Modern Wisdom - #637 - Tony Volk - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Bullying

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Tony Volk is a psychologist, professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Brock University, a researcher and an author. Almost everyone will encounter bullying at some point in our lives. Be it in school, sports or even at the workplace, there seems to be no shortage of individuals ready to prey on others. But why does bullying exist? Why is it so ubiquitous? And what are the adaptive reasons why people engage in it? Expect to learn whether bullying actually serves any purpose in society, whether bullying is heritable from parents, what factors can predict whether you will be a bully, whether broken homes make bullying kids, which people are most likely to be victim, whether bullying has got worse over time, what to do if you're the parent of a bully or a victim and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied)  Extra Stuff: Check out Tony's website - https://brocku.ca/volk-developmental-science-lab/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tony Volk. He's a psychologist, professor of evolutionary psychology at Brock University, a researcher, and an author. Almost everyone will encounter bullying at some point in our lives. If it in school, sports, or even at the workplace, there seems to be no shortage of individuals ready to pray on others. But why does bullying exist? Why is it so ubiquitous? And what are the adaptive reasons why people engage in it? Expect to learn whether bullying actually serves any purpose in society, whether bullying

is heritable from parents, what factors can predict whether you will be a bully, whether broken homes make bullying kids, which people are most likely to be victims, whether bullying has gotten worse over time, what to do if you are the parent of a bully or a victim, and much more. This breakdown is absolutely awesome. I love finding researchers like Tony, who is massive in his field and publicly in the space of sort of science communication podcast, bro stuff hasn't really been broken yet, and this is an absolutely awesome episode. So many great insights, loads of interesting ways to reminisce and reflect on your time in school, interacting with the politics of young kids and growing up. It's

so great. Having this adaptive lens, looking at things using this evolutionary perspective is so interesting to me. And I really, really hope that you take tons away from today and that it's hopefully going to nudge your future and the future of your kids in the right direction. Don't forget that you might be listening, but not subscribed. And that means that you're going to miss episodes when they go up. So if you want to support the show and if you want to ensure that you know when every episode drops and if you want to make me very happy, go and press subscribe. On Spotify or Apple Podcasts

or wherever else you are listening. I thank you. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Crafted London. They are the number one mens jewelry company worldwide, over half a million happy customers and it doesn't surprise me. The pieces are so easy to dress in. It's what I wore in the Mark Norma episode last Thursday for all of the people that were asking. It was the feather pendant.

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everything that better help offers and how they can help you by going to betterhelp.com slash modern wisdom. That's betterheelpe.com slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tony Volk. Why did you get interested in studying bullying? It actually was kind of by accident. Wendy Craig at Queens University had a whole pilot data and she needed a PhD student to work on it. I was friends with her and I said sure, I'll look at it, so I ended up looking at it. And then over time, as I was a professor, more and more students wanted to do research

on bullying, and it eventually became my main focus. What do you think is unique on novel about the approach that you've taken to looking at bullying? The biggest thing is that our group really asks why bullying happens. Seeing as it's ubiquitous, over time, time across cultural and really hard to prevent, seems like either development has gone wrong for so many people, or maybe there's something in it for the bullies. Okay, so how do you define bullying? What is it? Another great question. We define bullying

as a deliberate aggressive attempt against a weaker individual that causes harm. So it's got to be goal directed. It's got to be something that causes harm, so it can't be a meaningless thing. And most importantly, it has to happen in a context where the victim has a hard time defending themselves. That's the power imbalance. So bullying in that regard can't happen to somebody who is of equal status or higher status than you.

Exactly. That would be general aggression, but that wouldn't be bullying. Interesting. Okay. So what's the evolutionary hypothesis behind bullying? What have you come to believe about it? So bullying first seems a little counterintuitive from an evolutionary perspective. And what you often find is that in nature there's dominant hierarchy. Bullying is often confused with the alpha male, beta male, etc. But it's really unusual in dominant hierarchies for number two to pick on number 17 in the hierarchy. That's the whole point of a dominant hierarchy. They shouldn't be fighting. So we think bullying has a few different functions. Some of them depend on that hierarchy and some don't.

The ones that don't are pretty easy to explain. You're bullying somebody to get something that you want. So you want their resources. You want the best spot in the play yard. You want that scholarship that they're going for that you're interested in. But when it comes to bullying for dominance, we actually don't think that it's a direct competition

between competitors. Instead, what bullying is, it's a way of signaling how dangerous you are to compete with. So why is number two punching number 17? Number 17 is in the threat. Number 17 doesn't have things that they need socially. But what number two is doing is showing number one and number three, what they're capable of doing. And they're picking a target that's a reasonable threat. So if you were a 10-year-old and you're beating up a four-year-old, that's not really impressive. If you're a grade 12 and you're picking on a grade 9, that's not really going to intimidate the other

people. But on the other hand, if you're a grade 12 or a 12-year-old picking on up here, then that's showing your peers what you're willing and capable of doing to other peers, and it seems to be quite effective. Does that mean that bullying is increased when there is an audience of some kind? That's a really great question. A lot of bullying that we've observed happens with an audience, over 80% of bullying that we've observed. Again, calling Wendy Craig a dead puppy, did a beautiful study, kind of like a B.U.C. documentary where they put microphones on kids, sent them into the playground, and then filmed them from a distance. And they saw that 85% of the time when somebody was bullying somebody

else, they were surrounded by peers. Now, that would explain this sort of almost performative aspect of it. It's a very heavy signal. Yeah, we can talk about private bullying, so you could bully your sexual partner into things that you might not want a public. But as far as the majority of bullying that you see on the playground, especially in its schools, as well as in a lot of workplaces, is done performatively to show other people what you're capable of and that they should not mess with you. Interesting.

What are the most common setups or dynamics between a bully and a victim. Yeah, we for a long time thought that the problem was a one of a relationship. That the bully and the victim didn't get along and if we could somehow sit down the land with the lion, then things would be better. But recent research has shown a few really interesting things that go against the idea that there's this perfect setup or mismatch between individuals. Number one is that interventions that sit the land down with the lion are eye atrogenic, which means they make things worse. So what happens is for the next few weeks the bullying goes down and then the bullying

goes to higher than it was beforehand, which sort of makes sense. You put the bully with the victim in front of adults, and the bully plays nice for two weeks, and then as soon as the adults are done looking, they get their revenge. The other thing that some Dutch researchers have done is shown that bullies cycle victims. They don't just pick one victim,

and they cycle through one victim after another, and the more that they do that, the higher their reputation increases, the greater their popularity and their dominance. So it really seems like it's a signal. Beyond that, victims tend to have weaker levels of power, so they're less socially connected. They're more likely to have mental health issues to begin with, that bullying exacerbates, and then believes a very good at finding victims that they can target. So if you have a bully who's physically strong,

they'll pick on a physically weak individual. Somebody's socially strong, we'll pick on a socially isolated individual. Somebody who's mentally and socially strong, pick on a socially isolated individual. Somebody who's mentally and socially quick will pick on somebody who doesn't have strong mental or social skills. So the bullies are very flexible in choosing the right target for them. What else predicts a bully victim? You've mentioned what seems to be social isolation, lack of a support network.

I'm going to imagine that the fewer friends you have, the more likely you are to be bullied. Yeah, absolutely. Physical size, not surprisingly, younger age. If you're younger within the grade or younger overall. And then now we're currently looking at adolescents, you know, the data in, but I suspect we're going to find that being isolated from the data game is but I suspect we're going to find that being isolated from the dating

game is also an important factor. Now for aggression, you tend to find that being involved in a dating game makes you more likely to be targeted by aggression, but that's by equal level peers. Yep, yep, yep. So being picked on by stronger people is usually again these kids who are sending the right cost benefit signal. So somebody who's strong enough that the signal has meaning but somebody who's weak enough that the bully isn't going to be successfully retaliated against. And bullies will look at your social

network and say okay well, well, those people who the victim is connected with, I don't care about their opinions, they're safe target. But put that kid over there, he's friends with a girl who I like, so they're off limits. It's very strategic. It's interesting that there's almost like this Goldilocks zone where below a particular threshold of weakness or vulnerability, there is no point in the bully doing it, because what are you signaling?

You can obviously beat up. Now imagine that you would maybe verbally take the piss because I guess that that shows still that you're quick comparatively, but certainly doing something physical wouldn't make sense. I guess this must raise some questions for kids being skipped a heavy year or two in school because what you're doing is immediately putting somebody who is physically, mentally, socially, less adept in where the pool of

people that are more likely to be bullies. Yeah, that's a good example of a situation that can very easily backfire. Because it's very, in believes, a very skilled at saying, oh, we're just taking the piss out of this guy. We just haven't found the ret easing goofing around. And especially as kids get older, they do less physical bullying, boys do more physical bullying than girls. She's a surprise that you do more physical aggression of all kinds. But as kids get older, if you have a couple of eight-year-olds punching another kid, it's

not that bad. In terms of the physical damage, if you have a couple of 18-year-olds wailing away on somebody, you know, bones are broken, they're chipped. So they shift to these verbal and social forms of bullying that are in a sense less risky for the bully, but they're also much harder to detect and prevent. That's easier to deny. Okay, so what sort of people bully? What are the typical characteristics of someone

that is a bully? Again, one of the things that we went into this was the assumption that these aren't broken kids. And the first thing that steered me in this direction was I was working on that original data set, 10,000 kids from the World Health Organization. They look at kids' school health and 10,000 kids in Canada. And I noticed that bullies yes were more likely to smoke, more likely to drink alcohol, but

they had better mental health than average. Which didn't fit with the picture that these are kids who have poor self-esteem, who have poor social skills. And in fact, research has shown that they don't have deficits in mental health. They don't have deficits in social skills. They don't have deficits in things like theory of mind, understanding other people's thoughts and ideas. They don't even necessarily have deficits in empathy and in anger. What they have is low levels of a trait that we call honesty humility is part of the hexical. It's a six factor personality scale, a really new,

dynamic personality scale that really captures any social behavior with this trait. And essentially honesty humility, I like it because it sounds innocuous. What does that have to do with anything? But really, if you take the belief that you're better than other people, you deserve more than other people, you deserve more than other people, and you're willing to act on that belief, then that sets you up for saying, number 17, sorry, this is the way the world works.

It's doggy dog, nothing personal, but I'm better than you, and I'm going to show people it. And if you weren't such a crappy kid, or it's stupid, slow, ugly, you know, no friends, then this wouldn't be happening to you. So that's really the biggest predictor that we find across cultures. We've seen it now in Chinese data, and Dutch data, and Canadian and North American data, that this honesty, humility, is really what's driving individuals to engage in that behavior, along with having power. So another really interesting study from the Netherlands showed that not only do bullies gain in popularity when they engage in bullying, but kids who become more popular, power corrupts them, and they become more likely to be bullies themselves.

Right, so there are a lot of incentives here for a bully to bully. Aside from presuming that you have low honesty humility, which I'm going to guess would be associated with things like guilt, shame, regret for social infractions and treating somebody miserably. If you're not feeling the pain from that, if you're benefiting by having more social prowess, by rising up through your own dominant hierarchy, more prestige, greater social circles, also didn't you do something that looked at more access to sexual partners? They have sex sooner or more regularly or something?

Yeah, that's one of the main benefits from an evolutionary perspective. All this other stuff is nice, but if you don't translate it into passing on your genes, it doesn't matter. So we did a study that kind of surprised us. It hit number seven on Reddit when it came out that bullies have more sex than non-bullies. And that accounted for both early adolescence and in later adolescence. Both boys and girls, so it wasn't a case that it was just dominant boys monopolizing the gene pool. But both dominant boys and dominant girls use bullying to get sex.

And then recently, a team from Europe, again, Netherlands and some folks from the UK as well, looked at, I'm trying to think of, I think it was almost 50 years now, at least 40 years ago, data on bullies from the late 70s. And they showed that these bullies actually have more kids.

And we've done this follow-up study looking at 30-year-olds and 30-year-olds who are bullies in high school have more kids. That's very interesting. I'm trying to work out what direction this arrow of causation goes. For instance, you could just have people who are more likely to bully are more tapped in socially, therefore their sociosexuality would be higher. It's not necessarily that by bullying you gain more access to mates, which means that you then get more sex, which means that you then have more kids, because I don't think that

that would explain particularly why girls would get more access. Maybe some intracectual competition stuff here that you've derigated some female rivals and you rise up. But I don't know, man, like even when I was a young full of magic and runescape 15-year-old, I don't think I thought the girls that bullied were more hot or charming. I can see it in reverse.

Everybody could understand why the dominant guy that wears the leather jacket with cut off sleeves and stands with one foot up against a wall, smoking a cigarette, why he might be highly prized by the women, but I don't think that it would work in reverse. So yeah, I wonder whether sociosexuality just kind of folds into this more, the more socially adept, the more socially tuned in,

they're playing that dominance and that status full game, and that means that downstream from that, they're also playing the flirting game and the dating game and the having kids game. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think it's a bidirectional pathway. And in the case of girls, we know that kids who victimize are less likely to have sex and less likely to date. So bullying is an effective way of knocking out some competitors and intimidating others. If you see the movie Mean Girls, it's often the prototype for girls bullying, and they're pretty nasty with it each other when it comes to and they're pretty nasty with each other when it comes to guys' attention. So certainly, intracexual competition is important.

Intersexuality, these girls are dominant in securing the resources. And we know that in our species, men compete for women, not as much as in the other way. But a woman who is good at getting resources and good at taking care of her kids, you think in Canada here we talk about the hockey mums, in the US, in the UK, it's probably soccer mums, maybe Southern US, it's the football mums. Those mums are intimidating and perhaps attractive

to the male partners because they say, look, she's gonna look after my kids and get them what they want and Knock the other kids out of the way for them So there's benefits Directly and then of course personality underlying bullying also really overlaps with social sexuality Right, so given the fact that I'm not massively familiar with hexa co So big five is at least what I have a bit of an insight in and it seems like there's a good bit across over. I know that the the C and the O and the A have a bit across over.

Given the fact that one of the best predictors for this is honesty humility, given the fact that almost all personality traits are very highly heritable of 50% on average. I don't know what honesty humility is. Does that mean that bullying is heritable? Yes, bullying has a high degree of genetic heritability, 60-70% now it's important for folks to know that that doesn't mean bullying is 60-70% caused by genes. It means the differences between average individuals and western samples, 60 to 70% of that difference can be explained by genetics. Hexico is like the big five, but much better. It's gotten better across cultural growth.

Throwing shade. Throwing shade at the big five The guy you came up with it is at my university along with Hibian Lee Mike Ashton And they were trying to replicate the big five as grad students across cultures and it didn't come out as Five English it comes out as five or six. So the original big five creators Took parsimony and said, in English, we'll go with five. You're right that there's a lot of similarities, extroversion, conscientiousness, openness, or similar, but where it's very

different is that the hexical really maps on well with evolutionary explanations for social behavior. So social behavior happens for three reasons. And by social, I mean cooperation. Mutualism is when you each get something to benefit from. That's the cleaner bird, picking a crocodile's teeth. They're each getting something direct from each other. Lions helping bring down prey or helping each other directly. Or it happens through kin selection, which

means look after similar genes. That's usually nepotism looking after your family or reciprocal altruism. Your reciprocal altruism is you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours at a later date. Now the hexico-honesty humility maps on with your willingness to cheat on others, to look after yourself. So if you think of something like the Prisoners dilemma, it's a willingness to take advantage of others. If you see a wallet with 200 bucks, you take the money out before you can consider returning it. The advantage of that is you selfishly benefit. The cost is that you get a reputation for being selfish and people don't like being with you.

Agreeableness in the Hexico is the opposite of that. How willing are you to forgive somebody taking advantage of you? So, you and your mate go out for lunch and they forget their wallet, they screw it, we're done through, you know, or do you tolerate that and allow it to continue? Now, obviously that's good for continuing your relationship, but if you're really agreeable, your dead flanders, people can take advantage of it. Emotionality maps on really nicely with sentimentality and a lack of risk taking. It's the one that has the biggest sex difference, men are a little lower in honesty humility, women are actually a little lower in agreeableness,

but women are much higher in emotionality. I mean, we're in a lower in agreeableness, but women are much higher emotionally. And that in a lower in agreeableness on Hexico. Yeah. Yeah. They're more likely to get angry and retaliate than men are. Is that so is the Hexico agreeableness a different measure than the big five agreeableness? Yeah. Big five agreeableness just basically says nice, but it doesn't map onto the specific

function. So, you've got emotionality, which is basically kin selection. Are you sentimental? Do you have high levels of emotional empathy? Do you worry a lot? Which is what we've seen a lot of mothers and women. That's why you find more vegetarians, for example, amongst women. But then the hexaco is H and A, or do you take advantage of others and do you let yourself

get taken advantage of? Very interesting. Is there a place that people can do an online test, a thorough, very well validated online test that will explain the scores for Hexaco? Yeah. Hexaco. Hexac0.org is where the creators have that online test, and you can do it online there, and it will give you a sense of where you're at. It's a really useful scale. I don't know if we want to transition a little away from bullying, but one of the more interesting

findings we did in art my career was look at the big five and other personality measures predicting the dark triad, psychopathy, narcissism, macchiavalianism, which is basically scheming, strategic. And we found that the Hexico outperformed all the other personality measures, including the Big Five. And then the one that really blew us away was the colleague Gordon Hodson said, the dark triad all clustered together, thinking of overlapping circles,

because it shares a common core, that common core of anti-social selfishness. And so we looked to see how the core of the dark triad overlapped with the core of the hexico. And why was expecting a correlation to be pretty big? 0.5, 0.6. Correlation is 0.95. So it's the same thing. And that's been replicated now in 17 different countries, that being bad is basically being the same thing as being low in honesty humility. Wow. The nail in the coffin of the big five personality assessment there.

Okay, so going back to the bullying thing, I'm very interested in the sex differences in bullying. Why do girls bully, why do boys bully, and how do they do it differently? Yeah, absolutely. Both are bullying for the similar sorts of things, for resources, for reputations, for reproduction. There's a couple other potential functions, deterrence and recreation that we can talk about. But boys and girls, while they have some different pressures, both of them need to secure resources. Boys more than girls.

And both of them need to secure a reputation. And they're status hierarchies. We know from primate literatures and human literatures that high ranking women have better reproductive success. And so both are motivated to achieve those. The biggest difference that we find is that boys engage in much more physical bullying, which fits with every study on physical aggression.

That's because boys have at least as men have a greater degree of variance in reproductive outcomes. So the greatest bullies in history, I think it folks like Genghis Khan, whose father of 1% of the world's population alive today, he and his family or the ancestors, you better rate saying that. So there's a huge incentive for boys to take risks that isn't present in girls. So girls tend to engage in less direct bullying, so indirect verbal and indirect social bullying. But boys also engage in a lot of that behavior too. Their boys can be very strategic about spreading rumors, about their competitors.

And what they often tend to use, another difference is the language that they use. So women tend to go after another woman's sexual reputation, and boys tend to go after another boy's manliness. Well, I mean, just to interject the women chasing after chast, or females chasing after chastity and derogating that in their rivals, and men about manliness, the first time that I learned this through an evolutionary lens, it blew my mind,

because it's so plain and obvious, and everybody knows this. Another my favorite example of this, did you see that Greta Tunberg got into a spat with Andrew Tate like three months ago on Twitter? So Andrew was saying I'm going to drive my supercars and I'm going to emit CO2 and fuck you Greta like you're an idiot. And she quote tweeted him, I think it's like it's like the one of the most liked tweets of all time now. I think she's got two of the top 10. I'm pretty sure they're both at Andrew Tate, and she accused him of small dick energy.

And I thought, okay, anybody that needs a massive social experiment showing what people think men value the most, small dick energy. What are you derogating there? You're derogating manliness, you're derogating for mid-ability, there's a little bit of sort of sexual prowess in there, reducing status down.

If he'd replied, and he was on the streets of Newcastle outside of a nightclub at three in the morning, having had a couple of too many beers, he would have said something like, fuck you, you slag. Like, because again, what is that? That is a derogation of chastity. One of the brutal things that I learned about this over the last couple of months is that, this from Tanya Reynolds, she said that derogating chastity is such a precision engineered weapon because it's almost impossible

to disprove. You can't walk around showing people how little sex you're having. Look at all of this sex that I'm not doing. Look at how pure I am. It's basically impossible. So it's a real precision engineered strike. I just love that sex difference in terms of what gets targeted. And the fact that that shows up in bullying isn't surprising. Yeah, absolutely. Particularly since these kids have average or better social skills, they didn't become the captain of the football team or the head cheerleader through physical prowess alone in most cases. It's because they know how to manipulate these social cues, so they really know how to

hit kids where it hurts. But that's individualistic. You know, one of my favorite, because it gives it the wrong connotation. But one of the more powerful or interesting stories I heard was about Lou Ferigno, a bodybuilder who for listeners who don't know, played the incredible Hulk without any CGI or makeup. They just painted him green, huge man, full of muscles. And he was relentlessly bullied because he has a hearing loss.

So kids would make fun of the way he talked. And that's not something you can punch your way out of. If people are causing, calling you stupid or slow, punching them doesn't change that. And so, bullies are really effective at picking the impact that's going to hurt their target the most because it sends the strongest signal. You're saying to number one and three, look what I did to the reputation of 17. We all know she didn't sleep around. Yes, she messed around with this one guy, but I destroy your reputation. You mess with me. It's going to happen to

you. Does this mean that bullies are smarter on average? The data on IQ shows that they are average. So they're not necessarily smarter or more cunning. I think the biggest difference comes in the low honesty humility means they're willing to use these things. I'm sure you know, hang out with your friends a lot of soft spots that you could hurt them with. The difference is you don't, you don't go there. You make fun of the things that you know they'll laugh at, but you don't talk about that one thing that would really hurt them. And bullies do.

I'm trying to map this onto my experience. So for a little bit of background, I was pretty badly bullied throughout school. And I haven't really spoken about it much on the podcast, but then I did this big episode a couple of months ago. And I felt like, okay, now's the time for me to really start to open up about what I felt. And I got this really heartfelt message

from a guy who used to bully me in school and he'd seen this interview I'd done with the BBC and he had to reach out and apologize for him like super, super moving. And I'm trying to think back to my experience as much as I've probably tried to shove bits of it away. Trying to think back to my experience and map myself onto the lessons that you're teaching us here. And the honesty humility thing, I find myself being quite orderly. I don't break rules very much. And I think that that like procedural, classic British, stand-in-align follow the rules and procedures thing. I think that's definitely something that I've

got in me quite strongly. I don't tend to break rules very much. I have a massive amount of guilt and shame when I do stuff. I do feel like pretty bad about fucking people over. If I say something that's mean that I know it's probably hurt someone or maybe even hasn't hurt them, but I'll worry about whether or not it has. So that's in there. And then when you were talking about the the bullies not using that and being able to kind of precision strike, derogate. I was smaller when I was in school, even though I'm a little bigger now, would have been not dumber, I would have been probably smarter on average than most of the kids, certainly most of the kids that were bullying me, but significantly less socially adept. So I think high scores a lot of the time, like let's say that I outperformed a

bunch of the bullies in a test or got higher grades or was moved up a class or did whatever, that would become also a justification for bullying down the line. So yeah, I think that, to like trying to map what I've learned from you onto my experience in school, I think I really had kind of a perfect storm of a lack of physical femininity and some pretty high social isolation coupled with lack of social capability that just made me like an absolute perfect target.

Yeah, and there's a number of things to dive into there, that just made me like an absolute perfect target. Yeah, and there's a number of things to dive into there, but I think the first and most important is victims recognizing that it's not their fault. Bullies are going through, it's almost like, the terminator walking with this little scanning list saying who's a good target, who's a good target, there's the right target. It's not something that you did.

There are sometimes victims that we call provocative victims who are sometimes bullied victims themselves. And I should qualify now that when I'm talking about police, I'm talking about kids who are primarily police and not victims as well. Kids who are both police and victims, they're like the Nelson months as they have bad social skills, they've deregulated, etc. How common are they? Yeah, I just can say, that's the most of the bullying estimates are less than 30%. 78% of the bullies, bullying that's done

is done by the really dominant kids. And so they're picking in a very cowardly way somebody that can't effectively fight back. The kids were picking on Luforig. No might have been smaller But they knew that he couldn't Respond without you know looking more socially awkward the only way he can defend himself is by punching his guys Well, no social skills. So it's a very Calus very calculated predatory way of achieving what you want. Whereas on the opposite end, if you're high and honesty humility, you have what you said,

you believe in fairness, you know, it's in some of your interviews, you try and present a balanced view, you don't take advantage of people when the opportunity presents itself. And that's so much more important than we often hear that it's an anger issue or a lack of emotional empathy. And those really aren't strongly correlated at all with bullying, especially emotional empathy. And if you look at almost any action hero that's been in Hollywood from the 80s onward, even before the Clint Eastwood. They all have the profile

of their very low in emotionality and empathy, their very low in agreeableness, but they're high in honesty humility. These are good people until you piss them off. Yeah, they've got that noble side to them, right? Right, and it's that nobility, that's why we like them. In a sense that, yes, you think a John Wick, how many people have killed in this series? Don't touch his dog. Don't touch his fucking dog. That's a lesson.

But we still like him because he's honorable. And he has that sense with him. And that is really the biggest cost that we found for bullying is that while they are very good at getting what we call dominance or popularity, people don't like them. And that's because people can recognize what they're doing. So the head cheerleader is intimidating, the capital football team is intimidating, but you don't really want to spend a lot of time with them unless you're directly gaining from their power.

Yeah, then we trickle down effective whatever good social halo they've got going on. Okay, so what about the ages of bullying? What age does bullying peak? Is there a difference? You already mentioned physicality kind of adjusts over time, but what about if we roll forward from school into adulthood, the workplace, the neighborhood, et cetera? Yeah, so we have colleagues at Jamie Austro in Buffalo studies actually bullying in the preschool.

So we know that it exists early on and some other colleagues have shown that babies might have a basic understanding of power and balances in interactions. So it probably starts pretty early. We know that in children and adolescents, it peaks right around the age of 13 to 14. And the data isn't 100% lined up, whether that's because when you're usually transitioning schools and so you have to reassert yourself or whether that's because when you're usually transitioning schools and so you

have to reassert yourself or whether it's because of puberty, but most of the evidence is coming down on the side of puberty. That once the mating game starts, bullying kicks up another gear. That there's a whole new level of seriousness, which means between the ages of about 13 to 15 is when bullying peaks. It decreases, but it does continue on into adulthood. Being a bully in high school or elementary school is predictive of being a bully in the workplace. Almost certainly, in my opinion, because the shared underlying traits of honesty humility, which for different but similar reasons are also the lowest in adolescence it looks

like. That's when we bottom out in honesty humility. It's a time when you separate from your family and start thinking about yourselves. So it could explain why somebody like the individual you mentioned was a jerk then, and it isn't a jerk later now that they've grown up a little. But there are many jerks who persist into adulthood and are happy to continue bullying people throughout adulthood. So childhood bullying is predictive of adult bullying as well. Some people will age out of it, but not everybody will. I have to say, one of the things that, okay, before I say that, is there any correlation that you have found between the family's socioeconomic status, the presence of a father in the home,

race differences, family environment, stuff like that. I'm trying to separate out, you know, this honesty humility thing from some of the more environmental factors. Yeah, so father in the home, we've looked at briefly, and I've done other work, say on pubertal maturation and father in the home that I think shoots down that hypothesis, even though I kind of backed it up in the past, Bad neighborhoods and competitive

environments exacerbate bullying. What's the competitive environment? So where people endorse competitive attitudes, that status really matters, winning is more important than having fun, things like that. That increases bullying, having role models who bully, increases bullying. There is a really interesting study that was done by some colleagues in, believe it was North Carolina, and North Carolina is a purple state.

And in 2016, they did a study in 2015 and 2017. And in the districts that went hard read for Trump. A year after, so from 2015 to 2017, there was an increase in racialized bullying in those districts, which why and only those districts, our assumption is they're copying their role model and what their role model is doing. So role models matter. The really interesting thing about SCS, which typically being poor is associated with risk factors, not bullying. It's the opposite.

Wealthier kids are more likely to be bullies. And the reason for that is because they have power. If you're the kid who has the best clothes and you just came back from Europe and kids can come over to your house and go jet skiing or at your cottage, then you have a lot of power that you can use over kids who don't have that. So we actually see that higher SES is a risk factor for bullying. Right, so I'm just trying to think that the kids who have more that are higher in socio-economic status that have more resources at home, this isn't necessarily due to the fact that the lessons and world view that they have

is I can do things and not have repercussions. It is more that they have given this baseline of just higher status and from this higher status, it means that there is a greater number of people to punch down. That's kind of an interesting way to do it. So I've got it in my head. You know, that famous graph, the hypergamy graph of sort of men dating across, but then women only kind of dating up I'm kind of seeing the same thing, but for bullying where you know, number one can bully everybody down

But number five can only bully from number five down and number 10 can only bully from number 10 down It's very difficult to bully up So the people that are higher up in terms of socioeconomic status have a larger pool of other people from which to bully Yeah, I also suspect that you're right, that some of it, although our early analysis, don't suggest if we're doing more refined analysis, I think some of it is gonna come from the parents, wealth is correlated with the same sort of

arrogant attitudes of winner take all. Hi, God's Taker. Yeah, first place, and then there's losers. To balance out our samples, for example, when we work with undergraduates, we always get students from the business school because they're habitually lower in honesty, humility, because it's a cut-through world in business, right? It's a doggy dog, winner takes all. So some of that is certainly trickling down from parents. But one of the really interesting studies we did was showing that maternal monitoring,

and it maternal is just because women are an average primary caregivers, but you get to caregiver monitoring, is associated with the reduction in bullying. But then we split that between kids who are high in honesty humility and kids who are low in honesty humility. Kids who are high in honesty humility, it didn't make any difference at all. They are always low in bullying.

So if you're a good sensible kid, it doesn't really matter what your parents are doing or monitoring you because you're not gonna be tempted to take advantage of other kids. It was when the kids were low in honesty, humility themselves. And of course, there's going to be shared genetic and environmental influences from the parents along those lines. But for kids who were low in honesty, humility, and whose parents didn't watch them,

then they were the ones who by far engaged in the most bullying. What do you think is happening there? Just a lack of supervision and a disposition that tends you towards being like breaking rules and social norms and stuff without the parent there, you're more likely to succumb to your base instincts. Yeah, exactly. And it's also potentially, if you want to be

maxi-vailing about it, it might be more sensible for the parents to suggest more subtle ways of gaining power, because bullying can still, especially in some modern environments, land you in trouble. Schools have very poor records in general in dealing with bullying, But I think that's really what's underlying it is that, you know, without parents there to guide the child, those instincts are kicking in. So, okay, go for the throat. They do. Just to reiterate what you said earlier on, fatherless homes you haven't managed to find a particularly strong correlation? No, single parents, single parenting doesn't seem to be a major predictor.

Again, probably because if the cause of the single home isn't honestly humility, stressing in and of itself isn't going to make a good person turn bad. We tend to see what's the conscientiousness. If that gets lower, then yes, you engage in more risk-taking behavior, but that risk-taking behavior doesn't turn in a dark direction unless you have the dark, greatest positions. So, once you start loading up all kinds of different factors, it's so interwoven, man, it's so interesting. I love it. I love how complex it is.

It really does seem though, as with everything, behavioral genetics comes and smashes all of your ideas in the face. You've got a lot of raw materials and and you have a disposition, and there are things that you can do to kind of nudge it around, but really, you kind of are the way you are. There was something that you said before, first off, I'm realizing the reason I probably didn't lose my virginity until the age of 17 is because I got bullied in school, which I don't know whether that's an advantage or a disadvantage to have an x-reo under my belt before I decided to have sex. The relationship between alcohol use and bullying was something that I

thought was super, super interesting, especially coming from the UK, a country where the age of legal age for drinking is 18, is opposed to 21 21 Yeah, it's a great question and The answer is with everything it's complicated so for example kids in China These other major predictor and Chinese bullying is conscientiousness So willing us to plan ahead think long-term versus being a positive lazy, etc. That doesn't show up in North American data. And we think that's because in China, where many schools have in local parentists, which means they can act

like parents, the punishments for bullying are much more severe. So, if a kid's caught bullying, they have the power to physically discipline the child, toss the child out of class, expel them. You're kidding me, you can get spanked in China still. Yeah, I'm not going to say I know every school in China, it's a big country, but in the schools we work with yet. In North America, we tend to find its low agreeableness being angry is associated with it. Probably because it's not as risky a behavior, so it's not showing up with just these really impulsive kids. Having said that, alcohol is associated with an increase in all kinds of anti-sociality because it releases

impulsivity. I'd expect it to be a bigger effect in China and it would be in North America or in the UK, but I would suspect that alcohol use would both increase bullying directly as well as correlate with the general pattern of anti-sociality. Well, you're also also gonna have probably the people who do start drinking sooner will have a social group. Very few, 15, 16, 17 year old are drinking in the house on their own.

It's your part of a group. That means if you are part of a group, you probably got status. That means that you have this. Let's call it like the bullying pool. The bullying pool has been opened up for you a little bit. I also, you know, to fold another thing into the Chinese discussion, Asian people suck at drinking.

Like Asian people are not good at drinking. And, you know, that may be another sort of racial difference. One other thing I forgot to ask you about the family setup. I'm going to guess that only children are more likely to be bullied than children that have got brothers or sisters and or cousins that live in the neighborhood or go to the same school. Yeah, I would have thought the same thing, but the date on that is ambiguous. And I think that's partly because data shows that being bullied at home is correlated with being bullied at school And so if you're older brother or sister and sibling bullying

Is a newer area of research. It's not my area of research But what's been done seems to show that it's as toxic as being bullied by strangers So if your older brother or sister is picking on you that a might carry over into school and B, your behavior and reaction to other kids might carry over into school making you a more appealing victim. So, it's not the protective factor that we thought. In that, I'm sure it is in some cases, if you've got a good older brother or sister who looks at you.

mediated by what the relationship with the siblings is like. Yeah, so it double edged, I guess, is the short way of saying it. Having siblings, so many other categories with bullying. It's a double edged sort. It's bullying. Okay, so getting into the sort of more ancestral reasons we've spoken about kind of, I guess, the school yard mostly. I'm going to guess that bullying must have been used ancestral to foster social cohesion

in one form or another. What else that and then what else was it useful? Similar things, getting resources, so you want that piece of meat. A lot of hunter-gatherers divide their meat equally Well, you bully people to giving your family better meat or more meat You bully the people across hills not to come in hunting your territory even though you go into bears on occasion you infarigate the reputations of competitors

Especially in adolescence when you're getting ready to enter that dating pool. You don't want to be with her. She's not faithful. Interestingly, one of the things that really tuned me into the evolutionary research is a book by Jean Briggs, Never in Anger, and it's a book about her life with the Labrador Immulate, the Eskimochi, it's kind of what Inuit are, and they have a social norm that you're not allowed to

express anger, which is probably really useful if you're living in an aglue and it's minus 40 and if somebody gets pissed and you break the wall, it really frees death. So you're not allowed to get angry, but they still bullied. There was a main group of people who stuck together and there was a smaller group and the main group would make fun of the smaller group, talk about how stingy they were, they didn't share, they weren't as social or friendly, and then the main group had a bit of a food shortage and had to rely on the weaker group, right, things around, and there's some really interesting dynamics. But there's a case where that group versus group theme, which is a really powerful driver

of human behavior, it is very easy to turn one group against another, which is something we're looking at in adolescence. It's trickier to do, but we're really interested in seeing what happens with two groups start bullying each other's with your members. My guess is that either fades away or very quickly escalates. Talk to me about how social media has changed the landscape of bullying. Yeah, social media, I'm really not a fan of, you know, I heard somebody describe it well, there's Max Teigman, that it's our first experiment with AI, interfering with our lives, and it did not go well. The algorithms that it uses are

not friendly. So there's a number of impacts. The first and most obvious is that it's made it really hard to track down bullies. And when I talk to these school principles at the schools that we work with, it's a fantastic schools here in the Niagara region. The principles tell me how difficult it is when one of their students is being bullied but it's being done online. So what authority does the principle have to shut down an Instagram account or it's really done on Twitter, but Snapchat or TikTok wherever it is?

It makes it much easier to bully without having repercussions, which means it's an attractive option. Fortunately, the data shows that the kids who bully the most online are the same kids who are bullying in person. So it hasn't encouraged these kids, who I would say are probably not low in honesty humility, to suddenly start taking up bullying. But it has made it much harder for us to prevent cases of bullying where the bullies are smart enough. It's not a giant leap of intelligence to say, okay, if I hit this big anonymous account. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing that they can do compared to if you slam a kid into

a locker in front of the teacher. So so that aspect has certainly been very toxic. The general dynamics of social media are especially for girls toxic. It's not my area of specialty, but one of the interesting things we found looking at data from pre-to-post pandemic is that girls suffered a higher decline in mental health and boys. And we think part of that is because of how much time they spend on social media. And we know young boys in

social media, I can see it in my sons, they do the same sort of thing that we did when you're little. Play video games with their friends, they're yelling at each other, are you idiot when you do that? You know, no, you shot me, picked up my health pack, but it's the same sort of thing they'd probably be doing if they're in the room together. We'll spend a lot more time doing social comparison. And those algorithms don't show you a balanced view of life. They show the worst or the best. or the best, you know, the most sensationalized views, which makes girls more vulnerable to the effects of bullying as victims. You're not just comparing yourself to the best looking girl at school, you're comparing yourself to the best looking girls on the internet, which is not a fair or smart comparison to be making.

And the kind of media that they use is more conducive to that kind of bullying than it is in the social media that boys tend to use. Yeah, I had Jean Twangy on the show recently, and the lady that wrote I, Jen, and her new book, Generations. And it's not good, man. So what is it?

60% of teenage girls say that they have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness. It's just such a dark statistic. And, yeah, the weird thing is that it's such a high number of girls. Unless you're saying that 60% of the girls are being bullied by 40% of the girls, which I wouldn't imagine that 40% of all girls are bullies, especially not up against this other group. It's just like an ambient permeated, displeasure that everybody feels. It's not done by somebody. It's baked into the code and the experience of the technology itself, which makes it even worse. At least you could do an intervention with the individuals, if it was coming from individuals,

but if it's coming from the medium that you exist in, that's even harder. Looking at modern civilization then, school, we've spoken about in awful lot today Compared to an ancestral lifestyle have we created an environment which is more conducive to bullying is school a perfect storm for bullying? Yes, and no It's a sort of the yes One of the things that mediates bullying and Peter Gray wrote a really nice series of articles about this is you have mixed aged and often mixed sex play in hunter-gatherer groups. For most times of the year, almost all hunter-gatherers live in small bands in about 20 to 25 and then

seasonally when times are good, they get together with the extended family, 150 for a few months. So most of the time, you only have, you know, let's say half the group are kids, you've got 12 kids to pick from. So it's harder to have these isolated cleaks. Everybody sort of has to get along. And the mix-age play reduces the need to show off. 12-year-old doesn't need to show that they're better than they're eight-year-old cousin.

It's a given. The 12-year-old boy isn't as motivated to compete against a 12-year-old girl. Right. So because each cohort that would be competing for status and is sufficiently similar in status for bullying to be a useful tool is so small there is basically no point in but there's one person from this age and this age and this age and this age at each gender and that's it. Right and on top of that most of them are going to be related so that's selection, so that's a break on attacking copies of your genes and other bodies. So those are reasons why I think modern society and in particular as well you have adults who step in

and you're motivated to step in. And we know that one of the big factors that motivates teachers is whether they feel a motivated, be competent, nature-feeding, whereas in the past, you'd be living with your aunts and uncles and they would have no problem saying knock that off. In large part because that sort of behavior is rarely tolerated. The downside to ancestral environments is that the stakes could be potentially higher. So if you and I were siblings and there's one piece of meat, yes, you have 50% of my genes, but I have 100%. So unless I'm saving two of my brothers, I should be bullying to get that meat. And so the competition in that sense could be life or death, which would increase the

benefit of engaging in bullying. So my guess is that bullying was probably less common in the past, but when it did happen, it had the potential to become very serious. I want to talk about some interventions and stuff now. So you'd mentioned there one of the challenges that teachers face on and so forth. There's a quote from you, which I really liked, which was bullying is neither innate nor learned, but it is the interaction between two natural predispositions, selfless versus selfish, and our individual environments, the households we grow up in, for instance, promote or hinder these predispositions. That's why it's possible to reduce bullying, but challenging to do so. What have you learned about interventions that work? What is bad? What is bad? What is

good? Where to teach us? Struggle? Where to parents? Struggle, etc. Yeah, that's, you know, in some ways, the million dollar question. And when I tell my students about development, the two things I tell them, the big class that I teach on development is, number one, we don't have brains this big to find food and avoid predators. We have brains this big to figure out how to interact and compete against other brains this big. It's the only reason we have big brains. So it's going to be complicated.

Number one, and number two, development is never nature versus nurture. It's always the combination of the two. So what's more important in making a chocolate chip cookie, having chocolate chips or having another, like the nature ingredients or the environment, you need both. And every child is the product of both. So I don't believe in pure determinism, either from the environments or genetics. Having said that, you know, some kids are going to come with different ingredients.

Some kids are going to be having different, previous positions. And some kids are obviously going to come from different, uh, ovens, different environments. And so some of the things that we've seen are that purely social interventions where we rely on kids, uh, just plain learning, don't work. And my favorite example of that was in Norway, where the father of bullying research, Dan Olves, integrated a huge program where every level of government from federal to whatever version of provincial or state is,

to city, to schools, to parents, all got in, and everybody cracked down on bullying. And they reduced bullying by something like 30 to 40%. One of the biggest reductions we've seen at a large scale ever. That worked really well for three years. And then what did the government do? It's expensive. So the government said, hey, this problem's done. Stop spending money on it.

And bullying shot right back up to normal, right? Which is a really strong argument against it being learned. Because if this was a learn, purely learned behavior, kids would have seen low levels of bullying for years and they would have just stuck with that behavior. The fact that pop back up suggests that it's really this cost benefit. So that's where the better programs are aimed at.

So one of the more widely distributed ones and then I'll talk about the one that we're promoting, is Kiva, done by Christina Salmavali and some other Finnish folk that's now gone across the world, and it relies on peers to knock down bullying. Say, this isn't cool, it's not effective, we're not going to give you status and popularity, and it knocks down bullying by about 20-25%. Really interestingly though, they found that it only works on low and medium popularity bullies, probably a lot of the bully victims. When the bullies are high in popularity, their peers don't impact them, which makes sense. The popular kids aren't going

to listen to what a group of well-meaning and pathetic mid-popularity kids are telling them. And the problem is, most bullying is done by really popular kids. So it's very hard to change peer behavior when the leaders of the peers are the ones who are doing the behavior. So that's a limitation of peer-based interventions. We've tried something called the meaningful roles, which is an attempt to try and give students some way of meeting their goals that they want, their predispositions, so that kid

who's low in honesty humility is arrogant, wants attention, wants to be at the top, find a way of a, keeping them busy, so they're not able to believe, wants to be at the top, find a way of a keeping them busy so they're not able to believe they don't have time, but also be that they're able to meet that goal. One of the things that we do is we assign a variety of jobs to different people in the class. We think that being the Walmart door-grader is not a high-status thing, but if you're a

13-year-old and grade eight and everybody who comes in the class, you say, hi, welcome to Mrs. Smith's grade eight class. And they have to say hi back. You're getting a lot of social spotlight on you, a lot of attention. And so in a way, you're getting that status and visibility that you want in a pro-social way. And we found that reduces overall school violence by 70%. So you're giving them a way of getting what they want without harming others. Now, some people say, is that rewarding believes? And that's a tricky thing because in a way we are.

But the hope is that over time, and we know personality is fixed, either personality is a previous position, not a destiny, that they start shifting towards a more pro-social way, realizing, hey, I can get what I want and still be kind to others. And I think we really need that combination of the carrot and the stick because overall bullying interventions have largely failed miserably. It's a very hard behavior to get rid of, which suggests we need these really multi-pronged, multimodal interventions. And of course, it doesn't help that in the adult world could see all kinds of examples

of people getting away with bullying and getting great things. You know Donald Trump, whatever you, whether you like him or not, I think he's a fantastic example of a bully who's been very successful. He's got millions, if not billions of dollars, married three supermodels as six kids and reputation and dominance became the president of the United States. He ticked the boxes for how being aggressive and kicking down can work. And he's not the only one. There's lots of celebrities and sports in media

that show that being mean can work. And so even if we have a perfect school intervention, if kids are learning that okay, when you hit Wall Street, you have to be ruthless. Care out other people's throat. Once they see their parents playing in their sports league and you know, stomping on the competition or cheating on their taxes, doing whatever they can

to get ahead. Kids are going to copy that. So it's a really difficult behavior to get rid of because there's not only genetic predispositions, but there's so many examples in the environment of how being a bully can be effective. Have you been able to track whether or not bullying has increased longitudinally? Because I would grow science my way into saying that because we see in popular media now, at least on the surface,

more dark triad adjacent type behavior, people being backbiting, reality television, that kind of trend of like proximal, like ancillary to psychopathy, macchivalianism, manipulative type stuff, that that would have trickled down to more young people seeing that as a path to success. Is that something you've seen? Is it trending up? Is it trending down? In Canada, the data that I'm aware of, these are data from tens of thousands of kids.

Over the last 20 years, despite bully interventions at every school and lots of there's bullying awareness days, we've pink shirt day, etc. So lots of there's bullying awareness days, we have a pink shirt day, et cetera. So lots of interventions. The number of people who say that they bully others has decreased by 20%. The number of kids who say that they've been victimized hasn't changed at all. And I think that's because of these opposing forces

that we are trying to make inroads. Kids today are more empathic. Really neat study I just read that over the last 50 years, people have become more generous in economic gains in prisoners dilemma. So there's an argument to be made that we're more cooperative than we were 50, 60 years ago in general. But there's also many of these examples of these hyper competitive individuals and hyper competitive media incentives that are still creating a lane for kids who think that they can really do well by bullying others. Is the implication there that the number of bullies has reduced or the number of people

who say that they bully has reduced. We don't know. It's a great question. Buying little bastards that they are. You know, one of the things that I often hear is you're setting on a sea humility. How do you expect people who are low in honesty to do self-report appropriately? Yeah, get fucked, Tony. But they admit to a lot of stuff. You'll have, once you give an anonymity,

they'll admit to bullying, they'll admit to dating violence. If we don't do it in the high schools, but if you go on the universities, they'll admit to rape, abuse, they'll admit to serious stuff. If it's anonymous, if you made them stand up in front of the class, don't. Everybody put your hand up that's been a rape of this year. Yeah, I imagine that that's not exactly going to happen very commonly. What about for

we just punishment work, like, are there any punishments that work to disincentivize Bully's, forgetting rehabilitation, just simply encouraging them to stop doing it? Does anything work? Yeah, I've always said it's a cost-benefit behavior, and that these kids are behaving rationally or, you know, adaptively. And so if you increase the cost, it makes you less likely to do the behavior. We know that the very best defense against bullying is retaliation fighting back.

We also know that the very worst thing for escalating bullying is fighting back. It's double edged. And that if you are able to deter the bully and they say like, okay, geez, this is too tough of a net to crack, then they'll find somebody else. But if you do it in a way that say shows up, no bully, well then they have to give up everything they got or they double down and they double down and it gets much worse. So direct retaliation, which is what most people, kids, and adults say to do, is very risky. It's high risk, high reward. It's very risky. It's high risk, high reward. The study in the in Norway shows that if everybody clamps down, you can reduce bullying. But you're, if you only focus on the negatives, you know, I joke with the school board and with my colleagues that

I used to be invited to lots of schools to talk about bullying, but now that my message is bullying will get you sex, power, popularity, and resources, and this is the next bit, and we have a hard time catching you and prosecuting you, so please don't do it. I don't get invited to a lot of schools anymore. Which is the other part of it. It's really hard to find that same That same BBC style video, uh, documentary of these kids filming them in school yard, show that adults were present only 20% of the time. So kids know not to do it in front of adults. And 10% of the time, or sorry, half the time that it was there.

So 10% of total, 50% of the time that an adult was there, he adult did nothing about it. So, kids know that adults are going to miss a lot of this. Is there an element there that when the adult is around, there's a selection bias that the kid who is doing the bullying is more likely to be the one that's maybe a bit likeable, they're probably socially a little bit more adept. The kid that is being picked on is the one that's maybe a bit less likable, they're a bit weird, the adult doesn't really feel as much of an affinity. How much does that contribute, do you think? Huge. And we've done some informal studies on this. I've never had the time to sit down and do a formal study, but I guarantee,

well, I should say I guarantee, I'm very confident that the stereotype of a bully of being lonely, poor self-esteem, bad social skills, came from school teachers and principals catching the bully victims. These kids who really do come from a broken home have bad social skills and they've solved everything with their fists. But whereas the kids who come from those affluent homes who are heading up the It could be the chess club or the cheerleading team who are really popular in the class have good social skills Uh, they don't get caught and when they do they say all we were just kidding. We're teasing. We're so sorry You know, we never do that. We're sorry and you know the Jonathan's always been a little bit weird

He just doesn't really understand what's going on Yeah, exactly so It is absolutely skewed by that and not to mention that their parents are more likely to be wealthy Which means more likely to make a fuss and their parents probably have the kind of personality that Would be likely to make a fuss rather than say to their kid. Okay, I'm gonna Take this seriously. Yeah, it's a difficult one, eh? Trying to pass apart all of that.

Again, I'm always gonna have a soft spot for the bully, for the victim of the bullying because that was me for a long time, especially the person that would have been super socially inept, that would have been catastrophically unlikable to probably most of the adults that were around me because I was just struggling to do the social thing. And I can remember a time, there was this one time

during drama class, and I hadn't, I'd done my homework and one of the bullies hadn't done his and he snatched mine off me and said that he was gonna hand it in as his, and then need me in the head, and then I was upset because I just got need in the head and I got sent out of the class because I was making a fuss and he'd managed to not only take my homework but also worm his way into the drama teacher sending me away. So yeah, I think it's such a double edged sword that lack of Like social capacity as a young kid because not only does it make you more

vulnerable and likely to being a victim of bullying It makes you less adept at being able to explain to the people in power what's happening It makes you less believable. There's probably less sympathy generally that's just being pushed your way because you don't have those Those sorts of skills. You mentioned before about this double edged sort of fighting back. It's both the best and the worst response that you can give. In what ways can fighting back be done in a manner which will make it more likely to be a good response and less likely to be a bad response. The best thing to do is to recognize that this is a cowardly unfair fight. This isn't two guys

squaring off in the octagon in a sanctioned fight to see who's toughest. This is an MMA fighter picking on some guy on the street and doesn't even know what's happening and the MMA fighters got five buddies behind him So bringing in support changing the power and balance by bringing in adults bringing in friends You change it to an arena where you have some power and preferably do it privately I wouldn't advise kids to fight back, but if you're gonna do it don't do it publicly I mean I've written a couple articles or opinions op-eds on Putin, now he looks just like a school yard bully. And the problem he has is the same as school yard bullies. If he backs down now, he loses a ton of his credit. Is it such a public audience that's watching?

Right? Obviously. It's okay. So if you were to fight the bully in the school yard, or your kid was to fight the bully in the school yard in front of everybody else, it's not even though you might think, you know, you could bro psychology your way into believing that sends a message to him and his fucking friends that they shouldn't do it again. But what you've done is you've caused that bully

to lose a ton of status in front of the people that are the most important, whereas if you're to see him on the walk home, if this physical intervention or whatever, like standing up to him is going to happen, doing it where they're not going to lose face is actually a much more effective way to do it, because it may be a final full stop that they can bow out of be a final full stop that they can bow out of whilst being relatively costless to them. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's one of the ironic things that people who are low in agreeableness, I'm a little low in agreeableness as my whole family is, the joke was don't poke a folk. We make, and I sense probably there's a little bit of that

you, because these are the kind of people who are high in age, which is humble in me to say, but low in A, make good crusaders. The people who stand up for other people who don't tolerate injustice, do not put up with people taking advantage of others. But we've seen from victims in schools,, victims in workplaces and whistleblowers that often blows back against the person who's reacting back. So they'll say, why is he

flipping out? But the other person's really calm, Tony or Chris is really upset. Well, he's upset because he got me in the head. Tony's upset because this person was bullying a graduate student, Tony didn't like it, but all they see is one of us yelling. And that's one of the skills that Bullies have is very quickly pivoting. So it looks like the person fighting back is the one who's the aggressive one.

They're being unreasonable. You can see how unreasonable they're being. Okay, so what would you say to parents, let's say that there is a parent listening who's kid is either or first a bully and second being bullied. What are your best piece of advice for them? Yeah, first for the parent whose kid is being a bully, they're being a coward, they're engaging in a behavior that is going to likely keep happening in life. So, they'll behave this way with their siblings.

They'll behave this way with you. When you get older and you're elderly, they'll behave this way in the workplace. They'll behave this way with their spouse. They'll behave this way with this kid. So if you don't want to live around a belief, the rest of your life, step in and intervene. And recognizing that 20% of kids do this mean it's not, these kids aren't psychopaths. Your kid is not irredeemable or going down a difficult path. I don't want to say that all psychopaths are irredeemable, but I'm just trying to not catastrophize it.

But take it very seriously. If you have any kind of sense of fairness and ethics, your kid is breaking the rules. And you can't let them do that. For, and don't buy their excuses. That'd be the other thing that we've been saying, which I think parents would have forgotten, is if your kid is willing to believe, they're probably willing to lie about it. What's the intervention?

What do you say to your kid? It depends on the specific child and what they're doing. I first ask, you know, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? You know that there's a power imbalance, you know, that this is really weak. You know, this is not something I support. It's a moral based one that's aiming to change the underlying honesty humility. In the short run, we know that monitoring works. So keeping a tighter leash on them until you have confidence that they're not doing it, is effective following up with the teachers,

telling the teachers that you know this, and that you're happy to be contacted if anything comes up again, is again ratcheting up that monitoring system, so that you're essentially making more costly for them to engage in that behavior. They're not going to be believed if they say they were just teasing. They're going to get caught, they're going to get punished.

And then if they do well, reward them, as I said, care and a stick. If it's been two, three months and you legitimately have the sense that things have gone better, then you don't have to take them out for ice cream, but praise them, tell them that you're proud that they've changed, they're being more mature. That's the way that good people and good societies work. And then if your child is being victimized, the first and most important thing,

especially with adolescents, is trying to have open lines of communication. And I've got a 20-year-old or 14-year-old or 12-year-old. So I'm well aware of how challenging it can be to communicate with adolescents at times, but the more you're able to do that, the more you're likely to hear about the victimization or see changes relating to it, which are commonly symptoms of anxiety or depression that increase. And in particular, desire to not go to the place where bullying is happened to no longer want to go to school

I just need a day off sick, etc. And that's a real red flag to jump in and get involved because the bully has chosen this person. I can't emphasize that enough that almost every bully strategically chooses a victim who can't effectively fight back. So it's it's very rare that if they picked on somebody who could potentially punch their way out they would probably bully them in a way that if they did that it would be really bad. So bring a girl with him. So boy and a girl to use a guy. So what is he going to do punch the girl?

Then everybody knows this guy's a psycho and he's lost the fight. So number one, lines of communication. Number two, contact the school and make sure they take it seriously. There's far too many people who think that bullying is a right of passage. And the analogy I like to use is that conflict like exercise strengthens you. So you know that if you exercise and you stress your bones they get stronger. But if you have too much stress and you break a bone, that bone is never as strong as it was when it was, you know, whole before it was broken. And the same thing happens to bullying. If

you have severe bullying, other researchers have shown that it affects your immune response for decades. It affects the expression of your genes for decades. It's not a minor thing. It's not a right to passage. And if your child has been chosen to have some victim,'s, you see, fight back is because they can't. The bully is most cases they have found a way to prevent the victim from doing that. So bring in allies, you know, the school, the teachers, if they have any friends, that's

really important. If they don't have a lot of friends, go out of your way to try and help them make friends. We know that having friends doesn't reduce bullying dramatically is about 10-20 percent, but what it does do dramatically is reduces the long-term impacts of bullying. Because if you're 13 or 14, 15, you're a teenager, and your peers are telling you you're worthless,

either directly or implicitly by bullying you. It doesn't really help to hear from mom and dad say you're a fine, lovely person or your grandma or your aunt to say it. You really need to hear that from peers. And so having even just one friend cuts the odds of serious mental health outcomes by over 50%. So get involved, listen to your kid, and get them support. What are the potential serious mental health outcomes from somebody that is being bullied and it's untreated, but you know what I mean? Yeah, it's lifelong, lifelong risks of depression and anxiety. And of course, we've seen, unfortunately, a number of tragic incidents that result in suicide.

Some of the murder suicides and school shootings have been blamed on bullying. But we certainly know there's many more kids who are dying of their own hands because they can't take it. And of course, that's an area where the internet has become particularly pernicious or dangerous. It's because it doesn't go away. You know, back in my day, I went to school in the 80s, early 90s, if you were bullied at school, which I really wasn't.

But if you were, you know, you could go home and you'd have a sanctuary from all of that. Now you can't. It's on your phone. It's on the message. It's on the boards. And so you're putting your child in a place where they're fighting an unfair battle against people who are actively trying to hurt them. I can't imagine as a parent anything that would motivate me more strongly to stand up and say get lost, which is ultimately why I went down this road of research. It's really not fair to the kids who are being picked on. What about getting your kids to do some sort of team sport, getting them involved at a local either team sport or maybe

a boxing gym as well, I guess that's probably a pretty common response from parents. You know, anything that you can do to help offset the anxiety and the depression will help exercise is fantastic and building those friendships is really useful. Sports, friendship is really useful. Sports, I always tell my grad students that everything's great, other than the shirt, nothing's black and white, because sports can sometimes be a risk. And we've looked at bullying in sports and have found that for girls, it can be a risk factor. If you participate in competitive sports, both in the sport and outside, and for boys it depends on the sports and the team. Our local hockey team just had its captain and his brother barred from the lead for bullying other players

on the team. It's another area that you need to be aware of. But anything, even if it's not a team sport, if your child likes, I don't know, dancing, or wants to learn to play the guitar, anything that will help alleviate that, including if necessary, switching schools, getting away from it. If your child is stuck in a toxic situation where people are picking on them like it's an episode of Orange is the New Black, get them out of that situation. However you can. However you can. Here's the thing that's interesting, man. So I've seen pretty much both ends of the status

spectrum, right? So in school was probably the most close to the most like pitiful person there had the lowest number of friends was smart or whatever and I was always going to go to college in a university, but in an area that that wasn't very, very common. And then through probably 16, 17 was kind of a middling, 18, 19, 20, very, very quickly ascended to be one of the best known people in, you know, a city that's got a million people in it. By 2223, I'm doing reality TV, I'm on TV all the time. Then 27, I have another crack at reality TV, all through this period I've been the guy in the front door of a nightclub. And then now from doing the show, which is, you know, transcended to this much more kind of global, I get what widespread type of

status, I've seen both ends of it and observing the texture of my own mind, especially through this evolutionary lens is is fucking wild. Like I, I know what it feels like to be so like downtrodden and self-deprecating and and like lost and alone and in not just in solitude because solitude is okay but in like abandoned feels like abandoned. So I really have seen this fucking trajectory man I'm telling you from like the absolute bottom of the bottom of the bottom to now you know being somebody that's relatively well known and

Yet crazy. I totally understand how It could impact your immune system You know in girls especially if it's a lot of Social bullying can even mess with their menstrual cycle, you can stop them from releasing eggs. That's one of the suggested reasons for why women have got concealed ovulation, is that it means that other women can't go

and fuck with her to stop this egg from releasing, because if you did, that's basically like a big flag of, I'm fertile and you can come and mess it up if you come over here. So yeah, I really do kind of see this. Just how important it is. The reason that it got me thinking about that was I wondered whether some sort of sense of mastery, so the difference that I had, or the thing that I guess kind of ripped me out of, apart from aging out of kids that are just brutal and awful and being kind of pressed into a school, which is a perfect environment somewhere between a prison and a drama class to enact this.

The other thing that happened was I gained competence in areas that was valued by other people, which caused me to rise up through the status hierarchy, which meant that who's going to bully me, right? Like they need to get into my nightclub or they, you know, they want me to shout them out on Instagram or whatever. Like I'm aware that it's not the same as love, but it's a protect, it's like a prophylactic against somebody bullying you because of status. So I wonder whether, whether it's the boxing or the playing piano or the violin or the doing whatever. Some sense of mastery downstream from that is going to get you status. Now obviously there's certain stuff that's super lame.

If you learn the trombone or something, I wouldn't imagine that it's particularly protective. It's just as sucks as an instrument. But if you do something which is cool, and you encourage your kids to go and be good at a thing, that was the problem that I had as well. I was very, very, very good at cricket. That was my sport of choice. I played six, seven nights a week. Every single summer I got time off school to go and play,

which obviously I loved. But it was a sport. It was like from the most working class town in all of England, playing the most aristocratic bourgeois, whankey sport that you can think of. So I didn't get any status from it. It's like the rugby players and the football players got status. The cricket people, it's like the fuck players cricket. There's like three people that play cricket in the school. So even the thing that I did that was good. My thinking being, if you can try and maybe reverse

engineers something that's at the intersection of your kids' interests, what they like to do, and also what you could perhaps reasonably predict would cause them to gain in a little bit of status or whatever, that might be an interesting potential pathway for them. but that might be an interesting potential pathway for them. I think that's a really good general approach. For many things in life, it's to build on your children's interest, create self-esteem. It helps create resilience, because life is going to knock you down, whether it's bullies or otherwise.

And having that reservoir of confidence and self belief is really useful. And that does come from mastery. It is something that is certainly important to transmit. It helps with that sense of self-worth. So I would absolutely endorse that. The only limitation, of course, is it's not doing anything to stop the ongoing stress

from the bullying if it's ongoing. Yeah, it's going to take you a while to get mastery at fucking playing the guitar or boxing or whatever. And your story reminds me of a really tragic video from that BBC style filming. And it's a group of girls, grade sixes, who are standing in a circle and they're kicking a grade five girl in the ground, just like stomping the crap out of her. Teacher walks by with the little girls holding her hands and grade two is a threes, which a lot of school year teachers do, you know, they play with the cute little kids. The kids

are smart enough to stop, so the girl gets up and goes away. 30 seconds later, the girl comes back and they grab her through the ground and start kicking her again. And you're thinking, why ain't God's name would you go back? And it's because as humans being alone is the death sentence. So she would rather be with friends or she would rather be with enemies that were bullying her than on her own with no one around. Yeah, and then the best part of it is at the end, some dad or something walks through just looks, keeps walking, it sees it happen,

it keeps walking by. Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, that's a difficult one. I don't have kids yet, but I can't wait to be a dad. And when I am, it's going to bring up, I know that it's going to bring up a lot of challenges for me because my, the chip on my up, I know that it's gonna bring up a lot of challenges for me because my, the chip on my shoulder that I've worked very hard to try and get rid of, it's gonna come back. You know, if I see another kid being bullied, if I find out that my child either is a victim or is

doing it, I'm not going to be as impartial and as rational and as balanced as I should be. And that's, I know, it's like a, I don't know, seeing a tsunami on the horizon because every kid, I would imagine that some ungodly proportion of children will encounter some form of bullying at some point in their, in their time in school. And 80% of kids encounter some form of bullying. OK. So yeah, and you're going to find out about this. And I'm going to have this, you know, a good bit of self-work and a good bit of personal development really be tested.

It's going to stress test just whether a thousand sessions of meditation has made a difference or not, because I'm going to be like, well, fuck, here I am, I'm 12 years old again, and I hate my life. Yeah, that's... He's the other thing as well that I've taken away. I mean, I found your work absolutely fascinating, and evolution relends for such a common problem, which is so formative in people's lives, I think, is just phenomenal. The other thing that I've taken away, and this maybe legitimates part of the chip on my shoulder that I always had, I always used to be resentful of the kids that were bullies because

it felt like they were given an extra degree of an excuse for their behavior from the teachers that I was never given, that the teachers almost saw the propensity, this disposition that the kids had that were being mean. And I could get my homework stolen in need in the head and drama class, and I would get sent to the head teacher. But if I was talking a little bit too loudly in class, I would also be punished. And I remember thinking at the time, like, this just feels so unfair. It feels so unfair that I'm given less sympathy and also held to a higher standard. And I've always,

always hated, absolutely ardently hated, using excuses like, well, you know, he comes from a broken home, or well, you know, she's, she's, she's going through a rough time of it at the moment. And I would have had to swallow it, had your data set otherwise. But with this, it is very much a conscious choice, which is only mildly influenced by the environment that the person is in. If this kid decides to enact bullying, it is a conscious choice,

and it is not them calling out for help, it is not them enacting rage from inside of the house. It's them trying to gain fucking status. They want to climb the social ladder in the same way as schmoozing and taking a client out for a dinner in 20 years time is going to be the same. They're just doing this and that makes it it makes it so much more Machiavellian. It makes it so much less desperate and

yeah, it gives me It's annoying but vindicating because at least it makes me kind of feel like the presupposition that I had as a kid was somewhat accurate. Yeah, and, you know, I would say that, if you're looking for a little sound bite lip here, that I think that bullies are behaving like selfish assholes, and like all other selfish assholes,

whether they're narcissists, macchiavaliants, psychopaths, they're ruining it for everybody. I have no patience for that behavior. Now of course everybody at some point, unless you're a saint, does something bad. So I don't wanna be rock bottom, agreeableness, hexagulators,

and never forgive anybody. But for the people who are doing it regularly, just to benefit themselves, fuck you. We're standing up to you. You're not doing it. The ironic thing about it is that in the long run, the data is also really clear that the best way to be popular and light is to be powerful and kind. Those are the people, it's not a shock, but it surprises me how beliefs overlook that. That if you really want to be not just popular,

but people want to hang around you and want to be with you, and you're enduringly thought of in a good way, you have to be kind. So ultimately, they're trying to take a shortcut to just get what they need for their own selfish needs. And in a long run, I think it's going to burn them. Tony Volk, ladies and gentlemen, Tony, I absolutely adore your work. I think this is fascinating. You've got like a million other things that I want to talk to you about. So let's

line up and talk about psychopathy or personality or something else soon. If the people that are listening think that they want to learn more about the work that you do and your lab and stuff, why should they go? Yeah, as I said, I generally stay off social media, but if you Google me, Tony, T-O-N-Y, Vogue, Visa, Victor, O-L-K, on Google, you'll get one of my research lab pages and then look it up and send me an email if you want to get in touch. That's right. Tony, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you, man. No problem, great chatting.

How good was that? I absolutely love finding underground hero researchers and academics that have been looking at this stuff for ages. I really genuinely learned an awful lot about my own experience, reflecting on my own time in school. And I hope that it's given you an opportunity to reminisce and to maybe unpack some of the experiences that you had as well. I very much appreciate you listening, and as always, I'll see you next time. listening and as always I'll see you next time.