.
I wonder whether sociosexuality just folds into this more socially adept, more socially tuned in. They're playing that dominance and that status full game. And that means that downstream from that, they're also playing the flirting game and the dating game and the having kids game. Yeah, that's exactly right.
I think it's a bi-directional pathway. And in the case of girls, we know that kids who victimized are less likely to have sex and less likely to date. So bullying is an effective way of knocking out some competitors and intimidating others. If you see the movie, Mean Girls is often the prototype for girls bullying and they're pretty nasty with it when it comes to guys' attention.
So certainly, introsexual competition is important. Intersexually, these girls are dominant in securing the resources. And we know that in our species, men compete for women, not as much as in the other way. But a woman who is good at getting resources and good at taking care of her kids.
You think in Canada here, we talk about the hockey mums in the US, in the UK's probably soccer mums, maybe Southern US, it's the football mums. Those mums are intimidating and perhaps attractive to the male partners because they look, you know, she's going to look after my kids and get them what they want and knock the other kids out of the way for them. So there's benefits directly. And then of course, personality, underlying bullying also really overlaps with social sexuality.
Right. So given the fact that I'm not massively familiar with Hexaco, so a big five is at least what I have a bit of an insight in and it seems like there's a good bit of crossover under the B and the O and the A have a bit of crossover. Given the fact that one of the best predictors for this is honesty, humility, given the fact that almost all personality traits are very highly heritable of 50% on average, I don't know what honesty, humility is, does that mean that bullying is heritable? Yes.
Bullying has a high degree of genetic heritability. 67%. Now it's important for folks to know that that doesn't mean bullying is 60 to 70% caused by genes means the differences between average individuals in Western samples, 60 to 70% of that difference can be explained by genetics. So the Hexaco is like the Big Five, but much better.
It's about better cross-cultural. Throwing shade. Throwing shade at the Big Five. The guy who came up with it is at my university along with Kivy and Lee Mike Ashton.
And they were trying to replicate the Big Five as grad students across cultures and it didn't come out as five. The English comes out as five or six. So the original Big Five creators to parsimony and send English will go with five. You're right that there's a lot of similarities, extroversion, conscientious, openness, or similar, but where it's very different is that the Hexaco really maps on well with evolutionary explanations for social behavior.
So social behavior happens for three reasons, by social cooperation. Mutualism is when you each get something to benefit from. That's the cleaner bird picking a crocodile's teeth. They're each getting something direct from each other, lions helping bring down prey or helping each other directly.
Or it happens through kin selection, which means look after similar genes. That's usually nepotism looking after your family. Or reciprocal altruism. And reciprocal altruism is you scratch my back all scratch years at a later date.
Now the Hexaco honestly humility maps on with your willingness to cheat on others, to look after yourself. So if you think of something like the Prisoners Dilemma, it's a willingness to take advantage of others. If you see a wallet with 200 bucks, you take the money out before you even consider returning it. The advantage of that is you selfishly benefit.
The cost is that you get a reputation for being selfish and people don't like being with you. Agreeableness in the Hexaco is the opposite of that. How willing are you to forgive somebody taking advantage of you? So you and your mate go out for lunch and they forget their wallet, say screw it, we're done through, or do you tolerate that and allow it to continue?
Now obviously that's good for a continuing relationship, but if you really agree with your Flanders, people can take advantage of it. Emotionality maps on really nicely with sentimentality and a lack of risk taking. It's the one that has the biggest sex difference. Men are a little lower in honesty humility.
Women are actually a little lower in agreeableness, but women are much higher in motionality. And women are lower in agreeableness on Hexaco? Yeah. Yeah.
They're more likely to get angry in retaliate than men are. So is the Hexaco agreeableness a different measure than the big five agreeableness? Yeah, big five agreeableness just basically says nice, but it doesn't map on to specific functions. So you've got emotionality, which is basically kin selection.
Are you sentimental? Do you have high levels of emotional empathy? Do you worry a lot? Which is what you see in a lot of mothers and women.
So why you find more vegetarians, for example, most women. But then the Hexaco is H and A, or do you take advantage of others and do you let yourself get taken advantage of? Very interesting. Is there a place that people can do an online test, a thorough, very well validated online test that'll explain their scores for Hexaco?
Yeah. Hexaco? H-E-X-A-C-O.org is where the creators have that online test. And you can do it online there.
And it'll give you a sense of where you're at. And it's really useful scale. You know, I don't want to transition a little away from bullying. But one of the more interesting findings we did in my career was look at the big five and other personality measures predicting the dark triad.
Psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, which is basically scheming, strategic. And we found that the Hexaco outperformed all the other personality measures, including the big five. And then the one that really blew us away was the colleague Gordon Hudson said, you know, the dark triad all clustered together, you think of overlapping circles, because it shares a common core, that common core of anti-social selfishness. And so we looked to see how the core of the dark triad overlapped with the core of the Hexaco.
And I was expecting a correlation to be big, 0.5, 0.6, correlation is 0.95. So it's the same thing. And that's been replicated now in 17 different countries. That being bad is basically being the same thing as being low in honesty humility.
Wow. So you can nail in the coffin of the big five personality assessment there. Okay, so go back to the bullying thing. I'm very interested in the sex differences in bullying.
Why do girls bully? Why do boys bully? And how do they do it differently? Yeah, absolutely.
Both are bullying for the similar sorts of things, for resources, for reputations, for reproduction. There's a couple other potential functions, the terms and recreation that we can talk about. But boys and girls, while they have some different pressures, both of them need to secure resources, boys and girls, and both of them need to secure a reputation. They're statiocirically, we know from prime literature and human literature that high ranking women have better reproductive success.
And so both are motivated to achieve those. The biggest difference that we find is that boys engage in much more physical bullying, which fits with every study on physical aggression. That's because boys have at least as men have a greater degree of variance in reproductive outcomes. So the greatest bullies in history, I think of folks like Genghis Khan, whose father of 1% of the world's population lies today in his family, the ancestors, would be a better way to say that.
So there's a huge incentive for boys to take risks that isn't present in girls. So girls tend to engage in less direct bullying, so indirect verbal and indirect social bullying. But boys also engage in a lot of that behavior, too. Boys can be very strategic about spreading rumors about their competitors.
And what they often tend to use, another difference is the language that they use. So women tend to go after another woman's sexual reputation, and boys tend to go after another boy's nameliness. I mean, just to interject women chasing after chastity and derogating that in their rivals and men about manliness. The first time that I learned this from an evolutionary lens, it blew my mind because it's so plain and obvious.
And everybody knows this. You know that my favourite example of this, did you see that Greta Thunberg got into a spat with Andrew Tate like three months ago on Twitter? So Andrew was saying, I'm going to drive my supercars and I'm going to admit CO2 and fuck you Greta, like you're an idiot. And she quote tweeted him.
I think it's like, it's like one of the most liked tweets of all time now. I think she's got two of the top 10. I'm pretty sure they're both at Andrew Tate. She accused him of small dick energy.
I thought, okay, anybody that needs a massive social experiment showing what people think men value the most, small dick energy. What are you derogating there? You're derogating manliness. You're derogating verminability.
There's a little bit of sort of sexual prowess in there, reducing status down. If he'd replied and he was on the streets of Newcastle outside of a nightclub at three in the morning having had a couple of too many beers, he would have said something like fuck you, you slag. Like, because again, what is that? That is a derogation of chastity.
One of the brutal things I learned about this over the last couple of months is that this from Tanya Reynolds, she said that derogating chastity is such a precision engineered weapon because it's almost impossible to disprove. You can't walk around showing people how little sex you're having. Look at all of this sex that I'm not doing. Look at how pure I am.
It's basically impossible. So it's a real precision engineered strike. I love that sex difference in terms of what gets targeted. And the fact that that shows up in bullying isn't surprising.
Yeah, absolutely. Particularly since these kids have average or better social skills, they didn't become the captain of the football team or the head cheerleader through physical prowess alone in most cases. It's because they know how to manipulate these social cues. So they really know how to hit kids where it hurts.
But that's individualistic. One of my favorite, because it's the wrong connotation, but one of the more powerful or interesting stories I heard was about Lou Ferrigno, a bodybuilder who for listeners who don't know played the incredible Hulk without any CGI or makeup, just painted a green, huge man full of muscles. And he was relentlessly bullied because he has a hearing loss. So kids would make fun of the way to talk.
And that's not something you can punch away at it. People are causing you stupid or slow. Punching them doesn't change that. And so bullies are really effective at picking the impact that's going to hurt their target the most because it's the strongest signal.
You're saying to number one and three, look what I did to the reputation of 17. We all know she didn't sleep around. She messed around with this one guy, but I destroyed your reputation. You mess with me.
It's going to happen to you. Does this mean that bullies are smarter on average? The data on IQ shows that they're average. So they're not necessarily smarter or more cunning.
I think the biggest difference comes in the low honesty humility means they're willing to use these things. I'm sure you know, hang out with your friends, a lot of soft spots that you've heard them with. The difference is you don't go there. You make fun of the things that you know, they'll laugh at, but you don't talk about that one thing that would really hurt them.
And bullies do. I'm trying to map this onto my experience. So for a little bit of background, I was pretty badly bullied throughout school and I haven't really spoken about it much on the podcast, but then I did this big episode a couple of months ago and I felt like, okay, now's the time for me to really start to open up about what I felt. I got this really heartfelt message from a guy who used to bully me in school and he'd seen his interview, I'd done with the BBC and he had to reach out and apologize, like super, super moving.
And I'm trying to think back to my experience as much as I've probably tried to show a bit of it away, trying to think back to my experience and map myself onto the lessons that you're teaching us here. The honesty humility thing, I find myself being quite orderly. I don't break rules very much. And I think that procedural, classic, British, stand in line, follow the rules and procedures thing.
I think that's definitely something that I've got in me quite strongly. I don't tend to break rules very much. I have a massive amount of guilt and shame when I do stuff. I do feel pretty bad about fucking people over.
If I say something that's mean, I know it's probably hurt someone or maybe even hasn't hurt them, but I worry about whether or not it has. So that's in there. And then when you were talking about the bullies not using that and being able to precision strike, derogate, I was smaller when I was in school, even though I'm a little bigger now, would have been not done. I would have been probably smarter or smarter on average than most of the kids, certainly most of the kids that were bullying me, but significantly less socially adept.
So I think high scores a lot of the time, like let's say that I outperformed a bunch of the bullies in a test or got high grades or was moved up a class or did whatever, that would become also a justification for bullying down the line. So yeah, I think that to try to map what I've learned from you onto my experience in school, I think I really had kind of a perfect storm of a lack of physical familiar ability and some pretty high social isolation coupled with lack of social capability that just made me like an absolute perfect target. Yeah. And there's a number of things that I've been doing there, but I think the first and most important is victims recognizing that it's not their fault.
Bullies are going through, it's almost like the Terminator walking with this little scanning list saying who's a good target, who's a good target, there's the right target. It's not something that you did. There are sometimes victims that we call provocative victims who are sometimes bullying victims themselves. And I should qualify now that I'm talking about bullies.
I'm talking about kids who are primarily bullies and not victims as well. Kids who are both bullies and victims, they're like the Nelson Munson, they have bad social skills, they have deregulated dysregulated. How common are they? Yeah, I was going to say, no, it's the most of the bullying.
Estimates are less than 30%. 78% of the bullying that's done is done by the really dominant kids. And so they're picking in a very cowardly way, somebody that can't effectively fly back. The kids were picking on Lou for a minute, no, it might be smaller.
But they knew that he couldn't respond without looking more socially awkward. The only way he can defend himself is by punching his. This guy's low and no social skills. So it's a very callous, very calculated, predatory way of achieving what you want.
Whereas on the opposite end, if you're high and honest with humility, you have what you said, you believe in fairness, not some of your interviews, you try and present a balanced view. You don't take advantage of people when the opportunity presents itself. And that's so much more important than we often hear that it's an anger issue or a lack of emotional empathy. And those really aren't strongly correlated at all with bullying, especially emotional empathy.
And if you look at almost any action hero that's been in Hollywood from the 80s onward, even before the Clint Eastwood, they all have the profile of their very low in emotionality and empathy, their very low in agreeableness, but their high and honest dignity. These are good people until you piss them off. They've got that noble side to them, right? Right.
And it's that nobility. That's why we like them, in a sense that, yes, you think of John Wick having people who just killed it in series over the top? That's a dog. That's a fucking dog.
That's a lesson. But we still like him because he's honorable and he has that sense with him. And that is really the biggest cost that we found for bullying is that while they are very good at getting what we call dominance or popularity, people don't like them. And that's because people can recognize what they're doing.
So the head cheerleader is intimidating, they happen to football teams intimidating, but you don't really want to spend a lot of time with them unless you're directly gaining from their power. And we trickle down effective, whatever good sort of social halo they've got going on. Okay, so what about the ages of bullying? What age does bullying peak?
Is there a difference you already mentioned, physicality kind of adjust over time? But what about if we roll forward from school into adulthood, the workplace, the neighborhood, et cetera? Yeah, so we have colleagues at Jamie Ostrov and Buffalo studies actually bullying in the preschool. So we know that it exists early on.
And some other colleagues have shown that babies might have a basic understanding of power balances in interactions. So it probably starts pretty early. We know that in children and adolescents, it peaks right around the age of 13 to 14. And the data isn't 100% lined up, whether that's because when you're usually transitioning schools and so you have to reassert yourself or whether it's because of puberty, but most of the evidence is coming down on the side of puberty.
That once the mating game starts, bullying kicks up another year. That's, there's a whole new level of seriousness, which means between the ages of about 13 to 15 is when bullying peaks. It decreases, but it does continue on into adulthood. Being a bully in high school or elementary school is predicted being a bully in the workplace.
That's certainly my opinion because the shared underlying traits of honesty, humility, which for different, but similar reasons are also the lowest in adolescents it looks like. That's when we bottom out in honesty, humility. It's a time when you separate from your families or thinking about yourselves. So it could explain why somebody like the individual you mentioned was a jerk then and it isn't a jerk later now that they've grown up a little.
But there are many jerks who persisted to adulthood and are happy to continue bullying people throughout adulthood. So childhood bullying is predictive of adult bullying as well. Some people will age out of it, but not everybody will. I have to say one of the things that, okay before I say that, is there any correlation that you have found between the family socioeconomic status, the presence of a father in the home, race differences, like family environments, stuff like that, I'm trying to separate out this honesty humility thing from some of the more environmental factors?
Yeah, so father in the home, we've looked at briefly and I've done other work say on pivotal maturation of father in the home that shoots down that hypothesis, you can know it like I kind of backed it up in the past. Bad neighborhoods and competitive environments exacerbate bullying. So where people endorse competitive attitudes, that status really matters, winning is more important than having fun, things like that, that increases bullying, having role models who bully increases bullying. There's a really interesting study that was done by some colleagues in, I believe it was North Carolina and North Carolina is a purple state and in 2016 they did a study in 2015 and 2017 and in the districts that went hard red for Trump a year after, so for 2015 to 2017 there was an increase in racialized bullying in those districts, which why and only those districts are assumptions, they're copying their role model and what their role model is doing.
So role models matter, the really interesting thing about SES, which typically being poor is associated with risk factors, not bullying, it's the opposite. Wealthier kids are more likely to be bullies and the reason for that is because they have power. If you're the kid who has the best clothes and you just came back from Europe and kids can come over to your house and go jet skiing at your cottage, then you have a lot of power that you can use over kids who don't have that. So we actually see that higher SES is a risk factor for bullying.
I'm just trying to think that the kids who have more, that are higher in socioeconomic status that have more resources at home, this isn't necessarily due to the fact that the lessons and worldview that they have is I can do things and not have repercussions, it is more that they are given this baseline of just higher status and from this higher status it means that there is a greater number of people to punch down. That's kind of an interesting way to do it. So I've got it in my head, you know that famous graph, the hypergamy graph of sort of mandating across but then women only kind of dating up. I'm kind of seeing the same thing but for bullying where number one can bully everybody down but number five can only bully from number five down and number ten can only bully from number ten down, it's very difficult to bully up.
So the people that are higher up in terms of socioeconomic status have a larger pool of other people from which to bully. Yeah, I also suspect that you're right that some of it, although our early analysis don't suggest that we're doing more refined analysis. I think some of it is going to come from the parents, wealth is correlated with the same sort of arrogant attitudes of winner take all- High-caught decisions. Yeah, first place in others losers.
To balance out our samples for example when we work with undergraduates, we always get students from the business school because they're habitually lower in honesty, humility because it's a cut throughout world in business, right? It's a dog, a dog, winner takes all. So some of that is certainly trickling down from parents. But one of the really interesting studies we did was showing that maternal monitoring and it's maternal just because women are an average primary caretivers but you get caregiver monitoring is associated with the reduction in bullying.
But then we split that between kids who are high in honesty, humility and kids who are low in honesty, humility. Kids who are high in honesty, humility didn't make any difference at all. They're always low in bullying. So if you're an incenseable kid, it doesn't really matter what your parents are doing or monitoring you because you're not going to be tempted to take advantage of other kids.
It was when the kids were low in honesty, humility themselves. And of course, there's going to be shared genetic and environmental influences from the parents along those lines. But for kids who were low in honesty, humility whose parents didn't watch them, then they were the ones who by far engaged in the most bullying. What do you think's happening there?
Just a lack of supervision and a disposition that tends you towards breaking rules and social norms and stuff without the parent there, you're more likely to succumb to your base instincts. Yeah, exactly. And it's also potentially, if you want to be more sensitive, it might be more sensible for the parents to suggest more subtle ways of gaining power. Because bullying can still, especially in some modern environments, land you in trouble.
Schools have very poor records in general in dealing with bullying. But I think that's really what's underlying it is that without parents there to guide the child, those instincts are kicking in to go for the throat. Just to reiterate what you said earlier on, fatherless homes you haven't managed to find a particularly strong correlation? No, single parents.
Single parenting doesn't seem to be a major predictor. Again, probably because if the cause of a single home isn't honesty, humility, stressing in and of itself isn't going to make a good person turn bad. You tend to see what's the conscientiousness if that gets lower, then yes, you engage in more risk-taking behavior, but that risk-taking behavior doesn't turn in a dark direction unless you have the dark predispositions. So once you start loading up all kinds of different factors.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so interwoven, man. It's so interesting. I love it.
I love how complex it is. It really does seem though, you know, that as with everything, behavioral genetics comes and smashes all of your ideas in the face that you've got a lot of raw materials and you have a disposition and there are things that you can do to kind of nudge it around, but really you kind of are the way you are. There was something that you said before. First off, I'm realizing the reason I probably didn't lose my virginity until the age of 17 is because I got bullied in school, which I don't know whether that's an advantage or disadvantage to have an X-3 year under my belt before I decided to have sex.
The relationship between alcohol use and bullying was something that I thought was super, super interesting, especially coming from the UK, a country where the age of legal age for drinking is 18 as opposed to 21. Yeah, it's a great question. The answer is with everything that's complicated. So for example, kids in China, the other major predictor in Chinese bullying is conscientiousness.
So willingness to plan ahead, think long term versus being impulsive, lazy, et cetera. That doesn't show up in North American data. And we think that's because in China, where many schools have in local parentist, which means they can act like parents, the punishments for bullying are much more severe. So if a kid is caught bullying, they have the power to physically discipline the child, toss the child at a class, expel the child.
You can get spanked in China, though. Yeah, I'm not going to say I know every school of China is in the country, but in the schools we work with. Yes. The in North America, we tend to find its low-agriableness being angry is associated with it, probably because it's not as risky a behavior.
So it's not showing up with just these really impulsive kids. Having said that, alcohol is associated with an increase in all kinds of anti-sociality because it releases impulsivity. So I'd expect it to be a bigger effect in China and it would be in North America or in the UK. But I would suspect that alcohol use would both increase bullying directly as well as correlate with the general pattern of anti-sociality.
Well, you're also going to have probably the people who do start drinking sooner will have a social group, very few 15, 16, 17-year-olds drinking in the house on their own. It's your part of the group. That means if you are part of the group, you probably got status. That means that you have this.
Let's call it like the bullying pool. The bullying pool has been opened up for you a little bit. I also, you know, to fold another thing into the Chinese discussion, Asian people suck at drinking. Like Asian people are not good at drinking.
And, you know, that may be another sort of racial difference. One other thing, I forgot to ask you about the family setup. I'm going to guess that only children are more likely to be bullied than children that have got brothers or sisters and or cousins that live in the neighborhood or go to the same school. Yeah, I would have thought the same thing.
But the data on that is ambiguous. And I think that's partly because data shows that being bullied at home is correlated with being bullied at school. And so if you're older brother or sister and sibling bullying is a newer area of research, it's not my area of research, but what's been done seems to show that it's as toxic as being bullied by strangers. So if your older brother or sister is picking on you, that a might carry over into school and be your behavior and reaction to other kids might carry over to school, making you a more appealing victim.
So it's not the protective factor that we thought in that I'm sure it is in some cases. You've got a good older brother or sister who looks mediated by what the relationship with the siblings is like. Yeah. So a double edge, I guess is the short way of saying it, having siblings.
So many other categories with bullying, it's a double edge. Is bullying, okay, so getting into the sort of more ancestral reasons we've spoken about, kind of, I guess, the school yard mostly. I'm going to guess that bullying must have been used ancestrally to foster social cohesion in one form or another. What else that and then what else was it useful?
Similar things, getting resources. So you want that piece of needs. A lot of hunter-gatherers divide into equally well, you believe people to get in your family better needs or more needs. You believe that people across pills not to come in the hunter territory, even though you go into their design occasion, you interrogate the reputations of competitors, especially in adolescence, when you're getting ready to enter that dating pool.
You don't want to be with her. She's not faithful. Interestingly, one of the things that really tuned me into the evolutionary research is a book by Jean Briggs, Never in Anger. And it's a book about her life with the Labrador Inuit, the Eskimo in the way that she's done with Inuit.
And they have a social norm that you're not allowed to express anger, which is probably really useful if you're living in an igloo and it's minus 40 and if somebody gets pissed and you break the wall, it'll be free to death. So you're not allowed to get angry, but they still believe. There was a main group of people who stuck together and there was a smaller group. And the main group would make fun of the smaller group, talk about how stingy they were, they can share.
They weren't a social or friendly. And then the main group had a bit of a food shortage and had to rely on the weaker group, right, for things around. And there's some really interesting dynamics. But there's a case where that group versus group theme, which is a really, really powerful driver of human behavior, it is very easy to turn one group against another, which is something we're looking at in adolescence.
It's trickier to do, but we're really interested in seeing what happens when two groups start bullying each other's weak members. My guess is it either fades away or very quickly escalates. Talk to me about how social media has changed the landscape of bullying. Yeah, social media, I'm really not a fan of.
You know, I heard somebody describe it well, it was Max Tegman that it's our first experiment with AI interfering with our lives and it did not go well. The algorithms that it uses are not friendly. So there's a number of impacts. The first and most obvious is that it's made it really hard to track down bullies.
And when I talked to the school principals at the schools that we work with, the fantastic schools here in the Niagara region, the principals tell me how difficult it is when one of their students is being bullied, but it's being done online. So what authority does the principal have to shut down an Instagram account or it's really done on Twitter, but Snapchat or TikTok, wherever it is, it makes it much easier to bully without having repercussions, which means it's an attractive option. Fortunately, the data shows that the kids who bully the most online are the same kids who are bullying in person. So it hasn't encouraged these kids, who I would say are probably not low and honest, they can't even suddenly start taking up bullying.
But it has made it much harder for us to prevent cases of bullying where the bullies are smart enough. It's not a giant link with intelligence to say, OK, but it's just making an honest account. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing that they can do compared to even slanting into a locker in front of the teacher.
So that aspect has certainly been very toxic. The general dynamics of social media are especially for girls' toxic. It's not my area of specialty. But one of the interesting we found looking at data from pre to post pandemic is that girls suffered a higher decline in mental health for boys.
And we think part of that is because of how much time they spend on social media. And we know young boys and social media, I can see it in my sons. They do the same sort of thing that we did when you're going to play video games with their friends, they're yelling at each other, you idiot, when you do that. No, you shot me, you picked up my health pack.
But it's the same sort of thing they'd probably be doing if they were to live together. We'll spend a lot more time doing social comparison. And those algorithms don't show you a balanced field of life. They show the worst or the best, you know, the most sensationalized views, which make girls more vulnerable for the effects of bullying as victims.
You're not just comparing yourself to the best looking girl at school. You're comparing yourself to the best looking girls on the internet, which is not a fair or smart comparison to be making. And the kind of media that they use is more conducive to that kind of bullying than it is in the socially and the voice sentence. Yeah, it's a gene twangy on the show recently, Lady the Road Eye Gen and New Book Generations.
And it's not going on. It's like, what is it? 60% of teenage girls say that they have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness. Like, it's just such a dark statistic.
And yeah, I, the weird thing is that it's such a high number of girls, unless you're saying that 60% of the girls are being bullied by 40% of the girls, which, you know, I wouldn't imagine that 40% of all girls are bullies, especially not up against this other group. It's just like an ambient, permeated displeasure that everybody feels. It's not done by somebody. It's baked into the code and the experience of the technology itself, which makes it even worse.
At least you could do an intervention with the individuals if it was coming from individuals, but if it's coming from the medium that you exist in, that's even harder. Looking at modern civilization, then, school, we've spoken about an awful lot today, compared to an ancestral lifestyle, have we created an environment which is more conducive to bullying in school, a perfect storm for bullying? Yes and no. Well, certainly yes.
One of the things that mediates bullying, and Peter Gray wrote a really nice series of articles about this, is you have mixed age and often mixed sex play in hunter-gatherer groups. Because for most times of the year, almost all hunter-gatherers live in small bands about 20 to 25. And then, seasonally, when times are good, they get together with the extended family, 100, 150 for a few months. So most of the time, you only have, you know, say, half the group or kids, you've got 12 kids to pick from.
So it's harder to have these isolated cliques. Everybody sort of has to get along. And the mixed age play reduces the need to show off. The 12-year-old doesn't need to show that they're better than their eight-year-old cousin.
And the 12-year-old boy isn't as motivated to compete against a 12-year-old girl. Right. So because each cohort that would be competing for status and is sufficiently similar in status for bullying to be a useful tool, is so small, there is basically no point in, but there's one person from this age and this age and this age and this age at each gender, and that's it. Right.
And on top of that, most of them are going to be related. So that's a kin selection, so that's a break on attacking copies of your genes and other bodies. So those are reasons why I think modern society, and in particular as well, you have adults who step in and are motivated to step in. And we know that one of the big factors that motivates teachers is whether they feel a motivated to be competent in intervening, whereas in the past, you know, you'd be living with your aunt and uncles and they would have no problems saying knock that off.
In large part because that sort of behavior is rarely tolerated. The downside to ancestral environments is that the stakes could be potentially higher. So if you and I were siblings and there's one piece of meat, yes, you have 50% of my genes, but I have 100%. So unless I'm saving two of my brothers, I should be bullying to get that meat.
And so the competition in that sense could be life or death, which would increase the benefit of engaging in bullying. So my guess is that bullying is probably less common in the past, but when it did happen, it had the potential to become very serious. I want to talk about some interventions and stuff now. So you mentioned that one of the challenges that teachers face on and so forth was a quote from you, which I really liked, which was bullying is neither innate and all learned, but it is the interaction between two natural predispositions, selfless versus selfish and individual environments, the households we grow up in, for instance, promote or hinder these predispositions.
That's why it's possible to reduce bullying, but challenging to do so. What have you learned about interventions that work? What is bad? What is bad?
What is good? Where do teachers struggle? Where do parents struggle? etc.
Yeah, that's, you know, in some ways, the million dollar question. And when I tell my students about development, the two things I tell them, the big class that I teach on development is number one, we don't have brains this big. Defying food and avoid predators. We have brains this big to figure out how to interact and compete against other brains this big.
It's the only reason we have big brains. So it's going to be complicated. Number one. And number two, development is never nature versus nurture.
It's always the combination of the two. So what's more important than making a chocolate chip cookie, having chocolate chips or having an oven, like the major ingredients or the environment, you need both. And every child is the product of both. So I don't believe in pure determinism, either from the environment or genetics.
Having said that, you know, some kids are going to come with different ingredients. Some kids are going to be having different predispositions. And some kids are obviously going to come from different ovens, different environments. And so some of the things that we've seen are that purely social interventions, where we rely on kids just plain learning, don't work.
And my favorite example of that was in Norway, where the father of bullying research, Dan Olves integrated a huge program where every level of government from federal to whatever version of provincial or state is city, to schools, to parents, all got in and everybody cracked down on bullying. And they reduced bullying by something like 30 to 40 percent, one of the biggest reductions we've seen at a large scale ever. That worked really well for three years. And then what did the government do?
It's expensive. So the government said, hey, this problem's done. Stop spending money on it. And bullying shot right back up to normal, which is a really strong argument against it being learned because if this was a learned, purely learned behavior, kids would have seen low levels of bullying for years and they would have just stuck with that behavior.
The fact that pop back up suggests that it's really this cost benefit. So that's where the better programs are aimed at. So one of the more widely distributed ones, and I'll talk about the one that we're promoting is Kiva done by Christina Salavali and some other Finnish folk that's now gone across the world and it relies on peers to knock down bullying. Say, this isn't cool.
It's not effective. We're not going to be status and popularity. And it knocks down bullying by about 20, 25 percent. Really interestingly though, they found that it only works on low and medium popularity bullies, probably a lot of the bully victims.
When the bullies are high in popularity, their peers don't impact them, which makes sense. The popular kids aren't going to listen to what a group of well-meaning and Patrick, you know, mid popularity kids are telling them. And the problem is most bullying is done by really popular kids. So it's very hard to change peer behavior when the leaders of the peers are the ones who are doing the behavior.
So that's a limitation of peer-based interventions. We've tried something called the meaningful roles, which is an attempt to try and give students some way of meeting their goals that they want their predispositions so that kids low and honestly humility is eric, wants attention, wants to be at the top, find a way of keeping them busy so they're not able to bully you on the time, but also be that they're able to meet that goal. And so one of the things that we do is we assign a variety of jobs in different people in the class. And we think that being the Walmart door graders is not a high status thing, but if you're a 13 year old in grade eight and everybody who comes in the class, you say, hi, welcome to Mrs.
Smith's grade eight class and they have to say hi back. You're getting a lot of social spotlight on you, a lot of attention. And so in a way, you're getting that status and visibility that you want in a pro-social way. And we found that reduces overall school violence by 70%.
So you're giving them a way of getting what they want without harming others. Some people say, is that rewarding beliefs? And that's a tricky thing because in a way we are. But the hope is that over time, and we know personality is fixed, either personality is a predisposition, not a destiny, that they start shifting towards them or more pro-social way, realizing, hey, I can get what I want and still be kind to others.
And I think we really need that combination of the care of the stick because overall bullying interventions have largely failed miserably. It's a very hard behavior to get rid of, which suggests we need these really multi-pronged, multi-modal interventions. And of course, it doesn't help that in the adult world could see all kinds of examples of people getting away with bullying and getting great things. You know, Donald Trump, whatever you like or not, I think he's a fantastic example of a bully who's been very successful.
He's got millions, not billions of dollars, married three supermodels, six kids, and reputation of dominance between the president of the United States. He ticked the boxes for how being aggressive and kicking down can work. And he's not the only one. There's lots of celebrities and sports in media that show that being me can work.
And so even if we have a perfect school intervention, if kids are learning that, okay, once you hit Wall Street, you have to be ruthless. You know, care about other people's throats. Once they see their parents playing in their sports league and, you know, stomping on their competition or cheating on their taxes, doing whatever they can to get ahead, kids are going to copy that. So it's a really difficult behavior to get rid of because there's not only genetic predispositions, but there's so many examples in the environment of how being a bully can be effective.
Have you been able to track whether or not bullying has increased longitudinally because I would throw science my way into saying that because we see in popular media now, at least on the surface, more dark, triad, adjacent type behavior, people being backed by T reality, television, that kind of trend of like proximal, like an silary to psychopathy, Machiavellianism and manipulative type stuff that that would have trickled down to more young people seeing that as a path to success. Is that something you've seen? Is it trending up? Is it trending down?
In Canada, the data that I'm aware of, these are data from tens of thousands of kids. Over the last 20 years, despite bullying interventions at every school and lots of bullying awareness days, a pink shirt day, etc. So lots of interventions. The number of people who say that they bully others has decreased by 20%.
The number of kids who say that they've been victimized hasn't changed at all. And I think that's because of these opposing forces that we are trying to make inroads. Kids today are more empathic. Really neat study I just read that over the last 50 years, people have become more generous in economic aims and prisoners dilemma.
So there's an argument to be made that we're more cooperative than we were 50, 60 years ago in general. But there's also many of these examples of these hyper competitive individuals and hyper competitive media incentives that are still creating a lane for kids who think that they can really do well by bullying others. Is the implication there that the number of bullies has reduced or the number of people who say that they bully has reduced? We don't know.
It's a great question. Little bastards that they are. You know, one of the things that I often hear is you're setting honesty humility and how do you expect people who are low and honest to do self or false appropriately? Yeah, get fucked, Tony.
But they admit to a lot of stuff. You will have once you give anonymity, they'll admit to bullying, they'll admit to dating violence if we don't do it in high schools, but the only university is the limit to rape abuse, they'll admit to serious stuff. If it's anonymous, if you made them stand up in front of the class, don't everybody put your hand up that's been a rapist this year. Yeah, I imagine that that's not exactly going to happen very commonly.
And what about for just punishment work? Like, are there any punishments that work to disincentivize bullies for getting rehabilitation, just simply encouraging them to stop doing it? Does anything work? Yeah, I've always said it's a cost benefit behavior and that these kids are behaving rationally or adaptively.
And so if you increase the cost, it makes you less likely to do the behavior. We know that the very best defense against bullying is retaliation, fighting back. We also know that the very worst thing for escalating bullying is fighting back. It's double edged in that if you are able to deter the bully and they say, like, okay, geez, this is too tough of a nut to crack, then they'll find somebody else.
But if you do it in a way that says shows up the bully, well, then they have to give up everything they got or they double down and they double down and it gets much worse. So direct retaliation, which is what most people, kids and adults say to do, is very risky. It's high risk, high reward. The study in the in Norway shows that if everybody clamps down, you can reduce bullying.
But you're if you only focus on the negatives, you know, I joke with the school board and my colleagues that I used to be invited to be lots of schools to talk about bullying. But now that my message is bullying will get you sex, power, popularity, resources, and this is the next bit and we have a hard time catching you and prosecuting you. So please don't do it. I don't get to it.
Which is the other part of it. It's really hard to find that same BBC style video documentary, these kids filming them in the early yard showed that adults were present only 20% of the time. So kids know not to do it in front of adults and 10% of the time or sorry, after time that it was there. So 10% of total 50% of the time than adults was there.
You've nothing about it. So kids know that adults are going to miss a lot of this. Is there an element that when the adults is around? There's a selection bias that the kid who is doing the bullying is more likely to be the one that's maybe a bit likable.
They're probably socially a little bit more adept. The kid that is being picked on is the one that's maybe a bit less likable. They're a bit weird. The adult doesn't really feel as much of an affinity.
How much does that contribute? You think huge and we've done some informal studies on this. I've never had the time to sit down and do a formal study, but I guarantee question, say I guarantee I'm very confident that the stereotype of a bully of being lonely for self-esteem, bad social skills, came from school teachers and principals catching the belief victims. You know, these kids who really do come from a broken home have bad social skills and they've solved everything with their fists.
Right. Yeah. But whereas the kids who come from those affluent homes who are heading up the, it could be the chess club or the cheerleading team who are really popular in the class have good social skills. Uh, they don't get caught.
And when they do, they say, oh, we were just kidding. We're so sorry. You know, we never do that. We're sorry.
And you know, the John has always been a little bit weird. He just doesn't really understand what's going on. Yeah, exactly. So it is absolutely skewed by that.
And not to mention that their parents are more likely to be wealthy, which is more likely to make a fuss. And their parents probably have the kind of personality that would be likely to make a fuss rather than say, okay, okay, I'm going to take this seriously. Yeah, it's a difficult one. A, um, trying to, trying to pass apart all of that again, you know, I, I'm always going to have a soft spot for the bully, for the victim of the bullying, because that was me for a long time, especially the person that would have been super socially inept, that would have been catastrophically unlikable to probably most of the adults that were around me because I was just struggling to do the social thing.
And I can remember a time, it was this one time during drama class, and I hadn't, I'd done my homework and one of the bullies hadn't done his and he snatched mine off me and said that he was going to hand it in as his and then need me in the head and then I was upset because I just got needed in the head and I got sent out of the class because I was making a fuss and he managed to not only take my homework, but also worm his way into the drama teacher sending me away. So yeah, I think it's such a double edged sword, that lack of like social capacity as a young kid, because not only does it make you more vulnerable and likely to being a victim of bullying, it makes you less adept at being able to explain to the people in power what's happening. It makes you less believable. There's probably less sympathy generally that's just being pushed your way because you don't have those, those sorts of skills.
You mentioned before about this double edged sword of fighting back. It's both the best and the worst response that you can give. In what ways can fighting back be done in a manner which will make it more likely to be a good response and less likely to be a bad response? The best thing to do is to recognize that this is a cowardly unfair fight.
This isn't two guys, you know, squaring off from the octagon in a sanctioned fight to see who stuff is. This is an MMA fighter picking on somebody on the street, doesn't even know what's happening and MMA fighters got five bodies behind him. So bringing in support, changing the power imbalance by bringing in adults, bringing in friends, change it to an arena where you have some power and preferably do it privately. I wouldn't advise kids to fight back, but if you're going to do it, don't do it publicly.
I mean, I've written a couple articles or opinions op-eds on Putin. Now he looks just like a schoolyard bully. And the problem he has is the same as schoolyard bullies. He backs down now.
He loses a ton of his credit. It's a public audience that's watching, right? Okay. So if you were to fight the bully in the schoolyard or you're just fighting the bully in the schoolyard in front of everybody else, it's not even though you might think, you know, you could grow psychology away into believing that sends a message to him and his fucking friends that they shouldn't do it again.
But what you've done is you've caused that bully to lose a ton of status in front of the people that are the most important, whereas if you're to see him on the walk home, if this is a physical invention or whatever, like standing up to him is going to happen, doing it where they're not going to lose face is actually a much more effective way to do it, because it may be a final full stop that they can bow out of, uh, was being relatively costless to them. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's one of the ironic things that, uh, people who are low in agreeableness, I'm a little low in agreeableness as my whole family. The joke was don't poke a vote.
Um, we make, I sense it probably there's a little bit of that view, uh, because these are the kind of people who are high in age, which is humble me to say, but low in A, make good crusaders, you know, the people who stand up for other people who don't tolerate injustice will do not put up with people taking advantage of others. But we see from victims, uh, in schools, victims in workplaces and whistleblowers that that often blows back against the person who's reacting back. Right. So they'll say like, why is he flipping out?
But the other person's really calm. Tony or Chris is really upset. Well, he's upset because he got me in the head or told me upset because this person was bullying a graduate student, don't even like it. But all they see is one of us yelling.
And that's one of the skills that bullies have is very quickly pivoting. So it looks like the person fighting back is the one who's the aggressive one. They're being unreasonable. You can see how unreasonable they're being.
Okay. So what would you say to parents? Let's say that there is a parent listening whose kid is either or first a bully and second being bullied. What are your best piece of advice for them?
Yeah. First for the parent whose kid is being a bully, um, they're being a coward. Uh, they're engaging in a behavior that is going to likely keep happening in life. So they'll behave this way with their siblings.
They'll behave this way with you when you get older and you're elderly, they'll behave this way in the workplace. They'll behave this way with your spouse. They'll behave this way with his kid. So if you don't want to live around a bully, the rest of your life, step in and intervene and recognize that 20% of kids do this.
I mean, it's not these kids aren't psychopaths. You know, your kid is not irredeemable or, uh, you know, going down a difficult path. I don't want to say they're all psychopaths or you're redeemable, but just trying to not catastrophize it. Uh, but take it very seriously.
Um, if you have any kind of sense of fairness and ethics, your kid is breaking the rules and you can't let them do that for, and don't buy their excuse. That's the other thing that we've been saying, which I think parents would have gotten is if your kid is willing to believe, they're probably willing to lie about it. What, what's the intention? What do you say to your kid?
It depends on the specific child and what you're doing. I first asked, you know, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? You know, that there's a power bounce.
You know, this is really weak. You know, this is, uh, not something I support. It's a moral base one that's aiming to change the underlying honesty, the ability in the short run, we know that monitoring works, so keeping a tighter leash on them until you have confidence that they're not doing it is effective, following up with the teachers, telling the teachers that, you know, this, um, and that you're happy to be contacted if anything comes up again, knows it's again ratcheting up that monitoring system so that you're essentially making more costly for them to engage in that behavior. They're not going to be believed that they say they were just teasing.
They're going to get caught. They're going to get punished. And then if they do, well, reward them. You know, as I said, care and sit, if it's been two, three months and you legitimately have a sense that things have gone better, then you have to take them out for ice cream, but praise them, tell them that you're proud that they've changed, they're being more mature.
That's the way that good people and good societies work. And then if your child is being victimized, the first and most important thing, especially with adolescents is trying to have open lines of communication. And I've got a 20 year old, 14 or 12 year old. So I'm well aware of how challenging it can be to communicate with adolescents at times, but the more you're able to do that, the more you're likely to hear about the victimization or see changes related to it, which are commonly symptoms of anxiety or depression that increase and in particular desire to not go to the place where bullying has happened to no longer want to go to school.
I just need a day off and sit, et cetera. And that's a real risk, like, to jump in and get involved. Because the bully has chosen this person. I can't emphasize that enough that almost every bully strategically changes a victim who can't effectively fight back.
And so it's very rare that if they picked on somebody who could potentially punch their way out, they would probably bully them in a way that if they did that, it would be really bad. So bring a girl and so a boy and a girl to use a guy. So what is he going to do punch the girl? Then everybody else's guys, the psycho needs to be lost.
It's like, so number one, lines of communication. Number two, contact the school and make sure they take it seriously. There's far too many people who think that bullying is a rite of passage. And the analogy I like to use is that conflict like exercise strengthens you.
So, you know, if you exercise and you stress your bones, they get stronger. But if you have too much stress and you break a bone, that bone is never as strong as it was when it was, you know, whole before it was broken. And the same thing happens to bullying. If you have severe bullying, other researchers have shown that it affects your immune response for decades.
It affects the expression of your genes for decades. It's not a minor thing. It's not a rite of passage. And if you child has been chosen as a victim, it's usually like back is because they can't.
The bully is most cases they have found a way to prevent the victim from doing that. So bring an allies, you know, the school teachers, if they have any friends, that's really important. If they don't have a lot of friends, go out of your way to try and help them make friends. We know that having friends doesn't reduce bullying dramatically, about 10, 20%.
But what it does do dramatically is reduces the long term impact. Because if you're 13 or 14, 15, you're a teenager and your peers are telling you you're worthless, either directly or implicitly by bullying you, it doesn't really help to hear from mom and dad say you're a fine, lovely person or your grandma or your aunt to say it. You really need to hear that from peers. And so having even just one friend cuts the odds of serious mental health outcomes by over 50%.
So get involved, listen to your kid and get them support. What are the potential serious mental health outcomes from somebody that is being bullied and it's untreated, but you know what I mean? Yeah, it's lifelong risks of depression and anxiety. And of course, we've seen unfortunately a number of tragic incidents that result in suicide.
Some of the murder suicides and school shootings have been blamed on bullying, but we certainly know there's many more kids who are dying on their own hands because they can't take it. And of course, that's an area where the internet has become particularly pernicious or dangerous, is because it doesn't go away. You know, back in my day, you know, with the school in the 80s or 90s, if you were bullied at school, which I really wasn't, but if you were, you know, you could go home and you'd have a sanctuary from all that. Now you can't, it's on your phone, it's on the message, it's on the boards.
And so you're putting your child in the place where they're fighting an unfair battle against people who are actively trying to hurt them. I can't imagine as a parent anything that would motivate me more strongly to stand up and say, you know, get lost, which is ultimately why I went down this road of research. It's really not fair to the kids who are being picked on. What about getting your kids to do some sort of team sport, getting involved at a local either team sport or maybe a boxing gym as well?