TED Talks Daily - How bullying spreads — and how social bravery stops it | Amy Cuddy

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

How does bullying take root? Social psychologist Amy Cuddy got an inside view of this question after she became the target of a coordinated campaign to discredit her. Drawing on her own experience and years of research, she gives a clear-eyed analysis of how bullying reshaped our culture and how each of us can practice social bravery — everyday acts of standing up for one another — to end it. (Note: This talk contains discussion of suicide.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. A quick heads up before we begin. This episode includes a frank discussion of bullying and of suicide. Please take care in deciding whether and when to listen. More than a decade ago, social psychologist Amy Cuddy gave a TED Talk about body language and confidence that became one of the most watched of all time. What came after, she says, nearly ended her life. She became the target of years of bullying, not from anonymous trolls, but from colleagues in her own field.

She has spent the years since studying exactly what happened. Bullying is not conflict. It's not a debate. It's not criticism. It is a deliberately targeted serial escalating pattern of attacks carried out by multiple people. and it's intended to destroy a person's reputation and their ability to contribute. In this talk, Amy lays out how cruelty becomes collective,

how it spreads, why bystanders go quiet, and how a whole group can turn on a single person. But she's clear that this isn't a story of despair. It's a story about what she calls earned hope because the same thing that gives bullying its power is the thing that can take it away. The first thing to us, understand is that bullies need us. Bullies need an audience. If we refuse our participation,

a lone bully is impotent. Amy shares what any one of us can do, small concrete acts of what she calls social bravery to stop these patterns before they harden and why in the end, we'll never fix cruelty with more cruelty. That's coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day. My talk begins where my life nearly ended. In 2012, I stood in the Red Circle, and I gave a TED Talk on social psychology. I was a junior professor at Harvard,

and I spoke about feeling like an outsider. I spoke about how we lift our self-confidence and how our bodies affect us. the way we feel. The talk went viral online quickly and became one of the most viewed TED Talks of all time. And that cracked my world open in some beautiful ways. I saw the most luminous parts of people. And then I saw the darkest parts when I became the target of a sustained bullying campaign. Not by trolls on the internet. I learned to dismiss them quickly,

but by colleagues, by tenured professors, department chairs, and journal editors, who used their names, their real names, to attack me, relentlessly,

for many years. They publicly declared that I had no serious conception of the term science, that what I'd proposed was stupid and unintuitive, that I'd abandoned academia for a lucrative career selling pseudoscience to a mostly women audience.

They created a narrative about our work on power posing that it had been debunked. But here's the thing. Our work on power posing hadn't been debunked. In fact, the central finding, the most important finding, was that our posture, how expansive or contractive it is, affects the way we feel, how powerful, confident we feel. It was replicated dozens of times in independent studies

by labs all over the world using better methods than those that we used, and even by our skeptics, in multiple meta-analysis, including one with 88 studies in nearly 10,000 participants. They landed on the same conclusion. Expansive versus contractive posture affects how powerful or powerless we feel. The behaviors and the hormones were more complicated, and there were non-replications. In the science that I was trained in by my dear advisor,

that would have led to constructive and friendly inquiries, collaborations to figure out what was different about these studies. Were there moderators that affected why you got this effect and we got this effect? Science should interrogate itself. That is how knowledge advances. That should happen. But that's not what happened in my case. science didn't interrogate itself.

It stopped itself, and it silenced a scientist, a junior scientist, who also had a lot of other research on stereotyping and prejudice and injured group relations. Two tenured Ivy League professors told a New York Times reporter that they would have defended me publicly had they not been afraid of becoming targets, themselves. Friends wrote privately, I'm so sorry this is happening to you. These guys are horrible,

but wouldn't look at me publicly. I couldn't eat. I didn't sleep. I worked all the time defending myself from constantly incoming attacks, nonstop, relentless. It was very hard to be present for my son and my husband.

I'm sorry, I chose to walk away from my job at Harvard a year before going up for tenure, not because I was forced to, but because I knew that staying meant certain death. And so eventually I tried to take my own life twice because this kind of bullying is simultaneously this horrible public spectacle of shame, where you're in a spotlight.

And at the same time, it's a total erasure of who you are and what you've done. Many targets don't survive. And I do want to say, before I go forward to the targets, I understand. I see you, and I know that what seems incredible happened. But this is not a talk about despair. This is a talk about earned hope.

I've been a social psychologist for 25 years studying the forces that affect how we treat each other and judge each other. But I've spent the last eight focused on how cruelty becomes collective. how truth becomes distorted, how people decide that one person should be pushed out of the group. But also, more importantly, what are the things that we can do to prevent those cultures from taking hold before they harden?

And what I've learned is this. First, bullying is not conflict. It's not a debate. It's not criticism. it's not humor that you're too sensitive to take well. It is a deliberately targeted serial escalating pattern of attacks carried out by multiple people, and it's intended to destroy a person's reputation

and their ability to contribute. It unfolds in predictable stages, and it usually ends with someone being completely silenced or disappearing completely. This is really important. Bullies are rare. They're rare. Most of us are not bullies.

Bullies share one thing, a worldview. In their worldview, the world is hostile, people are fundamentally bad, everything of value is scarce, it's all zero-sum. Your achievement is their, loss. They have an insatiable need for recognition and status and dominance, and they prove their dominance by publicly demonstrating that they can force a target, a valuable target, to fully submit.

That's what bullying is. The thing has been on the rise among adults for the last 15 years. Digital platforms make bullying faster, easier, louder, and the bullies' lives last forever now. So what do we do? The first thing to understand is that bullies need us. Bullies need an audience. They need people to carry out their agenda.

When we just watch and remain silent, or what I call passive bystanders. When we join in and amplify and share and attack, we're what I call accessory bullies. But if we refuse our participation, a lone bully is impotent. Without us, a bully is impotent. Second, we need to learn to spot the opening.

When we get in early, we can totally derail this. It starts with what I call a bully test. The bully tests the audience to see if they can get away with bullying that person. It might be a really inappropriate comment in a professional setting, or it might be an accusation

against someone that's reputation destroying but not backed by evidence. When we hear those things and we say stay silent or we laugh, we're just saying to the bully, go forward, and that's when they launched their attack. We also need to practice social bravery, these small risks that we take to defend each other,

to support each other interpersonally. And social bravery is risky. So we need to distribute the risk across people. We need to do it together. It is so much easier for two people to do it than for one person to do it. When one bystander steps in in a way that's noticeable, others step in.

And we know from research on changing social conventions that when about 25% of people step in, they can flip a social norm completely. Bullying is not a personal problem. It's a collective problem. And we can fix it. So after eight years of writing this book, I turned it in a few months ago.

Right after that, I traveled to Greeley, Colorado. a small city in the high plains that was raw, politically divided, on edge. I could feel the vigilance in the air when I looked at them. I spoke about personal power and trust. And at the end, the moderator said, her last question to me was this. She said, is there one piece of leadership advice that you haven't really shared? and I said, yeah, we'll never win by bullying the bullies. We cannot validate their worldview.

As soon as we tell them that the world has to be brutal, they say, see, that's why I have to behave this way. I told them, you don't have to show how much you can hate to prove how much you care or to prove that you belong. and I looked out and I saw their shoulders relax. I saw a flicker of hope in their faces. I felt them collectively exhale. And the next day, a woman wrote to me,

and she said, I was at your talk, and I noticed something interesting as I left the venue. The crowd was unusually cheerful and courteous. several drive aisles roved together toward the exits and everyone was alternating and letting each other in no one was saying with their actions that they were more important than another person

I just wanted to share the observation that you made an immediate, positive, and tangible difference. We want to be neighbors again. We want to go to our kids' friends' birthday parties and not worry about an explosion. We don't want to have to show how much we hate to prove how much we care. Bullies power is borrowed power, and we can refuse to give it to them. We all have access to personal power, and with that personal power,

we can commit small acts of social bravery supporting each other, challenging bullies. So I invite you, please, to join me. Let's find that collective power and turn bullying around. And one more thing. Hey, y'all, Elise here, wanted to let you know that at this moment, right before the end of her talk, Amy puts her hands up and stands in the power pose. That was Amy Cuddy at TED 2026. If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonzica, Sunmar Nivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballerazo, Christopher Faisi Bogan, Valentina Bohanini,

Ban Ban-Bang, Brian Green, and Lainey-Lott. Learn more at podcasts.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.