The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt

how did you get interested in studying bullying I get asked that question all the time people want to think that it was because either I was a bully or I was bullied but the truth of the matter was I was just really interested in popularity and popularity led me to bullying because the kids at my high school were the ones who bulled the most um I went ahead and looked at that for my dissertation and found that they were four times more likely to bully others than those who didn't have power who were not popular and then it just kind of snowballed from there okay so how much work is being done in the world of evidence-based bullying intervention stuff like that so the past 25 years we've studied this in Earnest it's been primarily correlational I mean it's going to be hard to do experiments on bullying when you think about it um it's I mean it's just not going to work really but we've looked at it primarily from a correlational point of view the first thing was just to sort of document the prevalence and the like and then after that then people looked at um individual factors that were associated with it Dan O has kind of led the charge he's a Swede who uh was living in Norway at the time um conducted the largest study uh at the time longest largest longitudinal study but also intervention study um and then found a 50% reduction but easy to do in Norway when you have everybody involved it's a small country um so anyhow so he looked at um what happens to kids who bully as they move forward so identified Boys in grade nine found that uh a large percentage of them were criminally were involved in um the criminal justice system by the time they were age 24 so that was kind of like the first I think well- conducted study in this area that was B Beyond just descriptives although there are it is still Des criptive to some extent and then um some people then focused um on the so the sort of like the broader context that it happens in so like not just at the individual level but what do school related factors look like kids are nested within Schools they're nested within their families how do those interrelate and then my focus was always on the neurobiology of bullying was really interested in documenting how it hurt people not just at that level where it could be easily dismissed where people just say ah you know you just need to be more resilient suck it up um yeah she's sad but she'll get over it I wanted to show that no it it it affects them in a way that's profound and places them at risk for the rest of their lives so that was kind of like my area of research and since then um others have followed um there's not enough of us I think that we need to be looking at the neurobiology a little bit more carefully it's a profound psychosocial stressor so that's kind of like the evolution of bullying research and then there's another side group that looks at it from an evolutionary perspective and I know you had Tony vul on before and I do that a little bit too with Tony and the like um so yeah it's I think it's we're getting there what's next what would you want to look at next or what do you think the uh broader bullying research Community needs to be focused on why interventions don't work so when we look at the big meta analyses there was one that was just redone um so you'd think like when you redo the meta analysis on uh buling intervention efficacy that we would have improvements um over the course of a decade and we don't so we're still only seeing about at best a 20% reduction in bullying and um and that I think needs obviously it needs to improve because kids are so profoundly affected and so are teens and so are adults so what is it that um why does this persist why can't we move that to be in a like move it so that um we have better rates but better I mean lower rates of bullying and and we're just not there like there was one I think there's one promising area um they're looking at again power I think that's really what you need to focus on because bullying is is a systematic abuse of power but um the kids who were most and teens who were most impervious to bullying intervention programs were the ones who were the most popular in the school because they don't want to give up their power holding position oh that's interesting okay so explain to me the the motivations for why people bully like what what's the reason for doing it I think there's a lot of different motivations but I think primarily it's about the corrupting influence of power so our longitudinal studies show that okay so there's a certain percentage of kids probably about 10% of kids and when I say kids I'm mean anybody under 18 um so there's a certain percentage of kids who just have sort of like um emotional disregulation so prefrontal dysfunction so ADHD conduct disorder that sort of thing the Nelson um Nelson from The Simpsons so that's a great um great representation of who I mean um our past studies and our past intervention efforts have focused on Nelson or the Nelsons of the world um but they are so different and they don't really represent the true bully out there um so when you look at it um what happens is that kids have assets and competencies that the peer group values they're good-look they're good athletes they're whatever whatever the every school has a different um context or a different culture I mean um and so those kids then are afforded power and then that power is then um abused so then they use aggressive means to maintain hegemony and but also to have achieved it so like the beauty gets you there first and then it corrupts you and then it just escalates into you being a complete jerk and then ruling the school and then uh in a sense like creating the Norms of the school because these kids are so powerful and so Salient um that everybody pays attention to them and everybody emulates what they're doing and then next thing you know you have um the the entire environment has been corrupted not just the individual and that's 90% of bullies that's 90% of kids who bully others okay why is it not the case that you get a benevolent leader at the top why is it that when people get power that they end up going toward cruelty rather than kindness um there are some they're definitely some kind leaders they're I I I make a distinction in my research between implicit and explicit power so implicit power is the type of power you achieve by having competencies and assets that the peer group values and you don't abuse your power and then exposive power is the type of power that you achieve through coercive means and it elicits fear and compliance and submission um and then kids who bully others tend to be this mange of implicit and explicit power so they do have some redeeming uh qualities they can be pro-social they tend to be strategic um they're interpersonally exploitative like that sort of thing exists so ma of alen um but um we don't have a good grasp on who those just pure implicit power people are um but they exists we just don't know enough about them so the kids who are pro-social and only pro-social but extremely powerful within their school Community what's the p ality profile of a typical bully have you got have you done Ocean or hexico or anything else on them have they got a star sign that we need to look out for yeah I so right now we're focusing more on the the dark Triad and looking at how that unfolds and it's what you would expect they're really high on narcissism they're high on Mach of alienism they're high on uh they're Psychopathic in some ways they have Psychopathic traits um so they're callous and unemotional in a lot of ways they're very well um adjusted they're good at um at explaining their terrible Behavior at justifying it to themselves and to others um they're socially skilled uh you know so I we used to think like based on old vas's old study that kids who bullied others were just destined to be locked up in a sense or just have like a life of misery and cause harm to society and yet what our Studies have shown and we've been following kids for over 16 years from the time they were 10 until now um they're 26 actually they're turning 27 and that's not the case these are pretty successful individuals um they're successful because they have this blend of pro-social and antisocial um they have like I said a lot of assets and competencies so they don't get shunned I like I've said when it comes to the girl World um that being beautiful can you can get away with murder if you're attractive so and then on the boy side there's a lot of things like if they're a good athlete and you're in a very um athletic school they can get away with murder I think that if you act the way some of these beautiful girls and athletic boys act um without those features um the peer group's going to turn on you pretty quickly and that's what you see with Nelson right so no tolerance for Nelson because Nelson doesn't have a lot going for him does that mean that bullies are smarter than average if you to do an IQ test there's evidence that they have better social skills their emotional intelligence is higher I think that there probably is um higher intelligence just like a general intelligence because to be able to manage and manipulate interpersonal relationships is quite complicated to really understand the nuances the politics of the playground that takes some skills some cognitive skills so the privileged in one of many ways athletically capable good-looking presumably probably people from Rich homes or homes that have got that and then even the more sort of difficult to observe privileges of social skills of I'm going to imagine their higher and disagreeability uh and assertiveness and stuff like that um yes and no so they could also be higher on both like so you would think like um like in some ways they're agreeable in other ways they're not the lack of agreeableness comes with the um entitlement that comes again like holding wielding power is really bad for an individual's um like I mean it's good for their personal trajectory but it's not good for a society's trajectory I mean you could just see leadership around the world um and how corrupt it is in a in a lot of ways this is what I'm I'm describing um you know like a lot of people aren't fans of Donald Trump but Donald Trump didn't get to where he is by just being purely um explicit in his power right he does have some assets and competencies pres as well as that sort of dominance thing yeah you know what I mean and then there's this other thing that we haven't really looked at and we should I'm going to just move over out of the sun again one of the things I think we also need to get a handle on is like um people who are dirty Fighters I think that gives them power too because um you know anxiety is the root of human restraint so at the end of the day unless you're a psychopath you are going to pull back a bit you are going to be a little bit anxious about how people view you you are going to be worried about crossing a line right unless again you're wired different because you're a psychopath and we tend to all have that but then there's this group that are just really high on Psychopathic features um everyday sadism and they don't care and so they um use aggression in a way that you and I would never use and that then wields them power because it's just so off the rails and so atypical and quite scary so you actively avoid them or you play to them if you can avoid them and then it gives them this erroneous belief that they're respected when in fact they're feared that's interesting what's the truth around bullies being from broken homes um so I don't know that and I thought I knew the research literature pretty well I think that that would be this idea that they come from broken homes would be studying more aggressive behavior and you know keep in mind that when we're talking about bullying we're talking about the end of that Spectrum right so all bullying is aggressive behavior but not all aggressive behavior is bullying Bullying happens in the context of a power imbalance so there is an over representation of kids from um dysfunctional homes where there's family Discord and they're not intact who have a more higher they're higher on aggressive trajectories there is a bit of a genetic load attached to that too that people don't like to talk about but it does exist um but I don't know of any study off the top of my head where you see um kids from broken homes more likely to bully others that's interesting I think it's one of the kind of go-tos of the hopeful uh slightly dismissive person when it comes to bullying which is well you know this is just a normal response to an abnormal raising situation and that's kind of the place that they go to and and that is true but they're talking about aggression and they're conflating it with bullying and we really need to keep them separate because the evidence on bullying suggests that those who bully others have a different profile right so like again they're they're higher on these dark Triad traits but also those who are victimized who are victims of bullying don't fare well at all and it's because of that power imbalance because they can't fight back because they can't defend themselves because it happens over and over again it places them at a huge disadvantage that really um hurts them today and tomorrow so um I see this happening all the time in education um where parents and students um and even Educators um mistake aggression and bullying they think they're the same thing if it happen if it happens once it's typically not bullying when it happens over and over again and the reason it can happen over and over again is because there's a a differential uh there's a power differential right yeah talk to me about the I know if you were to make a a meal that was bullying what are the ingredients the component parts that go into it in order for you to sort of have that you've mentioned about power power imbalance sort of inability to fight back social exclusion stuff like that what what are the what what are the individual components of bullying I think we'd have to build two different meals we would have to build that Nelson meal right and that kid would again have a lot of um so they would be disregulated they probably have a lot of prefrontal dysfunction they would be um they wouldn't be strategic they would be reactive in their use of aggression um they would run a muck of their school by just indiscriminately picking on everybody they would be rejected um marginalized their future would not be that positive um but then if we built the other meal it would be kids who have who come in um thinking they're it in a bag of chips because they've been told that they're it um they have a lot of assets and competencies which I already mentioned um they are probably a little bit lower on anxiety so they're able to treat people poorly and not worry about it too much um and then then it just snowballs right because then that acru power then that power then corrupts them and then they want to usurp even more power by being a total [ __ ] how many people okay sorry I need to qualify they're not total [ __ ] they're [ __ ] to some people and good to others because if you're a complete jerk you then alienate yourself in your power base um also then um gets corrupted and corrupted in a different way like meaning like you just can't hold on to um your your power holding position yeah because you need the sort of scants and around you and if you're too much of an [ __ ] you become a Nelson yeah you need a base to help you out how many people are victims and Bullies so um bullies represent so victims are about 30% of the the population um are victimized and 10% are bullied ruthlessly every single day we're talking millions of kids as we speak were bullied today around the world hundreds of millions um so 30% of the population's bullied 10% are ruthlessly bullied and then in terms of those who bully others it's a bit lower it's probably around 8% bully others um but you know most of it is relying on self-reports and most kids don't admit to doing this to others if we use peer nominations then you're getting closer to let's say 20 to 30 again it would map on but it really depends on the methodology so the benefits to bullies maintaining power popularity uh it seems like they have uh in some ways better outcomes in later life I assume that that's not because they don't get better outcomes because they were bullies they get better outcomes because the things that permitted them to bully are also useful when they become adults like socially being quite Adept maybe being a little bit more ruthless and assertive than other people are uh having this lowered sense of anxiety which allows them to maybe be a little bit more risk-taking in a calculated way etc etc um so if those are some of the benefits are there any costs to bullies bullying um so again if we just focus on high status as high powered bullies I guess the cost would be one that's born by society and those in their lives more than at the individual level and that that kind of hurts to tell you that because I would want there to be a cost that dissuades them from acting this way but the truth of the matter is that they're a menace to those in their lives not necessarily to themselves and um and so I think the cost one of the costs to themselves would be uh maybe in the in the end they have more difficult relationships because it maintains their narcissism or it um influences their narcissistic traits so it makes them more pronounced they become more entitled and then that is challenging to be around okay so moving on to the victims what are the types of people who get bullied so I mean there that was like really big Focus back in the day like could we identify kids who get bullied um so that we could protect them and obviously those who are not able to defend themselves are going to have a harder time um you know think about this like if and we're talking again about the Nelson and I know I keep making this distinction but that's they're really different animals it really looks different so um those kids come into grade one let's just say and they they just pick on everybody and you know I pick on Tracy and she goes and tells the teacher right away and then I pick on Chris and he doesn't tell anybody and so that gets me coming back right so one of the things that you see is that those that are willing to intervene on their behalf so meaning like saying no I'm not going to allow this to happen or tell somebody immediately they tend to not get victimized again um now that's not always the case but you know as a general rule saying no and sticking up for yourself is is a good way to go um but not everybody has the capacity to do that so I'm not asking people to do it because I recognize that's inherently unfair um kids who are shy and socially withdrawn tend to get picked on a little bit more um kids who are girls who have ADHD who are just a little bit atypical neurod divergent kids get picked on a little bit more kids who don't have the cool stuff that everybody has can be picked on more so if you're in a middle class school and you're not wealthy you're not in that economic bracket you could be more at risk um kids who have poor social skills um can get picked on but then there's also kids who challenge those who wield power who get can can get picked on so if you're you know a very attractive girl let's say and you move to a new school uh God help you it's just not going to go well um you know those girls are going to Eat You Alive and make sure that you don't usurp their power um if you're a very athletic boy and you come into a new school I think you'll be okay because boys tend to um tolerate hierarchies more than girls so it's you know it's a little complicated I know you maybe want just like a list of here are the things of kids that like put that places kids at risk but I just can't give it to you because it's far more complicated than that I think it's more interesting to look at it this way because you know it's not a one-size fits-all uh there's some fundamental you know power imbalance aggression is being used um it it feels to me like bullying is playing on the need to belong and that social okay so is is social exclusion and the need to belong is that sort of one of the the fundamental components of of how bullying works I think bullying exploits that fundamental need to belong for sure um and that comes back to remember we talked about their social skills like how do they know that and how they know that so early for sure um and then bullying also exploits um well I mean it THS people's fundamental need to belong but it's not always exploiting it so some kids are just better at it at Bitter picking up what your sensitivities are and then um then just treating you poorly as a consequence right like they just know which buttons to press um I don't know if we know really what that ingredient is so if we're still building our meal like yeah I I wonder whether you know one of the kind of Ruthless things I guess about about bullying is that if you as the high powerered prestigious slightly dominant person make it socially cancerous to be associated with the person that you're always picking on ruthlessly the 10% or whatever or maybe maybe more um it means that it becomes increasingly difficult for other kids to step in and give the victim the thing that they really need which is a support structure because they don't want to be in the blast radius of the super cool kid that's always being mean 100% and that's exactly what the research shows so uh so if I'm a bully um the kids that I bully and then you're in my group you're also bullying them so they can't they can't win right and then they become um in a sense uh avoided not in a sense they do really do get avoided because nobody wants to be the next Target and I always think about like it's like social singling right like we talk a lot about virtue singling now and everybody pretending they're good and look at me but there's another singling that's happening and it's about like hey you mess with me you're going to be the next Target and this is what it looks like so the kids's head really is on a state for everybody to see and then when we talk we talked about this already but this is what I mean why we can't um we shouldn't mix up aggression with bullying because you can imagine how isolating that is to the kid who's been victimized um how do they get out of that and then they tend to learn that the way to get out of that is then to act like the jerk who's doing it to them and now instead of having a prevalence rate of 30% bullying at your school you have a prevalence rate in the 70s because do you yeah do you see this sort of um contagion within schools if there's ao% I go to schools where um and we do research across hundreds and hundreds of schools in Ontario and some have low bullying rates like 15% and others have 70% bullying rates and it really is about that like um is anybody um holding them to account and if you don't hold them to account they will corrupt your environment and presumably that gets passed down from year to year as well exactly so there like think of it like and I know you know this literature but like if you think about like dominance the dominance literature really tells us that when somebody wields power we pay attention to them we emulate them and they don't pay attention to us they are um they're impervious to our singles of distress they're not that interested in us but we're profoundly interested in them and they also represent a really important socializing component in their environment so they're socializing everybody who's paying attention to them um in a way that we don't want them to be acting right like we don't want this to be the model of our citizenship at our school which is why you have 15% schools as well as 70% schools exactly yeah what about uh ethnic group differences in bullying yeah so we did a really big metaanalysis and I was a little bit surprised because if you look at like you just are going to think that there's going to be ethnic differences um ethnic and racial differences just expect it and we didn't find that at all for perpetration and for uh bullying victimization not at all I mean there's a little bit um at the end of the day it's about numeration so if we are at a school where it's primarily South Asian and we're the only two white kids then we're a little bit vulnerable um but if you're the only two South Asian kids at a white school You're vulnerable so it really doesn't have to do with One race or ethnicity or it really has to do with who's wielding power um in your in your particular school so being a minority anywhere probably not a not fantastic unless you've I don't know you're some s of sexy minority I don't know I was going to say there are some minorities that like um are more protected than others so like in Canada black youth are seen as more cool um wow they're like a a rare shiny Charizard in in Canada I imagine yeah I I'm not too sure but I do know that like there's um there's something going on there um I mean we don't have the same history as United States right we didn't have slavery and the like um our immigrant profile looks different um but so in our studies we don't see black youth being bullied as much but we do see Asian students and South Asian students being bullied more than black students um but we always see white students in our studies being bullied the most and bullying others the most but they represent the majority in our country right so it's that's always going to be the case all right what about um the relationship between overweight and bullying so okay so there has been a lot of research shown that kids who are overweight and obese are more likely to be bullied and then we did the study that like blew my mind because it was not at all what I thought was going to be the case so we follow kids prospectively for seven years and what we found was that there was always an association between being bullied and being overweight but that kids gained weight as a consequence of being treated poorly and that's what was driving the association primarily so it's not like like they were big and then got bullied they got bullied and then became bigger and then got bullied and then it just kind of spiraled so really unfair but it makes sense because they become depressed and depression is associated with either um overeating or undereating so you're going to go one way or the other and so to me it it fits like when I stood back and looked at it I was like oh yeah this makes sense but this study needs to be replicated it's only one study we are the first to show it it be interesting to see if others show it as well it seems like for both boys and girls attractiveness is one of the protective mechanisms or one of the enabling mechanisms uh you know a very sort of obvious bestowed type of prestige which you can then sort of transmute into dominance and um being obese is one of the things that's going to damage your attractiveness whether you're fat coming in or get fatter as it goes on but the the last thing that you want to do when you're teenage boy or girl and everybody is highly scrutinizing the way that everybody else looks and changes day to-day month to month year to year uh is to lose some attractiveness and uh yeah I suppose it's a vicious cycle that being bullied causes you to I I I don't know how many people get bullied in school and become more attractive because of it yeah I I don't know how that would work now there is a little bit so can we talk about skinny kids a little bit so skinny boys are vulnerable and um and especially skinny boys who are adolescents are very vulnerable um because that's not perceived as masculine which kind of goes hand inand with um being vulnerable which is unfortunate and then um thin girls get bullied but because of intrasexual competition so like even though like you're going to see it on both like so thin children and thin adolescence are at risk but the mechanism is different for boys and girls so interesting so for the boys it's insufficiently masculine you don't have that dominance you don't have that physical presence that would maybe say hey don't [ __ ] with me but for girls it's because other girls see that as potential like uh I guess sexual competition for want of a better term for when talking about teenagers but like precocious sexual competition or or whatever a future rival in one way or another because of the way that they look exactly um exactly and then then and then there was a study that just came out that showed um this curve and it was looking at how um weight status maps onto mental health so this was published in jamama it just came out like a few months ago and you see both ends so you see the really thin kids being overly represented on having poor mental health and then the overweight kids also having poor mental health more on the overweight side than the underweight side um but it really I I think that that could be explained through pure processes talk to me about you've kind of touched on it there this difference between girl bullying and boy bullying how do they differ um boys are so obvious in their bullying they're really like they value dominance and submission so they are going to put you in your place either physically or verbally and you're going to know where you stand if you have any flaw Chris they're going to tell you what it is right and it's going to be immediate and everybody's going to mock you with girls it's more circuitous like we value inclusion and exclusion a little bit more than boys so we um use our relationships as a vehicle to cause harm so we're more likely to use indirect aggression which is also called social or relational aggression so we will spread rumors about you we'll exclude you from the peer group um those sorts of things we'll give you a once over and give you a death stare and Mock and laugh at you and and do that over and over again um we'll pretend we are friends with you but we're really just trying to elicit information from you to use it against you so we are think are more instrumental and boys are more reactive so we're proactive and boys are more reactive although they can also be proactive boys how much cross- sex Bullying happens so there's a little bit of cross- seex bullying it mostly happens in elementary school when they get to be in high school they really just want to date each other so they don't do it as much right it's yeah that's funny they're interacting in one way or another but it it changes yeah exactly and also I think we've done a pretty good job at really making it clear that you know good boys don't pick on girls so I think if you're doing that when you're 17 there you know there's something pretty wrong about you so yeah so you tend to not see it as as much as they get older but when they're little kids and they haven't got the script yet and they haven't or the memo hasn't been received um yeah little boys can be little shits to girls but little girls can be little shits to boys I suppose until puberty kicks in little boys and little girls apart from one very specific part of their Anatomy are basically the like physically they're the same thing there's not much difference between them uh so I imagine even physically a 8-year-old girl could pick on an8 year old boy but it's going to be very rare for a 16-year-old girl to be able to pick on a 16-year-old boy yeah it's interesting though so the sex difference in in the expression of bullying um so a lot of times people want to say that there's no gender difference when it comes to indirect aggression but they have not looked at it in terms of proportions so they look at it in terms of means and it's true boys use it um just as much as girls but girls only use this and they tend to focus on this form of bullying early on so we can see it in um three-year-olds foury olds 5year olds where you know you can't sit with me during Circle time um they spread little rumors you know Chris peases pants that sort of thing um so they're they're pretty mean we we did a couple studies um where we looked at Toddlers and we did direct observations and these girls were nasty what do you think that is is that just some really precocious version of the same Dynamic the venting the intersexual competition the sort of very manipulative uh ways that females are going to have to use sort of social networks and stuff when they grow up is this them just sandbox training grounding it very early on I like that you I like how you described it I think that really is what it is they're practicing they honing a skill for the future Kai Burnquist um proposed this heterotopic continuity uh heterotopic continuity yeah of aggression and basically he talked about how I mean everybody eventually moves towards indirect aggression because it's the thing that Society tolerates but they don't you know we don't tolerate little girls punching little boys we tolerate boys punching boys up until a certain point but he also talked about how this happens and one of the things is that girls just have Superior verbal and social skills um early in life and and it continues across the lifespan um I know a lot of people are um turned off by sex difference research but you can't call yourself um a critical thinker if you don't think sex differences exist because they certainly exist this is a this is a safe space for you Trac anyone it's such a robust finding it's it's been shown like in so many labs around the world so little girls start it early I I had this conversation with Joyce benon probably 18 months ago 2 years ago and she was telling me it made so much sense I I know that even in you know three-month-old six sorry 3 to six Monon gestating uh humans you can see sex differences in the brain already like you're a minus three monthy old and we can already begin to see structural differences in the brain and then I think by age 10 an fmri IS 93 or 95% accurate at working out whether this is a male or a female brain which is about the same accuracy that adults have when just determining a human face so like that's the level of accuracy however accurate you think you are at picking out whether that's a man or a woman that's the same accuracy at 10 years old and obviously the sex differences before birth kind of gets rid of the socialization social roles Theory thing um but what she taught me that I thought was just super interesting kind of makes so much sense even when I think back to my time in school she was saying that if you look at the sort of games that girls play they're being veterinarians they're being nurses they're raising something it's about caring for something else it's um it's sort of collective but it's usually sort of outward focused toward an individual whereas if you look at what boys are doing it's Warfare It's they're cowboys or aliens or they're whatever and we're going to take them down and you know it's it's practicing for ancestrally I guess what the most Salient most important roles would have been when we grew up to become adults and uh no matter how much you sort of emancipate women from the kitchen and put them into the boardroom or tell men that they can be stay at home fathers or whatever like it's going to take a very long time for a biology to catch up with that especially when you're only three and you have no like you haven't been exposed to second wave feminism at three years old yet you haven't been exposed to sort of the metrosexual movement for men and and you know like holistic masculinity when you're five so yeah we still get to see maybe in a sort of a more un cumbered uh unmolested nature like what what that is like for uh humans when you're looking at kids 100% like I mean it's hard for some people to swallow it as you know I have a book coming out and that's basically the topic it's about how our brain today represents hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressure um we may want to say that it's all socialization but there's just no way um there's no way that we are where we are today um without evolutionary forces at play um we did the study that really speaks to this so like we're talking a little bit about indirect aggression and we did a study where I was really interested in what the early origins of that were and so uh we looked at two-year-olds and like so not very advanced in their language not very sophisticated and we looked at this thing called love withdrawal so it's basically relational or indirect aggression but a baby version where you are mad and you won't kiss your mom or you refuse to hug them you turn your back you know give them the a baby silent uh treatment and we found that close to 80% of toddlers did this um as reported by parents and by their preschool teachers their daycare teachers so we're pretty sophisticated social animals have you ever seen that video of a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat of a car when the owner it's a truck and in the back seat of the car is a a like baby cow so there's a baby cow sat in the back seat that the owner's just going to go and buy and there's a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat and the owner is trying to reach over to sort of stroke the golden retriever and the golden retriever is just refusing to look like he's just looking straight ahead and the guy's next to him and he keeps leaning back and as he gets touched he sort of moves his arm away like this I thought that's yeah that is that's that love withdrawal thing that's you know I'm I'm mad at you because the dog thought that he was being replaced by this baby cow that was sat behind him and it's interesting because like in that we talked about how um there was also a relationship to how it's used between parents and is it the case that you know parents think well I'm not hitting my spouse I'm not yelling at my spouse but I'm stonewalling them for two weeks straight and that's like a better way of expressing it and then the kids are picking that up or is like what is the origin of this and I don't know like I'm not not here to answer that at this point it was the first study that was done it needs to be replicated everything needs to be replicated now as you know Chris you got a good idea Andoid the rep replication crisis yeah I look I think it's um I think it's fascinating I think that's so interesting to consider the like how young this starts and what the like if you're two what can you really do especially what can you do to Mom and Dad but that's um something I've been thinking about an awful lot more recently which is liman stone or Brad Wilcox or you know whoever you want from like the institute for family studies both of whom have been on the show but they have an agenda like they have an agenda of keeping families together they're very Pro marriage uh you know Melissa carne's work the two parent advantage or two parent privilege um if you're looking at this stuff and you think well it's really important that parents stick together because we know that the outcomes from single parent homes aren't aren't fantastic but the way that parents stick together what what are the lessons that your kids are learning about what love is and attachment and uh dealing with disagreement and regulating uh disregulation and how do people come back together and what does that tell you about what you should expect from your friends and from future relationships is this really the best that you should hope for like this sort of um silent objectively successful but experientially miserable relationship like is that really the Pinnacle of what you're expecting in the rest of your life exactly it's attachment Theory right it's about this is the Prototype and is this the Prototype you want kids to have there was some studies done I think Sarah jaffy is the one who did it like maybe 15 20 years ago showing that it's actually really dangerous um for kids to be in a home with an antisocial dad their outcomes are better than not having that antisocial dad in the home so like yeah so keep families together but at what cost I mean it really you know it's like everything there's always going to be variance there's always heterogeneity and we have to be thinking about these nuances because it's not going to be one siiz fits all yeah having um a dad who's you know modeling really inappropriate behavior and I know people are going to say well what about moms this is the study that looked at dads but yeah any of these these Role Models being corrupt is a problem and that's also the peers like having the leadership of your school be corrupt is not good for the health of your school yeah I it's you're so right and I think I pushed Brad on this point and I think I think he's he arrives at the right place which is basically yes there are um many cases in which a marriage would be better to break up it would be to stay together but it's his belief that the threshold for when you should break up has been lowered too much that you know this person isn't helping me fulfill my my highest ideal or you know I really hate the way that they slurp their tea or whatever it may be because of a million a million different reasons that we don't need to get into but I think finding out and resetting where that barometer lies and looking at interventions for relationships to okay how can we come back together how can we have a hard reset on this so that we can really restart and thinking about what is it that we're modeling for our kids you know am I am I begrudgingly making my way through the next 18 years of this marriage so that my kids can leave a non-broken home uh but you know how how much are they taking from from the way that we interact there's this video that you might have seen that's been floating around on Twitter which is uh the best thing that parents can do for their kids is show them how much they love each other and it it's this video of a child sat down on a couch and it pans to the two parents salsa dancing out on a balcony together it's a little bit kind of of a meme but uh definitely in in that regard I think yeah it's not just about sticking together for the kids it's about sticking together in a good way and and I'll just add this because I think we'd be remissed if we didn't one of the challenges about families breaking up is that oftentimes women and children are left in poverty and poverty is a huge stressor poverty changes the brains of children and so this is where like beyond the behavior things that we're talking about and the socializing influence that we're talking about um if we could have kids and women not live in poverty then I think we would see different outcomes and if we were to hold that statistic account for that statistically I think that we would be making different um decisions but also we would hold a different Viewpoint about this yeah that's interesting so uh a broken home isn't just a broken home a lot of the time it's a poor home and a poor home a stressed home and you can't exactly separate those out yeah I think those variances need to be um separated accounted for or their interactions need to be um you know examined but at the end of the day we don't want kids to be hurt um you know obviously that's never going to be good for a kid's life and and living in a home where everything is about love withdrawal and control social control and the like that's also not healthy what about uh bullying for LGBT youths this is a a topic that I keep seeing online terrible they are so unwell and they're so poorly treated and especially right now with the current um anti-trans movement um I mean they are not living a good life at all let's let's separate just before we go any deeper actually let's separate this to LGB and T because even though fly the same flag sometimes uh I don't think they the same thing okay so we'll talk about um lesbian gay bisexual students are bullied at higher rates than heterosexual students but again um the context matters so if you're in um let's say performing art school where there's an over representation you're not going to be as bullied um it gets back to eneration that sort of thing and also what the culture of the school is but on average they're not treated well um they're Bullet at higher rates for sure and trans youth are particularly vulnerable um and also their mental health is off the chart like their poor mental health is um higher than anything I've seen in my career so we have this really massive study where we're following hundreds of thousands of kids in Ontario and those who identify as trans are not doing well I guess with that point it's difficult to know whether the kids are mentally distressed because they're trans or whether they're trans because they're mentally distrressed I think the temporal precedence has not been established because it's been so politically challenging to study this and this is always a problem when politics get interfere with science and knowledge um then you can't get to truth I think that you know that we both know that this is a problem yeah I mean the significantly higher rates of OCD of autism of neurod Divergence in these groups uh and you know it you're right it's when just talking about the well-being of kids and you just want somebody who can't really advocate for themselves who's still very much at the mercy of their parents or their school or their caregivers or the state they don't have agency and you shouldn't expect them to have that same kind of agency over this stuff and I think it's one of the reasons why the discussion around like trans yous uh becomes so fraud because it you can very quickly go from biological man who wants to be creepy in women's bathrooms to confused young girl who has really horrible mental health outcomes and you go well you need to be able to hold these two worlds in in your mind at the same time you're saying that you're you're sort of being empathetic for women but you're not being empathetic for this young girl who is even more uh vulnerable than the women the adult women that you're supposed to be protecting so yeah it's it's a really interesting one and I don't know I think I I kind of hope SL get the sense that the defocusing on the TRS discussion uh which it could go either way with four more years of trump um but by actually focusing on it less might normalize it a little bit more um and I I feel like there was a maybe a little bit of sort of I don't know what you call like conceptual fatigue um around around around people hearing these sort of stories all the time and maybe actually allowing them to take a back seat will help to sort of normalize um the the discussion and make it a little bit less fire I don't know and and also too it's frustrating to see the exception always being hailed as truth right like these are they they are very Sensational stories they elicit a lot of reaction um they get circulated a lot they get stuck in your brain because of how Salient they are um and that then is weaponized against this group that's quite diverse and that's a problem because we're really causing harm to individuals who don't fit that Minority that is hailed as being the Boogeyman and I it yeah it I feel for Trans kids I very much do I think that they're in a really tough spot and um and we really need to be thinking about this these are young people so um ultimately you know Society should be judged on how well they care for their most vulnerable and I don't think our report cards very good in this area yeah I think that's a good point so getting back to I guess the relationship between bullies and victims um how do bullies see their victims there has to be some kind of moral disengagement some sort of disrupted self-concept thing going on what what's happening here that's precisely the mechanism they think they they they think that um what they're doing is Justified that the person deserves their portrait treatment um and and if they don't think it they will convince themselves that they do so they may have reacted impulsively and then Justified it using moral uh disengagement principles um or they had already uh you know they've already said this person's less they've already dehumanized the individual and then that has given them licensed to treat them poorly moral disengagement I think is the most important uh theory that explains how everyday people um become bullies how everyday people can treat others poorly and still sleep with them sleep with a good conscience because really it's about making our egregious acts more palatable um what is the process of moral disengagement or the so there a variety of different cognitive strategies but basically you're trying to make your shitty Behavior seem justified okay so you may dehumanize the victim you may blame the victim you may defuse responsibility um you make make uh advantageous comparisons so like listen I just called her stupid Chris is the one who shoved her in the locker like come on not even comparable so those are like we use these these mechanisms these cognitive mechanisms to to live with ourselves for the crummy behavior that we did the other thing that people who bully others tend to do is they tend to not pick up on the cues of distress but In fairness um part of it is because the power has corrupted them so they just don't see it their brain actually works differently but the other part of it is that it's so embarrassing and humiliating to be bullied that a lot of times and it's done so publicly it really is typically a public event that kids then um hide their distress so the one C that is needed for the public the bystanders to come in and support me um is what I'm suppressing and it's the one cue that maybe will get that bully to be morally engaged instead of disengaged is the thing that I'm suppressing so it's you know it gets really ugly yeah I mean the the shame of being socially excluded of being picked on causes you to hide your sadness and sadness is the very thing that might cause this bystander effect to cease or for Teacher to notice or for parents to realize or for the bully themselves to actually breach this threshold of reduced empathy uh is that something actually have you seen as you're tracking longitudinally do adult ex bullies have less empathy the I think in the moment so there is some evidence that yes but I think in the moment is when they have uh an empathetic Gap because that is when the moral disengagement is taking place and that's when they feel fully Justified so maybe when they look back at it with fresh eyes and and none of the emotional veilance attached to it they're able to be a bit more objective um you pointed at one thing though and I just wanted to say because if I'm not plugging my studies what's the point of even being here um that we did a study of 1,700 teachers and we asked them like why would you um intervene on behalf of a kid who's been bullied like what are the cues like what is it that's going to um that's going to motivate you to do something and they said distress distress was the number one reason that they would intervene on behalf of kids who are bullied and teens who are bullied and as I just said they're suppressing distress so we're counting on adults to lead in this area and they're not able to pick up the one CU that they need to to realize that something is something nefarious is going on yeah it's so interesting so why does it happen so much in school is there something special about the setup of the school environment is it something about the teenage in puberty years that encourages bullying what's going on so first of all bullying goes down as kids get older so it is a lot more atypical in high school students than it is in elementary and middle school students it really has to do about like there's so many different factors but part of it is going to be social skills where their brain is their brain development Social Development moral development cognitive development all those things interacting um and there's also like they're vying for uh limited resources so there's a little bit of resource scarcity which I mispronounced as scar twice the last time I was on your show didn't get bullied over that Chris so that's okay so there's also a bit of resource scarcity that's involved so all these things interact um they're just not that socially skilled um in our intervention programs we never talk about power we never talk about how power corrupts we never talk about how when you're afforded power or how it behooves you to be a good citizen to not abuse your power so um you know we're not expecting kids are going to have these lessons you at the end of the day we're animals right we're primates um this is what all primates do um so we're socialized Iz ing kids out of this they're not necessarily socialized into it some of it is maintained through socialization as we spoken about like I've said this over and over again but I also think that we're coming to um the school with like these deficits to begin with yeah yeah you're having to fight against something that this there's like a bullying entropy which is always going to be there and you're permanently going to have to intervene and intervene but I I guess one of the things that at least to me seems quite uh hope inducing is that if you can intervene and create kind of a a circuit breaker uh in the school you can have this recursive culture thing work for you as opposed to against you you can go from the 70% school to the 15% School uh and that that seems quite reassuring so I remember I was having this when I had my chat with Tony and he said there's something to do with the osificante social hierarchies and the fact that you don't move out of them much for a very long time what's the role that that's got to play with childhood bullying because there is like an obvious question you get to University and it's not happening as much and then you get to the workplace and even in the workplace you know people are there for a while not quite so long so you think what is it immaturity is it some hypervigilance to social hierarchies that we have during puberty when we're trying to flee the nest and we're looking for who our partner might be and all the rest of it um yeah what what's the unmoving longterm exposure to the same social hierarchies and social people what what's the role that that's got to play I mean it's precisely what you said everything all of the above and you and I talked about it on the last time we spoke too is it really is like the hierarchies are pretty pronounced in Elementary and high school um they're maintaining their power holding position um coercively but also using pro-social means so it really has to do with that so um you know how do you maintain power well you abuse those below you you scare them but then you also charm them so like it's it's complicated it's again this blending of pro-social and antisocial Behavior but and then there's lack of autonomy you spoke a little bit about that before um and it really is that like they don't have the same autonomy that you and I have um you know as friends in adulthood you treat me poorly I don't have to worry about seeing you again at school so we're done I can move on um whereas in high school and Elementary School you are going to see them again um and you're going to have to manage that and there's just some kids that are just more dominant than others right and they're imposing their will on others and not everybody's appreciating that but not everybody has the same skill set to be able to impose their will on others there there's little primates um put together in same age bands um and then then that same age band is then mixed with other age bands and we wonder why it happens how does bullying impact victims what does it do to them it affects all aspects of their life it affects everything in the immediate and in the long term it affects their mental health their physical health their academic achievement their sense of self um it changes who they are fundamentally and not only that it lasts a lifetime so studies that have followed individuals 30 50 years show that you can identify somebody who was bullied at 10 and they still have higher mental health rates at 50 um and at 60 it it's a scar that never heals now some of course will have it will get by um it but for the most part you won't and the reason why you won't is that it's so Salient it's so disruptive it serves a function for you to never forget so it's a social pain that's seared in your amydala and you're never going to get past it you may be better you may get better um for sure but um but it's if you re you think about it so like if you and I did a thought experiment right now and I know you said you were bullied as as a child and you think about those moments you're probably going to still have a visceral reaction and that has an evolutionary significance that not belonging is so Salient it's how we got ahead as a human species it's how we collaborate that the neuro alarm is massive when you don't and so your brain is going to never forget it and neither will your body are there some biological or genetic vulnerabil to the effects of bullying so when we look at um you and I talked about this last time about 5htt LPR the seratonin transporter gene so and obviously like genetics have advanced epigenetics is kind of like the new thing they're doing full scans um full Gene scans and the like so um not so there's a few people looking at the genetic vulnerability and there is a little bit um that exists I can't tell you what specific genes are involved I don't think that's the way to go it doesn't make sense to me I think that was the way to go 20 years ago that's how we thought about it but we don't think about it that way today um I do think that there are other things that like that obviously genes influence everything so um the way a person sees the world is going to also be attached to how they interpret advents um some people are just more sensitive to accuse of belonging and not belonging so they're high on rejection sensitivity um some individuals are more anxious um so if you think about it from a biological perspective their lyic system is more active uh their prefrontal cortex in a sense gets hijacked by their lyic system and it won't let them calm down it won't let them be rational it won't let them see things um as more nuanced so all of these individual differences affect how an person deals with bullying I think it's really important that's the bulk of my work is showing that um these this kind of heterogeneity because it's really important because some kids do better than others and then the kids who do better are kind of seen as the poster child of like this is what you should aspire to be the fact that you're not doing as well as Becky is because there's something wrong with You Chris if you just weren't so whiny if you just weren't so um squeaky whatever you want to call it then you know you could be okay just suck it up and you'll be okay um so I'm really trying to Chronicle this there's a lot of individual differences but there really is a difference in how they see the world sometimes but again back to that temporal priority is it the case that they're treated poorly and then it changes their worldview or do they have a worldview that's different that then um causes them to be treated picks up on and then it moves forward our studies typically show symptoms driven effects meaning that kids who have poor mental health are picked kicked on then that makes their mental health poor and if you've ever been around depressed people you can kind of see what's happening um they seem aloof they don't seem interested they don't have a lot of motivation they're not a lot of fun I'm not expecting them to be I'm not saying that at all but the peer group doesn't quite like that so then they pick up they pick up on those cues of being unwell and then pick on these kids and then make them even more unwell so and then there's going to be some kids who arrive at School ready to get at her and then they're treated so poorly and then they become unwell and then their worldview changes I suppose the ruthless thing about that is that if you've got this predisposition to ruminating brain to being a little bit more anxious and then something happens to further activate that like the very fear that you had about the world has sort of come to pass and the raw materials that you had that were there ready to be activated whether it's from an epigenetic genetic predisposition standpoint whether it's from a worldview perspective whether it's from the patterns that you've learned from your parents at home or whatever um yeah you kind of get a a 2X 3x multiplier bonus that pushes you further into this sort of dysfunctional uh perspective I love how you said that and it's kind of like okay so if we think about it so the biology has changed in some way right so we know and I'll just pick on the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access the HPA access which is our stress response system I've done a lot of work on that we've published longitudinal studies we know what's happening um when it comes to HPA uh dysfunction and bullying so kids who are bullied tend to either overproduce or underproduce cortisol and in time they underproduce cortisol so in the when you're faced with an acute stressor your HPA access um reacts right like you ramp up a a flight or fight um reaction I mean obviously it's a little bit more complicated than that but but you know I'm just giving a basic mechanism and then 20 minutes later cortisol has spiked and so that's what we're measuring we're measuring cortisol and how it's coming up and so your first time you're getting bullied Chris your cortisol is going to be high high high high and then as I follow you for the next three years eventually one thing I'm going to see is that your cortisol is going to be low and it's an Adaptive process so there's a you know the body is set on for homeostasis it's set to like keep you um doing well surviving thriving as best as you can even in difficult environments so bringing down your cortisol is a good way of doing it and it could be brought down because your gluc cortic cord receptor sites are now damaged from your brain being bathed in cortisol there's other mechanisms that also explained this but the point of the matter is is now we have low cortisol and so your reaction to Future stressors looks different now and not just the stressors of bullying the stressors across your life and so now we have changed the way a person is interacting and behaving in their world is a function of being terrible to them and that bothers me because this these behavioral and biological changes set them up for future um risk so they're more likely to be at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder so now Chris you've been bullied as a kid long time long-standing bullying issue now your HBA has downregulated itself as a protective factor and you get into a horrific car accident when you're 22 years old and you end up with PTSD that's debilitating and it causes you significant harm for the next 5 years if you hadn't had that experience PTSD probably wouldn't have been in your future and that's the stuff that we're looking at and we're working on so you can ex so risk is exacerbated in the future because of the relationships that our our grade three children have or our 10th graders are having so it really behooves us to step up it step it up on term in terms of intervention and prevention right yeah what about overcoming it overcoming childhood bullying as an adult has there been much work done on how people after the fact can help so I focused on not overcoming it and I know that sounds horrible but that's kind of like because I'm trying to get people motivated to change this so I've really focused on the ones who aren't doing well I don't think we have a good grasp of those who have done well just like we don't really understand the true positive leaders so if I you know if you have young scientists that are listening and they're just starting their career I want to know more about those who were bullied and seem to do okay um I wanted and maybe they had a protective um Gene maybe there was something about the way like maybe the other protective it might not even have been biological protective mechanism it could have been their family was so amazing you know like there's going to be so many things in the but that would be great because historically we haven't focused on positive side of things we've really focused on deficits and what's negative so I want to know that I think you know even the people that have got the deficits in later life would be interested in knowing okay this thing happened to me and maybe I'm carrying it with me to varying degrees uh how can I learn to overcome or how can I learn to move move past that maybe reprograms some of that uh that worldview that you said and I think that comes down to therapy like cognitive behav behavioral therapy would be really good can I mention another thing that kind of makes me so like in my book I really mentioned that like at the end of the day we don't know what the long-term implications are like well we have an idea that it's not going to be good um we don't know if this can be fixed if we can change this how bullying gets under the skin to confer a RIS you know I imagine we can because we're quite plastic there's a lot of plasticity um one of the things that we're doing is we're trying to reduce bullying in Earnest and what studies are showing and we just showed it um we still need to publish it but it's just replicating what's been shown across Europe um there's this healthy context Paradox where if you reduce bullying the few kids left in the school who are bullied have worse mental outcomes so in a sense we've now made some kids even more vulnerable by reducing bullying so what do you think that's about because I know you're a smart guy and you usually have the answer so well look if I was to if I was to totally Bro Science this and pull it out of my ass I would guess that I would guess that what you're able to do is lower the threshold of or increase the threshold basically for what high status bullies think is acceptable behavior who they think that they should be able to go after but the problem being that they still need to maintain power and control in one form or another which means that a smaller number of lower status victims are bullied more intensely because you're spreading the same or a similar amount of bullying across fewer victims so I think there's going to be a little bit of that and that part wasn't hasn't to my knowledge hasn't been really looked at but I love your answer so I will tell you the answer to that because we have the data and I'll be able to know that I think it comes back to also attributions if there's a lot of us being picked on the attribution is these guys are just jerks like it's not about me because I'm not the only one but if I'm the only one or there's only a few of us we there's something fundamentally wrong with us that is I think the attribution error that occurs so we are trying our best to reduce bullying and in doing so we're causing harm to a certain segment of the population so now I am going to school after school tomorrow I'm presenting to 170 principles in Quebec but I do this all the time and I present the data and I say here are the rates in your school we've done a great job at reducing bullying in your school can we get your school counselors to now um recognize that you have even you have kids that are even more vulnerable than they were before before isn't that a bit messed up it's ruthless it's uh I I mean I don't know what the I don't know what the solution to that is because it you're the suffering of the few saving the suffering of the many but then it's it's more on those few so if you end up with worse mental health outcomes it feels a little bit like it's it's not what you would ever have expected right you would just think like in a sense we're doing God's work by reducing bullying and yet the precious few who are left behind are doing worse than we've ever seen what do you say to people who push back and say well bullying is good for developing resilience or you know I was bullied as a kid and it made me a stronger person or it prevents you from being too weak I hate that and I get asked that all the time uh it triggers me um so I always think like well okay so you think you've done well but let's just say um I you I do a lot of stuff in sports because I'm a high performance soccer coach I coach uh Team Ontario for the U7 girls and uh our Canada Games Team uh but in any event the reason I mentioned that because it's a really easy way to explain this so you are now an Olympian Chris right you've won two Olympic gold medals in swimming and you say you know the reason I'm an Olympian is because I was bullied It Made Me Stronger it made me more resilient and I always say what if you were supposed to win 15 medals like so you know you don't know what your top performance is you don't know where you're supposed to be and where um how far you can Excel you think that it didn't do anything to you but there's going to be a biological component that definitely did that now there are always exceptions to the rules so I would be open-minded to maybe some people do better as a consequence of that I'm struck by often people don't want to change their experience if they could go back they don't want to change their experience because they think it's what made them who they are today but you could never know what your life would look like without that because you've experienced it and can't be erased well it's the difference between saying I achieved this because of that and I achieved this in spite of that exactly yeah yeah fascinating I mean look it's it's in many ways it's cope it's a way for an adult who went through tough thing as a kid to look back and say well this wasn't so bad I don't need to hold on to The Grudges because without that I wouldn't be who I am as opposed to without that I would be more of who I am and also too it's about making meaning from really terrible um circumstances like we all want to be able to explain why that terrible thing happened to us and um and makes sense of it so it makes sense to me um the people that I work with so I'm a professor of counseling psychology I supervise counseling psychologists of the future the clients that they are managing which are numerous more than I would be able to do as a single clinician um these individuals are not doing well they like the my students are overwhelmingly seeing individuals who had poor interpersonal relationships either with peers or with a caregiver most a lot of people are not forgetting these experiences how effective are most interventions at the moment give me the world and what does 20% mean 20% reduction in bullying is what we're doing at our best and we're doing it in younger kids and not in high school it becomes entrenched as it get so it goes down but the few victims that are left are in a sense lifetime victims so it becomes entrenched we're not doing a good job at all when we use a whole school approach we're better um when we have multiple components we're better when we involved um younger kids we're better I think that um that group I told you that's not moving are the really high status popular kids who are creating the norms for your school so really problematic um we can't we can't figure this out quick enough and I think it's because um we have focused in a way I think we have to bring it back and like in a sense like strip it down to its Essence and its Essence is I think this is part of the human condition and if you do that then I think your interventions are going to look a bit different and so I came out of a lab as a postdoc Rashard trumbl is like the highest cited Canadian psychologist maybe one of the highest cited psychologists in the world I was this postdoc student and he taught me about how kids are socialized out of aggression they're not socialized into it of course there's going to be some socialization component to it for sure you know um we're not saying that never exists but the idea that most people hold is that kids are aggressive because they've been modeled uh they've they've um in they've been influenced by aggressive models right Role Models um but this the research that I did with Rashard and has been replicated worldwide and has is longstanding like we follow kids from birth all the way into um long into adulthood is that most kids get socialized out of this um now I know it seems like I'm not being consistent because I really really emphasized a lot about how um popular bullies socialize the group but they came in probably with this need for dominance they came in with a a mai of alian worldview they came in with the tools that were needed in order to be effective in what they're doing and so if our intervention programs focused a little bit more on that maybe we'd be more successful does that make sense it does what are the current most commonly used anti-bullying interventions so there's one that's pretty popular it's called the Kaa program it comes out of Norway uh sorry not Norway Finland um and Christina Salma valy is the one who uh put this together it it has quite a bit of success in Finland but finland's a small country um it's roll out in a bigger place like the UK or Canada or the United States may not be um is not as is not it's not as successful in these contexts um what the preliminary data are suggesting there's also the alveus um anti-bullying program so Dan alas we spoke about the Scandinavian who um did most of his studies in Norway his early efforts had a 50% reduction in bullying but they implicated every aspect of society so everywhere you turn you had the same lesson so quite successful there um not as successful in North America or in the UK um what's the principles behind it the principles behind it so alas is about um creating awareness and involvement and the Kaa component is really about engaging the bystanders which is the way to go so if you because the source you know so bullying tends to happen in public bullying tends to be used in order to achieve and maintain power and so it's the peer group that's affording you that power they're the ones who are either going to accept what you're doing or they're going to reject what you're doing so if you could get the peer group to reject what popular bullies are doing or even the Nelson type bullies are doing then you'd be in a better position because you removed you've removed the incentive to do exactly interesting okay so how much or how effective is it to make bullies realize how much of an impact that they're having you know you've given all this compelling evidence about what it's going to do in later life and what it does to them at the time and their educational outcomes and they're going to gain weight and they're going to be blah blah blah blah you know as adults this is the entire way that uh campaigns for malaria Nets and stuff like that are done right here is a story of what your effort could have as a positive or A negative impact uh how effective is it to say to bullies look at all of the downstream implications of doing this this is what is that not an option so there is so there's a few programs that are um designed to increase uh moral engagement and so there are interventions bullying interventions that specifically Ally Target moral disengagement and moral engagement and they are they're they're not nothing is like very efficacious but you know they're doing something there's a bit of a reduction so I think that that should should be um applauded and replicated the issue is that um schools invest in this when they have a buling problem and then but for the most part they're not consistent in their investment so whatever we're going to do we're going to have to do it early and then maintain it over time um social emotional learning is really efficacious at just reducing aggression which is part of bullying um but there's a huge antisocial emotional learning movement in the United States I don't know if you know about that no you know because you can't socialize kids in schools that's the P perview purview of the parents um like how dare you even try uh you know get that woke uh BS out of our schools that sort of thing and yet the evidence is pretty strong when it comes to social emotional learning so there's a bit of a backlash against it but I guess it depends what what direction sustaining our efforts yeah it depends what direction the social and emotional learning is going toward whether it's going toward that there's no genders or the bi what they think it is but it's not this so you know I saw this last year um there was a pivot in UK schools away from criticizing toxic masculinity and toward promoting positive masculinity now the campaigns were exactly the same it was very much derating lots of typical behavior that you would see from boys and and young men uh and done in the classic frame that everybody that isn't insane hates um but this is one of those times where maybe a Rebrand could be useful uh and you might be able to you cool it's called social emotional learning not anymore now it's called now it's called like holistic interaction treatment or you know behavioral success or something like that and um yeah you this is one of the times where a Rebrand might be might be a good idea yeah or we're GNA have to do something I mean again this derails individuals potential not all I mean I don't want your listeners to have been bullied and worried about what this is going to mean for their memory and their health and all of things in the future I mean that's not it's not fair there's there's a lot of heterogeneity as I keep saying and I I think hope is really important one of the things I think is the saddest part so beyond the fact that we have some few remaining kids who are very vulnerable is that we could do a pretty good job at getting people to not actively bully others but we can't get kids to include kids and we started off talking about the need to belong right and how um we didn't talk we didn't use these words per se but it's a fundamental human motivator so at the end of the day I can maybe get kids to not call you stupid or shove you in the locker or whatever it is right um ex but I can't get them to include you I can't get them to invite them invite you to their birthday I can't get them to sit beside you at lunch and so we still have isolated victims who are not acely victimized and that breaks my heart yeah I I suppose it's the difference between getting somebody from sick to well and well to fit that you can stop them from being and I you're right that it's not even that it's that we don't have a need to not be bullied we have a need to be included like it's not avoiding exclusion it's uh creating in like inclusion um what you mentioned there about memory um what's the impact of bullying on memory childhood memory and then like life so we I I think we might have been the first study to show this but we did a study that was published in 2011 in brain and cognition followed kids prospectively for three years we looked at how memory um was affected as a consequence of being bullied Visa V cortisol because too much cortisol is terrible for your brain uh for your memory and so we look specifically at areas of the brain that are high in gluc cortico receptor sites so the hippocampus and the pre frontal cortex and we found that kids who were bullied increased their cortisol that in turn affected their memory in the areas that we would expect it to be so so that means it affects their memory that means they have fewer recall their veral memory is not as good um episodic memory can be still intact there's still but there is some issues also with episodic memory um yeah so it's just all of these things we tend to think about kids not doing well at school as a function of them being bullied so they disengage and then that influences their poor academic outcomes but we argued in this paper and it's been replicated that kids who are bullied also um legitimately have poor memory as a consequence of that poor treatment yeah neurobiology is stepping in to put a cap on your capacity and again this is the you succeeded because versus you succeeded in spite yeah yeah not nice um what about I I read something to do with increased supervision uh restricting bullying and something to do with spatial in spatial design spatial planning the way that schools of physical environments are put together so this is my this is my passion is telling schools that if they want to invest in anti-bullying efforts they should invest in supervision because it's one of the best ways of reducing bullying it's not a program it's just getting teachers out of the classroom and managing what's going on on the playground and in the hallways and the like so during the pandemic there was we did a study where we did a random design and keep in mind kids were still in school so we're not saying of course bullying should go down if they're not in school they're not face to face they're not interacting as much but um anyhow so when they were still in school we did this we randomized kids into um we looked at their bullying rates before the pandemic and during the pmic and we found a 50% reduction in Bine I've never seen that reduction in my lifetime so you're saying that another pandemic would be great fol yeah exactly no it back yeah so but um so this reduction came Visa V increased supervision which is something I've always been arguing for because we did a paper we published a paper in 2010 called places to avoid where we just chronicled all the places in the school where kids get bullied and guess where they get bullied Chris where there's no school where there's no supervision so they get on the playground in the hallways in the stairwell you name it right so um anyhow so this 50% reduction had to do with they were so um motivated to make sure kids had their masks on that they were washing their hands like they fully engaged in this uh you know virus mitigation strategies or these virus mitigation strategies that they inadvertently reduce bullying by 50% so how about remember kids we used to have um dinner ladies and and you know they weren't teachers but they were just adults they were adults that were on the playground you know um look I I don't mean to I don't mean to badmouth teachers a lot of them I was dating a teacher for a long time and and she would get into school at you know some ungodly hour and she'd be there for two hours before the kids got in and then work through and it's like you know you've got this one 50-minute block to have some food and reset before you go again in the afternoon um I'm aware teachers get to leave at 3:30 p.m. sometimes uh but also it is the one break that they get during the day all of that being said paying somebody who is you know maybe a a working mom for a couple of hours to help with a bit of supervision seems like a relatively low cost to improve the well-being of of the kids the issue is uh the unions are so strong teachers unions are so strong so I'm a huge fan of teachers as well um they have very strong unions good for them you know nobody's going to fault them for for advocating for themselves but um the unions um just prohibit a lot of what we want to try and do um they just don't allow it so I'll give you an example in Ontario High School teachers do not need to go into the hallways during school classroom transitions that's in their Collective Agreement um where does bullying take place in high schools in the hallways Jour classroom transitions so I mean you need to get them out of the class greeting them at the door just those little things there was this study and I may have got this wrong but I don't think I do um I remember this study from years ago where they were looking at why this particular school had low bullying rates and um it turns out that across the street so it's an elementary school across the street was a senior complex and there was a bench and they had the little old ladies sitting on the bench and so the kids in the playground thought they were being spied on by the little old ladies and those ladies were never going to get across the street in time to intervene in any capacity but just that was enough to reduce bullying rates wow make grandmother's great again that's what I see I love it there you go um what about so is that increased supervision the spatial planning intervention is that the same thing or is hand in hand so thinking about like um you know areas that if you can't get Supervision in um like we don't want scary spaces in a school right um kids are afraid of the bathrooms in schools because you can't get security cameras in there obviously you have to keep the door on them everybody has biological needs so yeah it so think that think when when designing schools thinking about schools stuff like that back of the bus pardon me school trips back of the bus you know uh staying of night doing camping whatever it might be so I guess one one thing that I'm kind of interested in we skirted around some uh behavioral genetics type stuff today you know interaction of of Nature and nurture of environment and genes um what about parents who were bullied then trying to parent their kids and you know this sort of hyper awareness this maybe this fixation on their experience as a child and then the inability to regulate what their future child is going through so studies show that there's a genetic component so there's um you know so parents who were bullied tend to have their kids have a higher likelihood of being bullied so beyond the genetic influence there's also uh an environmental influence I think a lot of it has to do with attributions so let's just say something's ambiguous and you tell me about it and I put my lens of how I was treated as a kid and influence your perception of an ambiguous situation Chris they're being mean to you you just don't realize it they're bullying you right and yet it's ambiguous so it can go left or it could go right that's part of the mechanism of what's also going on so in a sense parents are creating a threat sensitivity in their child um based on their experiences we do that across all aspects of life right like we're always about finding patterns making inferences that sort of thing um we tend to be our child's prefrontal cortex like we're you know their surrogate prefrontal cortex I mean that's what parenting is the problem is is in ambiguous situations you don't want to have a hostile attribution so you're basically making the child see threat where there may not be any and then when you see threat you behave differently right so then maybe I've guarded myself so now I'm seen as being aloof or arrogant and then that influences an interaction I mean social interactions are pretty complicated there's a lot of little things in the equation so that's just one example of how it it can happen what about the differences between childhood bullying and workplace bullying have you ever looked into what happens people get out they're now 25 they're no longer 15 and if there's anything that's interesting or Illuminating so the interesting thing is there's a lot of poly victimization so if you're bullied in childhood you're bullied in the workplace you so we still we showed a study um where you see that across all um areas so intimate partner violence Dating Violence that sort of thing workplace um peer relationships um in adulthood so it kind of there's some continuity but at the end of the day we're using self-reports so I'm not saying that these are not people who are like that their perception is not true but there could be a bias in their perception and you know again if you're looking for evidence that you're not well-liked if you're looking for evidence that people are going to treat you poorly you're going to find the evidence and so I think some of that is happening I also think that there's probably some of the vulnerabilities that made somebody uh that led to their victimization not not blaming victims at all like never ever would I suggest that you were treated poorly because of something that you did like you should be spared from oppression and humiliation you know full but there's some cues that are being picked up by others that may still be there that may still be present in adulthood well you've seen uh from Bad Men by David that study where uh criminals or sexual assaults were shown maybe it was silhouettes of women walking or maybe it was videos of women walking and they were asked who they would uh pick and they converged a lot of the time on the same sort of women so it's exactly the same you not laying at this at the feet and say it's because of the way that you walk but there is some sort of signal which is given off which portrays bestows exposes a vulnerability of some kind that a cohort of people uh May pick up on and then try and take advantage of and the single is hard because it reeks of a victim blaming right and yet it's not what the intention is um in the ideal world like so a lot of times what we do when kids are really bullied we change them schools in the past um they were put into programs social skills training programs so it was all about the deficits of the victim instead of thinking about um their rights and how they should be allowed to exist in this world being the way they are that that really the owner should be on changing the perpetrators um behavior and so I just need I think we need to be cautious because you know there PE this is a sensitive area we don't want people to ever think that um whatever they did um they deserve their poor treatment but at the same time there is something that some really terrible people are picking up on then it could be um a lack of confidence it could just be like as I said there's when I talked about if you were squeaky you you know you probably be left alone but if you're not you're going to be picked on again um we do know that there's victim shopping that that exists that kids do that and there's probably they try it out on a bunch of different you Tred it out on a bunch of different victims and you wait and see what the reaction oh that's so interesting victim that's not been studied in adults but I imagine that it probably will be like that that will exist that there is going to be victim shopping yeah very interesting Tracy you're awesome uh I oh you're awesome Hon you're awesome forever yeah well both awesome be careful what you wish for because you've got a book coming out soon um yeah in the interim between now and is it still called Mean Girls it's it's not called Mean Girls because it's women it's called mean mean mean yeah um between now and when that comes out where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing you seem to be publishing an awful lot of studies I mean publishing for sure I'm still on X I'm still hanging on by a threat on X um not so anyhow they can find me there I'm on LinkedIn they can find me Google Scholar of course that sort of thing um and then they can also find me on your podcast next year let's go we're doing it again we're ready to run it back I you're you're great you're great I I Adore speaking to you and uh I can't wait to see the new book and go through it and uh everyone here will be there to listen as well and thanks for putting attention on this like a lot of people are hurt so I think that um you have a huge microphone and people are going to appreciate hearing what works what doesn't work um and my mispronunciations they're going to appreciate that too and they won't put it in the comments I can't imagine that they never put it no one's ever commented anything mean on the internet so no no it's never existed all right until next time thank you Tracy bye do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go and go and check it out