The Evolutionary Psychology Of Bullies - Tony Volk

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 uh Wendy Craig at Queen's University had a whole pile of data and she needed a PhD student to work on it um 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 bully yeah the biggest thing is that our group really asks why Bullying happens seeing as it's ubiquitous over time across cultural 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 um okay so how do you define bullying what is it yeah another great question um we Define bullying as a deliberate uh aggressive attempt against a weaker individual that causes harm so it's got to be gold directed it's got to uh 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 imbalance so bullying in that regard can't happen to somebody who is of equal status or higher 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 uh at first seems a little counter-intuitive from an evolutionary perspective and that what you often find is that in nature there's dominatories so bullying is often confused with the alpha male beta male Etc but it's really unusual in dominance hierarchies for number two to pick on number 17 in the hierarchy that's the whole point of the Dominator they shouldn't 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 the resources um you want the best spot in the play yard you want that scholarship that they'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 isn't 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 uh a 10 year old and you're beating up a four-year-old that's not really impressive right if you're in grade 12 and you're picking on a Grade 9 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 that's 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 um a lot of bullying that we've observed happens with an audience over 80 percent of bullying that we've observed uh again colleague Wendy Craig and dad probably did 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 percent of the time when somebody was bullying somebody else they were uh 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 uh sexual partner into things that you might not want public but as far as the majority of bullying that you see uh on the playground especially in its 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 uh setups or Dynamics between a bully and a victim yeah we for a long time thought that the problem was of one of a relationship that the bullying the victim didn't get along and if we could somehow sit down the Lamb 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 um or a mismatch between individuals number one is that interventions that sit the land down with the 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 you put the bully with the victim in front of adults and okay the bully plays nice for two weeks and then as soon as the adults are done looking they get the 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 uh victims tend to uh have weaker levels of power so they're less uh socially connected they're more likely to have mental health issues to begin with that bullying exacerbates um 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 somebody's socially strong will pick on a socially isolated individual somebody who's mentally and socially quick will pick on somebody who doesn't have strong mental or social skills so the 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 um younger age if you're younger within the grade or younger overall and then now we're currently looking at adolescence you know the data in but I suspect we're going to find that being isolated from the dating game is also an important factor now for aggression you tend to find that being involved in the dating game makes you more likely to be targeted by aggression but that's by uh equal level peers yep yep yep 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 uh successfully retaliated against 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 hit over there he's friends with a girl who I like so they're off limits so it's very strategic it's interesting that there's almost like this Goldilocks zone where below a particular threshold of weakness or vulnerability uh the 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 bullies yeah that's a good example of a situation that could very easily backfire um because it's very it bullies are very skilled at saying oh we're just taking the piss out of this guy we're just having fun we're teasing goofing around um and they're especially as kids get older they do less physical building boys do more physical bullying than girls there's a surprise City more physical aggression of all kinds but as kids get older you know if you have a couple of eight-year-olds punching another kid it's not that bad in terms of the physical damage if you have a couple of 18 year olds wailing away on somebody you know bones are broken things are chipped so they shift to these uh 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 again one of the things that you know we went into this was the assumption that these aren't broken kids um and the first thing that steered me in this direction was I was working on that original data set 10 000 kids uh from the World Health Organization they look at kids school health and 10 000 kids in Canada and I noticed that bullies yes were 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 uh who have poor social skills and in fact research has shown that they don't have deficits in uh mental health they don't have deficits in social skills they don't have deficits and 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 uh it's a six-factor personality scale a really new Dynamic personality scale that really captures any social behavior with this trait and essentially honestly 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 wouldn't 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 Dutch data and Canadian and North American data that this honesty humility is really what's driving uh individuals to engage in that behavior along with having power so another really interesting study from the Netherlands showed that not only do police gain in popularity uh when they engage in bullying the kids who become more popular power corrupts them and they become more likely to be bullies themselves right so there are a lot of incentives here for a 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 uh by rising up through your own dominance hierarchy more Prestige uh greater social uh circles also didn't you do something that looked at uh 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 into passing on your genes it doesn't matter so we did a study uh that kind of surprised us it hit number seven on Reddit when it came out that bullies have more sex um than non-bullies and that accounted for both uh early adolescence and in later in adolescence both boys and girls so it wasn't a case that uh it was just you know dominant boys monopolizing a gene pool but um 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 uh I'm trying to think of how I think it was almost 50 years now at least 40 years ago but uh 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 uh looking at 30 year olds uh and 30 year olds who were 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 sociosexuality 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 girls would get more access maybe some intersexual competition stuff here that you've derogated some female Rivals and you rise up but I don't know man like even when I was a young full of magic and RuneScape 15 year old I don't think I thought the girls that bullied were like more hot or charming I can see it in reverse everybody could understand why the you know 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 I don't think that it would work in Reverse so yeah I wonder whether sociosexuality just kind of folds into this more the most socially Adept they're 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 um and in the case of girls we know that kids who victimized uh 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 it's often the prototype for girls bullying and they're pretty nasty with each other when it comes to guys attention and so certainly intra-sexual competition is important intersexually these girls uh are dominants 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 when you think in Canada here we talk about the hockey moms uh in the US and UK is probably soccer moms right uh maybe southern us it's the football moms those moms are intimidating and perhaps attractive to to the male partners because they say 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 um so 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 I know that the the C and the O and the a uh have a bit of crossover um 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 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 UH 60 70 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 and Western samples 60 to 70 percent of that difference can be explained by genetics hexaco is like um the big five but much better it's got better cross-cultural growing shade throwing shade at the big five oh I I the guy who came up with it is at my University along with Kim Lee Mike Ashton um and they were trying to replicate the big five as grad students across cultures and it didn't come out uh as five in English it comes out as five or six so the original Big Five creators took parsimony and said in English we'll go with five you're right that there's a lot of similarities extroversion conscientiousness openness are 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 and by social I mean cooperation mutualism is when you each get something to benefit from that's uh you know 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 reciprocal altruism is uh you scratch my back all scratch ears at a later date now the hexaco honesty humility maps on with your willingness to cheat on others to look after yourself so if you think of something like the prisoner's dilemma um 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 um 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 now you and your mate go out for uh lunch and they forget their wallet say screw it we're done through you know or do you tolerate that and allow it to continue now obviously that's good for continuing the relationship but if you're really agreeable your Ned Flanders people can take advantage of you emotionality maps on really nicely with uh 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 emotionality and I'm in a lower in agreeableness on hexaco yeah yeah uh they're more likely to get angry um and retaliate than men are is that 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 onto the specific function um so you've got emotionality which is basically kin selection um are you sentimental do you have high levels of emotional empathy um do you worry a lot which is what we've seen a lot of uh mothers and women that's why you find more vegetarians for example amongst women but then the hexago is uh h and a are 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 the scores for hexaco yep uh uh hexaco h-e-x-a-c-o.org is where uh 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 um you know I don't know if we want to transition a little away from bullying but one of the more interesting findings we did in our my career was look at the big five and other personality measures predicting the dark Triad psychopathy uh narcissism machiavellianism which is basically scheming strategic and we found that the hexaco outperformed uh all the other personality measures including the big five and then the one that really blew us away uh was a colleague Gordon Hodson said you know the dark Triad all cluster together if you think of overlapping circles because it shares a common core that Common Core of anti-social selfishness and so we look to see how the core of the dark Triad overlapped with the core of the hexaco and I was expecting a correlation to be pretty big uh 0.5.6 correlation was 0.95 so it's the same thing and that's been replicated now in 17 different countries that being bad is basically being this the same thing as being low in honesty humility wow the nail in the coffin of the Big Five personality assessment there okay so going back going back to the bullying thing um I'm very interested in the sext differences in bullying what why do girls bully why do boys bully and how do they do it differently yeah absolutely both are are bullying for the similar sorts of things for resources uh for reputations for reproduction there's a couple other potential functions deterrence and Recreation we can talk about but boys and girls while they have some different pressures both of them need to secure resources boys more than girls um and both of them need to secure a reputation in their status hierarchies we know from primate literatures and human literatures that high-ranking women uh 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 men have a greater degree of variance in reproductive outcomes so the greatest bullies in history I think of folks like Genghis Khan who's father of one percent of the world's population alive today he and his family are the ancestors would be a better way of saying that um so there's a huge incentive for boys to take risks that isn't present in girls so girls tend to engage in uh Less Direct bullying so indirect verbal and indirect social bullying but boys also engage in a lot of that behavior too their boys can be very strategic about spreading rumors um 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 manliness I mean just to interject the women chasing after chess or females chasing after Chastity and derogating that in their Rivals and Men about Manliness I the first time that I learned this from through an evolutionary lens it blew my mind because it's so plain and obvious and everybody knows this you know that my favorite example of this did you see that uh Greta turnberg got into a spot with Andrew Tate like three months ago on Twitter so Andrew was saying I'm gonna drive my supercars and I'm gonna emit CO2 and [ __ ] you Greta like you're an idiot uh and she quote tweeted him I think it's like it's like the one of the most liked tweets of all time now I think she's got two of the top ten I'm pretty sure they're both Andrew Tate and um she accused him of small dick energy and I thought okay okay anybody that needs a massive social experiment showing what people think men value the most small dick energy what are you derogating that you're derogating manliness you're derogating formidability 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 [ __ ] you you slag like because again what is that that is a derogation of Chastity uh one of the brutal things I learned about this over the last couple of months is that um 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 like 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 just love I love that uh sex difference in terms of what gets targeted and the fact that that shows up in bullying isn't surprising yeah absolutely uh you know 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 socials cues so they really know how to hit kids where it hurts but that's individualistic you know one of my I don't say favorite because against the wrong connotation but one of the more powerful or interesting stories I heard was about Lou Ferrigno uh a bodybuilder who for listeners who don't know play The Incredible Hulk without any CGI or makeup that just painted him 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 you talk and that's not something you can punch your way out of if people are causing calling 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 sends the strongest signal right 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 yeah she messed around with this one guy but I destroyed your reputation you mess with me it's gonna happen to you does this mean that bullies are smarter on average the data on IQ shows that they are average so they're not necessarily smarter or uh or more cunning I think the biggest difference comes in the low honesty humility means they're willing to use these things I mean I'm sure you know hang out with your friends a lot of soft spots that you can hurt them with the difference is you don't 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 and I got this really uh heartfelt message from a guy who used to bully me in school and he'd seen this interview I'd done with the BBC and he had to reach out and apologize very like super super moving and I'm trying to think back to my experience as much as I've probably tried to shove bits of it away uh trying to think back to my experience and and map myself onto the lessons that you're teaching us here and um the honesty humility thing I find myself being uh quite orderly I don't break rules very much um and I think that that like procedural classic British stand in a line follow the the rules and procedures thing I think that's 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 like pretty bad about [ __ ] people over if I say something that's mean that I know has probably heard someone who maybe even hasn't heard them but I'll worry about whether or not it has so that's in there and then when you were talking about um the the bullies not using that and and being able to kind of uh Precision strike derogate uh I was smaller um when I was in school even though I'm a little bigger now uh would have been not Dumber I would have been probably smart or Smarter on average than um 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 in a test or got higher grades or was moved up a class or or did whatever um that would become also a justification for uh bullying down the line so yeah I think that um to like trying 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 formidability and some pretty high social isolation coupled with lack of social capability uh that just made me like an absolute perfect Target yeah and there's a number of things to dive into there but I think the first and most important is victims recognizing that it's not their fault uh bullies are going through it's it's almost like you know 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 uh victims that we call provocative victims who are sometimes bully victims themselves and I should qualify now that when 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 months as they have bad social skills they've disregulated uh Etc how common are they yeah I was just gonna say they don't do most of the bullying uh estimates are less than 30 percent uh 70 to 80 of the bullies is bullying that's done is done by the really dominant kids and so they're picking in a very cowardly way uh somebody that can't effectively fight back the kids were picking on Lou Ferrigno might have been smaller but they knew that he couldn't respond without you know looking more socially awkward the only way he can defend himself is by punching his this guy's 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 in honesty humility you have what you said You Believe In fairness you know I've seen some of your interviews you try and present a balanced view um you don't take advantage of people uh when the opportunity presents itself and 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 um and if you look at almost any action hero that's been in Hollywood from the 80s onward right even before that Clint Eastwood they all have the profile of they're very low in emotionality and empathy they're very low in agreeableness but they're high in honesty humility these are good people until you piss them off yeah they've got that Noble side to them right right and it's that nobility that's why we like them uh in the sense that yes you think of John Wick how many people you've killed in this series such as dog don't touch his [ __ ] dog that's the lesson but we still like him because he's honorable and he has that sense with him and that um 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 um is intimidating the captain of the football team's intimidating but you don't really want to spend a lot of time with them unless you're directly gaining from their power yeah and we trickle down effect of 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 adjusts over time but what about if we roll forward from school into adulthood the workplace the the neighborhood Etc so we had Jamie ostrov in uh Buffalo studies actually bullying in the preschool so we know that uh it exists early on and some other colleagues have shown that babies might have a basic understanding of power imbalances and 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 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 gear that there's a whole new level of seriousness which means between the ages about 13 to 15 is when bullying Peaks it decreases but it does continue on into adulthood being a bully in uh high school or Elementary School is predictive of being a bullying in the workplace almost certainly in my opinion because the shared underlying traits of honest and humility which for different but similar reasons are also the their lowest in adolescence it looks like that's when we bottom out an honesty humility it's a time when you separate from your family and start thinking about yourselves so it could explain why somebody like the 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 persist into 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 dude I 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 [Music] um uh like a family environment stuff like that I'm trying to separate out you know the this honesty humility thing from some of the more environmental factors yeah so um father in the home we've looked at briefly um and I've done other work say on pubertal maturation a father in their home that I think shoots down that hypothesis even though I kind of backed it up in the past um bad neighborhoods and competitive environments exacerbate bullying what's a competitive environment so where people endorse competitive attitudes um that status really matters winning is more important than having fun things like that um that increases bullying uh having role models who bully uh increases bullying there's a really interesting study that was done by some colleagues in um I believe it was North Carolina uh 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 um a year after so from 2015 to 2017 there was an increase in racialized bullying uh in those districts which why and only those districts our assumption is They're copying their role model um and what their role model is doing uh so Role Models matter the really interesting thing about SCS which typically you know 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 uh the best clothes and you just came back from Europe and kids can come over to your house and go you know jet skiing uh 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 right so 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 a greater number of people to punch down on 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 you know number one can bully everybody down but number five can only Bully from number five down and number ten can only believe from number 10 down it's very difficult to bully up um 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 I also suspect that you're right uh 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 uh winner take all uh High conversations yes first place and then there's 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 Cutthroat World in business right it's Doggy 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 um maternal monitoring and maternal just because women are an average primary caregivers but you can take caregiver monitoring uh is associated with a reduction in bullying but then we split that between kids who are high in honesty humility and kids who are low and honestly humility kids who are high in honesty humility it didn't make any difference at all they are always low in bullying so if you're a good sensible kid doesn't really matter uh 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 and whose parents didn't watch them then they were the ones who by far engaged in the most bullying what do you think is happening there just a lack of supervision and a disposition that tends you towards being like breaking rules and social norms and stuff without the parent there you're more likely to succumb to your base instincts yeah exactly um and it's also potentially you know if you want to be Macy's alien about it might be more sensible for the parents to suggest uh more subtle ways of gaining power because bullying can still especially in some Modern environments land you in trouble yeah schools have very poor records in general in dealing with bullying um but I think that's really what's underlying it is that uh you know without parents there to guide the child those instincts are kicking in say okay go for the throat um they do just to reiterate what you said earlier on fatherless homes you haven't managed to find a particularly strong correlation no uh single parents single parenting doesn't seem to be a major predictor again probably because uh if the cause of the single home isn't honestly humility stress in and of itself isn't going to make a a good person turn that um we do tend to see uh 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 if you get a 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 how um complex it is it it really does seem though you know that as with everything behavioral genetics comes and smashes all of your ideas in the face but I think just 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 um there was something that you said before first off I'm realizing the reason I probably uh 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 a disadvantage to have an extra year under my belt before I decided to have sex um 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 uh age of legal age for drinking is 18 as opposed to 21. yeah it's a great question um and the answer is with everything it's complicated um so for example kids in China um these other major predictor and Chinese bullying is uh conscientiousness so willingness to plan ahead think long term versus uh being impulsive lazy Etc that doesn't show up in North American data and we think that's because in China where many schools have in local parentists which means they can act like parents the punishments for bullying are much more severe so if a kid is caught bullying uh they have the power to physically discipline the child toss the child out of class uh expel you're kidding me you can get spanked in China still yep uh yeah I'm not going to say I know every school in China it's a big country but in the schools we work with yes um in North America we tend to find it's low agreeableness being angry is associated with it probably because it's not as risky a behavior so you 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 to be a bigger effect in China than 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 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 are drinking in the house on their own uh it's you're part of a group that means if you are part of a group you've probably got status that means that you have this let's call it um like the bullying pool uh The Bullying pool has been opened up for you a little bit uh I also I 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 that may be another sort of racial difference one other thing I forgot to ask you about the the family setup um 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 date on that is is ambiguous um and I think that's partly because uh data shows that being bullied at home is correlated with being bullied at school and so if your older brother or sister and sibling bullying uh 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 um 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 a more appealing victim [Music] so it's not the protective factor that we thought um in that I'm sure it is in some cases if you've got a good older brother or sister who looks mediated by what the relationship with the siblings is like yeah so he double-edged I guess is the short way of saying it having siblings in so many other categories with bullying it's a double-edged sword is bullying so okay so getting into the sort of more ancestral reasons we've spoken about kind of I guess the school yard mostly um I'm gonna guess that bullying must have been used ancestrally to Foster social cohesion in one form or another uh what else that and then what else was it used for similar things getting resources so you want that piece of need a lot of hunter-gatherers divide their meat equally well you bullied people to giving your family better meat or more meat um you bully the people across Hills not to come and hunt in your territory even though you go into theirs on occasion uh you interrogate the reputations of competitors uh especially in adolescence when you're you're getting ready to enter that dating pool okay you don't want to be with her she's she's not faithful um interestingly one of you know 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 was I don't know what inuitar and they have a social Norm that you're not allowed to express anger which is probably really useful if you know you're living in an igloo and it's minus 40 and if somebody gets pissed and you break the wall everybody freeze to death so you're not allowed to get angry but they still bullied um there was a main group of people who stuck together and there was a smaller group and the main group would make fun of uh the smaller group uh talk about how stingy they were they didn't share um they weren't as social or friendly and then the main group had a bit of a food shortage and had to rely on the weaker group right flip 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 uh 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 weaker members um my guess is that either Fades away or very quickly escalates talk to me about how social media has changed the landscape of bullying yeah social media uh I'm really not a fan of you know I heard somebody describe it well it was Max tegman um that it's our first experiment with AI uh interfering with our lives and it did not go well um the algorithms that it uses are not friendly um so there's a number of impacts the first and most obvious is that it's made it really hard to track down uh bullies and when I talk to the school principals at the schools that we work with some 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 you know shut down an Instagram account or it's really done on Twitter but you know Snapchat or uh Tick Tock 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 or the same kids who are bullying in person so it hasn't encouraged these kids who I would say are probably not low in honesty humility to suddenly start taking up bullying but it has made it much harder for us to prevent uh cases of bullying where the bullies are smart enough and it's not a giant week of intelligence to say okay if I hit this make an anonymous account yeah exactly there's nothing that they can do compared to if you know slam a kid into a locker uh in front of the teacher and so that aspect has certainly been very toxic the General Dynamics of uh social media are especially for girls toxic it's not my area of specialty but one of the interesting things we found looking at uh data from pre to post pandemic is that girls suffered a higher decline in mental health than boys um and we think part of that is because of how much time they spend on social media and we know young boys in social media I can see it in my sons they do the same sort of thing that we did when we were little you know play video games with their friends uh they're yelling at each other are you idiot when you do that you know 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're in the room together we'll spend a lot more time doing social comparison um and those algorithms don't show you a balanced view of Life they show the worst or the best um you know the most sensationalized views which makes girls more vulnerable to the flexibility as victims you know 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 social media that boys tend to use yeah it's a I had gene twangy on the show recently lady that wrote igen and new book Generations and it's not good man it's like what is it 60 of teenage girls say that they have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness it's like it's just such a dark statistic and um 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 a an ambient uh permeated displeasure that everybody feels it's it's it's not done by somebody it's it's baked into the code and the experience of the technology itself which makes it you know 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 um 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 is school a perfect storm for bullying yes and no um it's well certainly yes uh one of the things that mediates bullying and Peter gray wrote a really nice series of articles about this is uh you have mixed aged and often mixed sex play in hunter-gatherer groups because for most times of the year almost all hunter-gatherers live in small bands in 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 in a say half the group or kids you've got 12 kids to pick from so it's harder to um have these isolated cliques everybody sort of has to get along and the mix-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 right that's it's a given and the 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 uh so that's uh kin selection so that's a break on attacking copies in your genes and other bodies so those are reasons why I think modern society and in particular as well you'd have adults who'd 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 be confident in intervening whereas in the past you know you'd be living with your aunts and uncles and they would have no problem saying knock that off um 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 um yes you have 50 of my genes but I have a hundred percent so unless I'm saving two of my brothers I should be bullying to get that need 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 there's a quote from you which I really liked which was bullying is neither innate nor learned but it is the interaction between two natural predispositions selfless versus selfish and our 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 uh what 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 um the two things I tell them in the big class that I teach on development is number one we don't have brains this big to find food and avoid Predators we have brains as 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 right the nature ingredients or the environment you need both right and every child is the product of both so I don't believe in pure determinism either from the environments or genetics having said that you know some kids are going to come with different ingredients some kids are going to be uh having different previous positions and some kids are obviously are going to come from different uh ovens different environments and so some of the things that we've seen are that purely social interventions where we rely on kids uh just plain learning don't work and my favorite example of that was uh in Norway where the father of bullying research Daniel Vayas integrated a huge program where every level of government from federal to whatever the version of provincial or state is the city to schools to parents all got in and everybody cracked down on Bully 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 is 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 learn 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 popped back up suggests that it's really this cost benefit um so that's where the better programs are aimed at so one of the more widely distributed ones and then I'll talk about the one that that we're promoting um is Kiva uh done by Christina Salman Ali 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 uh we're not going to give you 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 you know a group of well-meaning empathic uh 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 uh students some way of meeting their goals that they want the predispositions so that kid who's low in honesty humility is arrogant wants attention wants to be at the top find a way of a keeping them busy so they're not able to believe that they don't have 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 to different people in the class and we think that being the Walmart door greeter is not a high status thing but if you're you know a 13 year old in grade eight and everybody who comes into class you say hi welcome to Mrs Smith's grade a class and they have to say hi back you're getting a lot of social Spotlight on you right 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 percent so you're giving them a way of getting what they want without harming others now some people say is is that rewarding beliefs and that's that's a tricky thing because in a way we are but the hope is that over time and we know personality isn't fixed either personality is a previous position not a destiny that they start shifting towards a more pro-social way realizing hey I can I can get what I want and still be kind to others and I think we really need that combination of the carrot 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 multimodal interventions and of course it doesn't help that in the adult world kids see all kinds of examples of people getting away with bullying and getting great things you know Donald Trump whatever you whether you like him or not I think he's a fantastic example of a bully who's been very successful he's got millions if not billions of dollars uh married three supermodels six kids uh and reputation and dominance became the president of the United States and 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 in sports in uh in Media that show that being mean 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 tear out other people's throats once they see their parents playing in their Sports league and you know stomping on their competition and 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 signs 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 backbiting reality television that kind of trend of like proximal like ancillary to psychopathy machiavellianism manipulative type stuff um 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 uh the data that I'm aware of and these are data from tens of thousands of kids um over the last 20 years despite bullying interventions at every school and lots of those bullying awareness days or pink shirt day Etc so lots of interventions the number of people who say that they bully others has decreased by 20 percent 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 you know we are trying to make inroads kids today are more empathic uh it's a really neat study I just read that over the last 50 years people have become more generous in economic games and prisoners dilemmas 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 uh 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 um it's a great question little bastards that they are you know one of the things that I often hear is you're studying honesty humility and how do you expect people who are low and honesty to do self-reports appropriately yeah yeah get [ __ ] Tony but they they admit to a lot of stuff uh you'll have once you give anonymity uh they'll admit to bullying they'll admit to Dating Violence uh if we don't do it in the high schools but if you go into universities they'll admit to rape abuse they'll admit to serious stuff if it's Anonymous um if you made them stand up in front of the class don't everybody put your hand up that's been a raper this year yeah I imagine that that's that's not exactly going to happen very commonly um what about for we does punishment work like are there any punishments that work to disincentivize bullies forgetting Rehabilitation just simply encouraging them to stop doing it does anything work yeah but I've always said it's a cost benefit behavior um and that these kids are behaving rationally or you know adaptively um and so if you increase the cost uh 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 tougher than that to crack then they'll find somebody else but if you do it in a way that say 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 with my colleagues that I used to be invited to lots of schools to talk about bullying but now that my message is uh bullying will get you sex power popularity and resources and this is the next bit and we have a hard time catching you and Prosecuting you so please don't do it right I don't get invited to a lot of schools anymore which is the other part of it it's really hard to find them um that same BBC Style video uh documentary of these kids filming them in the schoolyard 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 half the time that it was there so 10 of total 50 of the time an adult was there the adult did nothing about it um so kids know that adults are going to miss a lot of this is there an element is there an element there that when the adult 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 likeable 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 do you think huge uh 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 well I should say a guarantee I'm very confident that The Stereotype of a bully of being lonely poor self-esteem uh bad social skills came from school teachers and principals catching the bully victims you know these kids who really do come from a broken home have bad social skills and they solve 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 teasing we're so sorry you know we'd never do that we're sorry and you know that Jonathan's always been a little bit weird so he's 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 means more likely to make a fuss and their parents probably have the kind of personality that that would be likely to make a fuss rather than say to their kid okay I'm gonna uh take this seriously yeah it's a difficult one eh um trying to trying to pass apart all of that again you know I I'm always gonna have a soft spot for the bully for the victim of the bullying uh 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 there 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 gonna hand it in as his and then need me in the head and then I was upset because I just got knead in the head and I got sent out of the class because I was making a fuss and he'd 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 um 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 um you mentioned before about this double-edged sword of fighting back it's both the best and the worst uh 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 best thing to do is to recognize that this is a cowardly unfair fight like this isn't two guys you know squaring off in the Octagon in in a sanctioned fight to see who's toughest this is an MMA fighter picking on some guy on the street and doesn't even know what's happening and the MMA fighters got five bodies behind him so bringing in support changing the power imbalance by bringing in adults bringing in friends uh you 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 gonna do it don't do it publicly I mean I've written a couple articles uh 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 if he backs down now he loses a ton of his credit because it's such a public audience that's watching right obviously it's okay so if you were to fight the bully in the schoolyard or your kid was to fight the bully in the schoolyard in front of everybody else it's not even though you might think you know you could bro psychology your way into believing that sends a message to him and his [ __ ] 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 if a physical intervention 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 whilst 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 uh as my whole family is the joke was don't poke a folk um we make and I sense probably there's a little bit of that new uh because these These are the kind of people who are high in h which isn't humble of 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 do not put up with people taking advantage of others but we've seen 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 meat in the head right or Tony's upset because this person was bullying a graduate student Tony didn't didn't 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 they're engaging in the 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 if their spouse they'll behave this way with this kid so if you don't want to live around a belief for the rest of your life step in an interview and you know recognizing that 20 of kids do this 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 and I don't want to say that all psychopaths are irredeemable but I'm just trying to not catastrophize it but take it very seriously 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 excuses right that's that'd be the other thing that we've been saying which I think parents would have begotten is if your kid is willing to believe they're probably willing to lie about it what what what's the intervention what do you say to your kid it depends on the specific child and what they're doing I'd first ask you know what are you doing why are you doing this do you know that there's a power imbalance you know that this is really weak you know this is uh not something I support it's a moral-based one that's aiming to change the underlying honesty humility 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 you know is again ratcheting up that monitoring system so that you're essentially making it more costly for them to engage in that behavior they're not going to be believed if they say they're 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 carrot in a stick if it's been two three months and you legitimately have the sense that things have gone better then you don't have to take them out for ice cream but praise them uh 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 and 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 a 14 and a 12 year old so I'm well aware of how challenging it can be to uh 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 relating to it which are commonly uh symptoms of anxiety or depression that increase and in particular desire to not go to the place where bullying is happening to no longer want to go to school I just need a day off and sick Etc uh and that's a real risk like to jump in and get involved because the bully has chosen this person I I can't emphasize that enough that almost every bully strategically chooses a victim who can't effectively fight back and so it's 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 um it would be really bad so bring a girl with him so a boy and a girl tease the guy so what is he gonna do punch the girl then everybody knows this guy's a cycle and he's lost the fight so number one lines of Communication number two contact the school and make sure to 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 um so you know that 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 uh you know hole before it was broken and the same thing happens to the link 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 your child has been chosen as a victim it's you say fight back it's because they can't the bully is in most cases they have found a way to prevent the victim from doing that so bringing allies you know with the school uh the teachers um 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 uh bullying dramatically is about 10 20 but what it does do dramatically is reduces the long-term impacts of bullying because if you're 13 or 14 you're 15 you know 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 percent 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 un not untreated but you know what I mean yeah it's lifelong 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 of their own hands because they can't take it and of course that's an area where the internet has become particularly pernicious or um dangerous is because it doesn't go away you know if back in my day you know I went to school in the 80s early 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 of 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 a place where they're fighting an unfair battle against people who are actively trying to hurt them I 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 them involved at a local either team sport or maybe a boxing gym as well I guess that's probably a pretty common response from parents you know anything that you can do to help offset the anxiety and the depression will help exercise is fantastic and building those friendships is really useful Sports I I always tell my grad students that everything's great these other than this shirt nothing's black and white uh because Sports can sometimes be a risk and we've looked at bullying in sports and have found that uh for girls it can be a risk factor if you participate in competitive Sports both in the sport and outside and for boys it depends on the sports and the team our local hockey team just had its captain and his brother barred from the league for bullying other players uh on the team it's another area that you need to be aware of but anything it would even if it's not a team sport if your child likes I don't know dancing or wants to learn to play the guitar anything that will help alleviate that including if necessary you know switching schools getting away from it if your child is stuck in a toxic situation where people are picking on them like it's an episode of Orange Is the New Black get them out of that situation yeah however you can here's the thing that's interesting man so I I've seen pretty much both ends of the status Spectrum right so in school was probably the most close to the most like pitiful person there had the lowest number of friends was smart or whatever and I was always going to go to college in and University but in an area that that wasn't very very common um and then through probably 16 17 was kind of a middling 18 19 20 very very quickly ascended to be one of the best known people in you know a city that's got a million people in it by 2223 I'm doing reality TV I'm on TV all the time then 27 I have another crack at reality TV all through this period of being the guy in the front door of a nightclub and then now from doing the show which is you know transcended to this much more kind of Global I get widespread type of status um I've seen both ends of it and and observing the texture of my own mind especially through this evolutionary lens is is [ __ ] wild like I I know what it feels like to be so like downtrodden and self-deprecating and and uh like lost and alone and in not just in solitude because Solitude is okay but in like abandon feels like abandoned so I I really have seen this [ __ ] trajectory man I'm telling you from like the absolute bottom of the bottom of the bottom to now you know being somebody that's relatively well known and um yeah it's crazy I I totally understand how it could impact your immune system uh you know in girls especially um if it's a lot of social bullying can even mess with their menstrual cycle it can stop them from releasing eggs that's one of the suggested reasons for why women have got concealed ovulation is that it means that although the other women can't go and [ __ ] with her to stop this egg from releasing because if you did that's basically like a big a big flag of uh I'm fertile and you can come and mess it up if if you come over here um so yeah I really do kind of see this just how important it is um the reason that it got me thinking about that was I wondered whether some sort of sense of of Mastery so the the difference that I had or the thing that I guess kind of ripped me out of apart from aging out of kids that are just brutal and awful and being kind of pressed into a school which is a perfect environment somewhere between a a prison and a drama class to to enact this um the other thing that happened was I gained uh competence in areas that was valued by other people which caused me to rise up through the status hierarchy which meant that who's going to bully me right like they need to get into my nightclub or they you know they want me to shout them out on Instagram or whatever like I'm aware that it's not the same as love but it's a protect it's like a prophylactic against somebody bullying you because of status um so I wonder whether whether it's the boxing or the playing piano or the violin or the doing whatever um some sense of Mastery Downstream from that is going to get you status now obviously there's certain stuff that's super lame if you learn the trombone or something I wouldn't imagine that it's particularly protective um it's just like sucks as an instrument but if you do something which is cool um and you encourage your kids to go and be good at a thing that was the problem that I had as well I I was very very good at Cricket that was my sport of choice I played six seven nights a week every single summer I got time off school to go and play which obviously I loved um but it was a sport it was like from the most working-class town in all of England playing the most aristocratic Bourgeois wanky sport that you can think of um so I didn't get I didn't get any status from it it's like the rugby players and the football players got status the cricket people it's like who the [ __ ] plays Cricket there's like three people that play cricket in this school um so even the thing that I did that was good my thinking being if you can try and maybe um reverse engineer something that's at the intersection of your kids interests what they like to do and also what you could perhaps reasonably predict would cause them to gain in a little bit of status or whatever that might be an interesting uh potential pathway for them I think that's a really good General approach um for many things in life is to build on your children's interests create self-esteem it helps create resilience because life is going to knock you down whether it's bullies or otherwise and having that reservoir uh of confidence and self-belief is really useful and that does come from Mastery uh it is something that is certainly important to transmit it helps with that sense of self-worth so I would absolutely endorse that the only limitation of course is it's not doing anything to stop the ongoing stress from The Bullying if it's ongoing yeah it's going to take you a while to get Mastery at [ __ ] playing the guitar or boxing or whatever and your story reminds me of a really tragic video from that BBC you know style filming and it's a group of girls uh grade sixes who are standing in a circle and they're kicking a grade five girl on the ground just stomping the crap out of her teacher walks by with the little girls holding her hands in grade twos or threes which a lot of schoolyard teachers do you know they play with the cute little kids the kids are smart enough to stop so the girl gets up and goes away 30 seconds later girl comes back and they grab her throw to the ground and start kicking her again and you're thinking why in God's name would you go back and it's because as humans being alone is a death sentence so she would rather be with friends she would rather be with enemies that were bullying her than on her own with no one around yeah and then the best part of it is at the end uh some dad or something walks through just looks and keeps walking it sees it happens it keeps walking by yeah I mean that's a that's a difficult one I don't I don't have kids yet but I can't wait to be a dad and when I am it's gonna bring up I know that it's going to bring up a lot of challenges for me because my uh the chip on my shoulder that I've worked very hard to try and get rid of it's gonna come back you know if I see another kid being bullied if I find out that my child either is a victim or is doing it I'm not going to be as impartial and as rational and as balanced as I should be uh and that's I know it's like a I know seeing a tsunami on the on the horizon because every kid I would imagine that some ungodly proportion of children will encounter some form of bullying at some point in their in that time in school 80 of kids uh encounter some form of bullying okay um so yeah and you know you're gonna find out about this and I'm I'm gonna have this you know a good bit of self work and and a good bit of personal development really be tested it's gonna stress test just whether a thousand sessions of meditation has made a difference or not because I'm gonna be like well [ __ ] here I am I'm 12 years old again and I Hate My Life um yeah that's here's the other thing as well that I've taken away I mean you know I found your work absolutely fascinating an evolutionary lens for such a common problem which is so formative on people's lives I think is is just phenomenal um the other thing that I've taken away and this may be legitimate part of the chip on my shoulder that I always had I always used to be resentful of the kids that were bullies because they felt it felt like they were given an extra degree of an excuse for their behavior from the teachers that I was never given that the teachers almost saw the uh propensity this disposition that the kids had that were being mean and I could get my homework stolen a need in the head and drama class and now we get sent to the Head teacher but if I was talking a little bit too loudly in class I would also be punished and I remember thinking at the time like this just feels so unfair it feels so unfair that I'm given less sympathy and also held to a higher standard and I've always always hated absolutely ardently hated using excuses like well you know he comes from a broken home or well you know she's she's she's going through a rough time of it at the moment and you know I I would have had to swallow it had your data set otherwise but with this it's no it is very much a conscious Choice which is only mildly influenced by the environment that the person is in you know if this kid decides to enact bullying it is a conscious choice and it is not them calling out for help it is not them enacting rage from inside of the house it's them trying to gain [ __ ] status they want to climb the social ladder in the same way as schmoozing and taking your client out for a dinner in 20 years time is going to be the same they're just doing this and that makes it it makes it so much more Machiavellian it makes it so much less desperate um and uh yeah it gives me it's annoying but vindicating because at least it makes me kind of feel like the presupposition that I had as a kid uh was somewhat accurate yeah and you know I would say that if you're looking for a little sound bite flip here that I think that bullies are behaving like selfish [ __ ] and like all other selfish [ __ ] whether they're narcissists Mackie of aliens Psychopaths they're ruining it for everybody I I have no patience for that behavior now of course everybody at some point unless you're a saint does something bad so I I don't want to be Rock Bottom agreeableness high schoolers and never forgive anybody but for the people who are doing it regularly just to benefit themselves [ __ ] you we're standing up to you you're not doing it and the ironic thing about it is that in the long run the data is also really clear that the best way to be popular and liked is to be powerful and kind those are the people it's not a shock but it it surprises me how bullies overlooked that that if you really want to be not just popular but people want to hang around you and want to be with you and you're enduringly thought of in a good way you have to be kind so ultimately they're trying to take a shortcut to just get what they need for their own selfish needs and in the long run I think it it's going to burn them funny folk ladies and gentlemen Tony I absolutely adore your work I think this is fascinating uh you've got like a million other things I want to talk to you about so let's let's line up and talk about psychopathy or personality or something else soon if the people that are listening think that they want to learn more about the work that you do and your lab and stuff where should they go yeah as I said I generally stay off social media uh but if you Google me Tony t-o-n-y Vogue bees and Victor olk uh on Google you'll get one of my research lab Pages uh and then look it up and send me an email if you want to get in touch damn right Tony I appreciate the hell out of you thank you man no problem great chatting what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace