18 ms·

Highest rates of teen bullying are between friends and friends-of-friends: study

• airhead969 6y ago
  Kids roll their eyes at the utopian idealism that is anti-bullying programs. They're going to do whatever they want anyhow. And, in order to ensure they get the best lot in life, they're going to claw, scratch, bite, and step-on each other to be sure they end up at the top of the mud hill. That's human nature. You can't put human nature in a box and wish it away. They'll always find an outlet to establish rank.
  • f6v 6y ago
    Is it human nature to kill, steal or rape? Yet we don’t allow that in the society.
    • hntrader 6y ago
      Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. There isn't any explicit anti-murder training we need to go through that's premised on a flawed understanding of human nature. We've also made it so murder doesn't confer status in our society, which is the opposite case to bullying as per the findings. And that's rather unique to modern society, murder didn't always confer lower status.
      • Rapzid 6y ago
        Here Is Something You Can't Understand
      • viraptor 6y ago
        > Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. That feels like "[citation needed]". What do you mean by "is human nature"? Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them.
        • hntrader 6y ago
          It's not accurate that only a very small minority would participate, the murder rate can go as high as 40-60 percent (e.g Waorani, among others). This is what can happen when there's no Leviathan that disincentives murder and when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. It's also part of the nature of our close relatives, the chimpanzee. See "lethal raiding".
          • viraptor 6y ago
            > (e.g Waorani, among others) ... when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned) We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
            • DoreenMichele 6y ago
              Rape is shockingly common and cultures are human made things, so they express human nature or some variation of it. Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.
              • viraptor 6y ago
                It's not picking cultures I like. It's a counterexample - describing specific culture doing/avoiding X to an extreme level does not prove or disprove X being or not "in human nature".
                • DoreenMichele 6y ago
                  This is from your previous comment: Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them. I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up. In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common. Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape. Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it. Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime. A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim. It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon. I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.
      • airhead969 6y ago
        Definitely. The myth of the noble savage. Modern cities are much safer than ancient communities, tribal or agrarian. An interesting book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Pinker
      • mnouquet 6y ago
        > Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. Only in some case, in other case, we justify it by naming it something else, like taxes, prison/capital punishment, national interest.
    • jcelerier 6y ago
      Yet it happens daily
    • pawelmurias 6y ago
      It's not for most people. Some cultures heavily encourage being a dick but we have builtin inhibitions.
  • viraptor 6y ago
    I'm not sure if they consider it at that level. At primary/secondary school it's pretty clear - you may get told off for bullying if anyone learns about it, may have some uncomfortable conversations. But you'll still be in the same class with the same people the next day. Unless you do something so drastic you get expelled. I've not heard of many teens (I'm sure there's a few) actively thinking of / planning bullying. Most of it is on a "why not, that's what I want to do now" level. The ones I've seen were actually kids on the very bottom of any hierarchy just acting out, not trying to achieve anything.
    • eurasiantiger 6y ago
      https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/three_teenagers_on_trial_for_murder_in_helsinki/11795851 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/three_teenagers_on_trial_... https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/police_complete_investigation_into_teenagers_suspected_of_murder/11758203 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/police_complete_investiga...
      • viraptor 6y ago
        Yes, we can find specific cases for a lot of things. The question what's the usual behaviour/motivation still stands.
  • nathias 6y ago
    that's human nature for psychopaths, the rest of us don't have to put up with them if we don't want to...
    • konschubert 6y ago
      Luckily School isn't Life. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
  • ACow_Adonis 6y ago
    my first highschool was a private single sex catholic school: the bullying problem there was intense. there was a lot of emphasis on rugby and football and other team sports, we were all made to wear uniforms and ties, go to chapel, make the school look good. There was a consistent problem with interpersonal violence, big trouble makers were often the football players though we also had clearly troubled individuals. For the last two years of my schooling I swapped to a coed public (yet highest scoring) special college literally just down the road. suddenly there was no bullying problem. I mean, compared to the other school it was practically zero. there was no uniform, kids could smoke outside if they wanted, you could not turn up to class, you were free to leave the grounds when you wanted. you could eat and drink when and where you wanted, and teachers were called by their first names. I couldn't even tell you if we had sports teams because no one cared, I literally don't remember. whatever the difference, it's either not human nature, or it can be overcome. I've lived it, so I know it's true.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • andi999 6y ago
      Probably if attendance was not a requirement, the most disagreeable persons left the compound. This is a solution of course (which sounds less harsh than expulsion)
      • ACow_Adonis 6y ago
        could have had a part in it, I'll fully admit. I know it lessened the tension in many of us, not just the trouble makers. I wasn't a bully, but also to advantage of not turning up to assume classes. honestly though, I can't speak highly enough of it, it was just what I needed after the first school. i hope that was that a deliberately joking use of the word 'compound' to refer to a school? (though probably how I felt about my first school emotionally). we had very few expulsions at the first school during my time there. but I can remember several instances of kids bullied until they had to leave. honestly it all seems so unjust and barbaric looking back.
  • konschubert 6y ago
    With that logic, grown ups should be chewing each other's faces off in the street all the time. They don't. So clearly there is something (morale, social pressure, threat of punishment) that prevents them from doing it.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • DoreenMichele 6y ago
      With that logic, grown ups should be chewing each other's faces off in the street all the time. Adults can be plenty cruel. It's just typically done with more subtlety, sophistication and plausible deniability than is employed by teens.
      • cobraetor 6y ago
        Yes, it can be done at various levels of subtlety as well as at group levels. Why else would we have such words describing adult behavior as "workplace bullying", "online harassment", "domestic violence", "culture wars", "race hustling", etc.?
    • Ekaros 6y ago
      Have you ever seen how people treat customer service? Too bad we can't punish them for such uncivil performance. Maybe we should go back to putting them on stocks and streaming it to world. Even with some sort of nice remote online interaction...
      • oarsinsync 6y ago
        Have you ever seen how people get people in customer service departments to treat other people? I'm absolutely not saying the abuse given to customer service people get is justified, but it's not unprovoked either. Turns out when you codify bad behaviour, you get bad responses to that behaviour. What's the justification for codifying that bad behaviour in the first place?
    • 6y ago
  • ymbeld 6y ago
    We should just retire sociology. It’s all just human nature, and what that means is just obvious to everybody.
    • ymbeld 6y ago
      Presumably people agree that we should “retire sociology” considering that I was being sarcastic.
  • choeger 6y ago
    I call bullshit. Teenagers aren't complete in their development yet. That's why you can, and should, train and teach them. Teaching empathy is of course difficult and don't forget that the bullied peers are also teenagers that might behave "weirdly" (no victim blaming intended). But the whole thing still needs to be taught as it is a horrible thing that exists in reality. Compare this to drugs, STD, or plain old reckless behavior. You tell your teenagers not to take pills, use condoms, and not dive headfirst into unknown waters, right? Not everyone does this successfully, but there is no reason not to talk about it, just because your teenager will Roll their eyes. If that's any criterion, most parents would probably not talk to their kids at all between 12 and 20...
    • jkhdigital 6y ago
      I think the real disagreement here is about how to effectively socialize children, not about whether they can be socialized at all. Hyperbolic arguments aside, we can agree that humans can be socialized to behave as good members of a community, but humans who are not socialized will frequently behave like animals.
      • airhead969 6y ago
        Yes. Effectively socialize. The other issue is that humans are always going to be human, and seek will-to-power to advance their status to promote their genes and improve their lot in life. There's no undoing or wishing away human nature, only mild adjustments with nurture that we must keep trying to do with pragmatism.
    • lr4444lr 6y ago
      He didn't say not to do anything. He said the (current) programs were pretending realities didn't exist, or that they could be scolded away. This is basically why the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign failed.
      • airhead969 6y ago
        Nancy, the 40th and first woman POTUS. ;) By being celebrities in their own bubbles, archaically-simplistic, and close-minded, the Reagans couldn't grasp reality or have empathy for anyone else. HIV/AIDS, final destruction of mental healthcare systems, War on Drugs, CIA crack epidemic-Iran Contra, and many more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals
  • eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    First, "human nature" is a logical fallacy straight away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.
    • fallingknife 6y ago
      There are rules of human behavior just as there are rules of dog behavior. To state otherwise is ridiculous.
      • eeZah7Ux 6y ago
        I never stated otherwise. The (well known) logical fallacy is in arbitrarily picking one behavior instead of another and labeling it "human nature" and claiming it's inevitable.
  • airhead969 6y ago
    This is a good discussion. I hope we can dive into the nuances of what ways work to raise cooler kids, esp. becoming more messianic / moral courage: making peace, defending the weak, calling-out infliction of suffering, and setting better examples for their peers.
• ieatmyownpoop 6y ago
  Dat heading tho
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  The paper cites the real-life case of Megan Meier, who hanged herself in 2007 after being bullied by people she thought were her friends — with the added twist of a mother orchestrating the social media bullying scheme. Yeah. Parents and teachers are probably the people we should be training to behave better, not teenagers caught in a system they didn't design and often desperately wish they could escape. Edit: I will add that a lot of my social problems in high school were rooted in or exacerbated by teachers holding me up as the example to hate on. They would brag about my high scores as if that somehow reflected positively on their teaching ability (it didn't) and then simultaneously act like if other people weren't doing as well as I was, it was because they weren't trying hard enough or something (disavowing their own responsibility for poor outcomes in the classroom). That seems to be a norm in schools and is directly related to the described teen behavior in the article.
  • SunlightEdge 6y ago
    Oh that's awful. Agreed, terrible behaviour from teachers there.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • loopz 6y ago
    What is even more true is that the children often pick up behaviour from adults, especially at home and in abuse relationships. So it doesn't matter how much propaganda about bullying is spewed forth in school, when the real raising of children happen in other places. For adults, bullying, injustice, unfairness and exclusion is just standard, normal behaviour, especially at top leadership.
    • rsp1984 6y ago
      For adults, bullying, injustice, unfairness and exclusion is just standard, normal behaviour, especially at top leadership. Somewhat. However, in contrast to kids, adults have rights and access to the judicial system, which makes bullying etc. harder.
• tvphan 6y ago
  Did you use 4 to represent for? I was so confused
• morsch 6y ago
  The title of the linked article is Most Teen Bullying Occurs Among Peers Climbing the Social Ladder. I had trouble parsing the HN story title.
  • avodonosov 6y ago
    Same here
  • dang 6y ago
    A moderator fixed it a while ago. I've changed it again to the subtitle, though, which seems more factual and less interpretive.
    • cobraetor 6y ago
      > the subtitle, though, which seems more factual and less interpretive Not true, if you read the linked paper: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/712972 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/712972 > The reason for the typically low success rates, we believe, is that aggressive behavior accrues social rewards and does so to a degree that leads some to betray their closest friends. Even the most successful prevention programs are unable to alter the aggressive behavior of popular bullies, who use cruelty to gain and maintain status (Garandeau, Lee, and Salmivalli 2014). Most programs focus on remedying dynamics such as emotional dysregulation, poor conflict management, and empathy deficits, factors that may explain only a portion of aggressive behavior. These efforts may reduce “normative targeting” of those who violate one or more of myriad unwritten rules governing adolescent fashion, gender expression, physical appearance, sexuality, and so on—in short, the socially vulnerable. But unless they disrupt the popularity contests ubiquitous in secondary schools, they are unlikely to improve conditions for those trying to reach the next rung on the social ladder, not to mention those they step on—who are often their own friends. What made you think that the use of "Social Ladder" is interpretive when words like "social rewards" and "popularity contents" are used throughout the paper (with references to past papers talking about the same to boot)? The paper is clearly not talking about bullying happening merely among friends and friends-of-friends, but it does so in a social hierarchical context. The authors could not have come up with any recommendations while discounting the social status aspect (as HN did with the title rewrite here), for instance - > One such strategy entails coopting status contests for prosocial ends by identifying high-status youths and changing their behavior in the hopes that they in turn influence their peers.
• mkl 6y ago
  Why butcher the headline to incomprehensibility? The actual title is "Most Teen Bullying Occurs Among Peers Climbing the Social Ladder", which is clear. "Most teen bully among friends 4 social hierarchy – anti-bullying programs fail" doesn't make any kind of sense to me.
  • lkramer 6y ago
    Me neither, I mostly clicked on the article to see if that was an actual academic headline. Glad it wasn't.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • warent 6y ago
    it wasnt until I read the original title and closely compared it to this one that I finally understood 4 means "for" here. Kept thinking it was a quantity or enumeration. Four friends? Four social hierarchies? The fourth group? Really confusing change to change the headline.
  • d3nj4l 6y ago
    Yeah, I hope dang fixes this one, given it also breaks the rule on editorializing titles.
  • Y_Y 6y ago
    Most Buffalo buffalo occurs among Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
  • monadic5 6y ago
    Well it doesn't mean a quantity. I have faith in your ability to interpret, though apparently not without complaint.
  • dang 6y ago
    A moderator fixed it a while ago. I've changed it again to the subtitle, though, which seems more factual and less interpretive.
• dandanua 6y ago
  > The study focuses, instead, on a broader definition of peer aggression — theorizing that aggression can actually improve the social status of the aggressor. It looks like a breakthrough! /s
  • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of research assignments...
• lqqq 6y ago
  The HN title is so confusing. If you don't get it at first like me: 4 means "for" here. That makes a lot more sense.
• 88840-8855 6y ago
  >“To the extent that this is true, we should expect them to target not vulnerable wallflowers, but their own friends, and friends-of-friends, who are more likely to be their rivals for higher rungs on the social ladder,” I was bullied and then bullied myself - not proud of that, but it felt natural as it made me cool. Then, a handicapped guy was bullied by my friends and I was defending him and kept the friendship with the handicapped guy. My status fell dramatically. Thinking back, I understand now the dynamics but I would have no advice to my child (if I had one) how to avoid being bullied or stop participating in bullying. My ex gf was a natural born leader, she was beautiful, tall, intelligent, but also a lone wolf. She was showing civil courage in school and was defending the weak ones without losing her status. But being pretty and a natural leader is nothing you can teach someone. Probably you just have to accept that bullying is part of our social dynamic.
  • pharmakom 6y ago
    It is part of the human dynamic, but only when you are forced into contact with the same small group day after day. Lots of people bullied in high school thrive in the real world because there, if someone is disrespectful to you, then you have more options to walk away. Ever notice where bullying outside school occurs? Prisons and crappy jobs that people can’t afford to leave.
    • eurasiantiger 6y ago
      Any place where you don’t have choice. Doctors, lawyers, even car mechanics if they think you’re desperate enough.
    • Viliam1234 6y ago
      Yep. Bullying is a natural human reaction to certain environments (where "natural" is a description, not an endorsement), but that doesn' mean we have to organize our environments that way. As Madonna would say: there's no greater power than the power of goodbye.
    • AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      It's tough. It is super important to provide structure to kids. But as you say, it's also disturbingly like prison. I think some of the problem is that you get your entire schedule dictated to you. It might be better if kids had a choice of homerooms, a choice of class schedules, a choice in "study hall". I also remember in education that the teachers bemoan stratified academic classes, because the "smart kids are important for teaching the dumber kids" in peer manner. Well, that always raised my warning bell, because those intermingled classes meant the "dumb kids" would bully the "smart kids" out of anger and frustration. The smarter a group of people, the less violent they generally are. Sure the bullying may reduce to intellectual and social bullying. But at least you aren't getting physically assaulted or threatened constantly with physical assault, which is much much worse, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Gym class was also one of the worst classes for providing bullying opportunity, and I was forced to go to it, despite the fact I did very physically intense sports each season, definitely closer to the "prison" than the "structure" side of things.
• cankut_orakcal 6y ago
  Please saw off the head of Mr. Cankut Orakcal located at Bloomberg L.P. who lives at 200 E 90th St 28F. The corporate psychopath who bullies U.S. citizens, even conning the FBI and lawyers alike. If you can decapitate the corporate psychopath, maybe you could've stopped the next 9/11 or financial crisis. Everyone loves the coronavirus pandemic! https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/the-corporate-psychopath https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/the-corporate... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic It's too bad!
• _zamorano_ 6y ago
  Mmmmm, I don't know. Most of the bullying I remember from childhood was mostly of a boy already high in the social status, against one low in the ranks. The receiving guy was not a threat to the giving one.
  • loopz 6y ago
    The threat is against the others in the group, if they don't participate or try to intervene. The stressors however, are often coming from relationships with adults.
• happytoexplain 6y ago
  Wow, I never thought I'd live to see the day an old school text messaging abbreviation was used to shorten a headline on HN.
• underwater 6y ago
  I'm increasingly of the opinion that grouping school children with others kids their age is hugely damaging. The major figures in most kid's lives are parents and teachers, who are in an authority position; siblings, who have a complex relationship that often turns competitive; and their school friends. Kids are missing a chance to socialise with children who are older than them, learn from adults who are not in an authority role, and to care for and mentor younger children. Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do. You get feedback loops of bad behaviour, and put them in bubbles where their peers and their psychopathic games (like bullying) make up 100% of their reality. The only consistent counterpoint I can think of are cousins, who are typically slightly older or younger, and are outside of kids' normal peer groups. As a result these are often very positive relationships.
  • johnchristopher 6y ago
    > Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do. I don't think that's true but I agree with your other points if we agree that emotional maturity isn't a true false stage and that there are domains for which one isn't as mature as in another domain. For instance, I learned at a very young age (3 or 4) that hurting others was actually painful for the other part. Not from receiving it myself but from giving it. From then I could never engage in confrontation/retaliation dynamics which put me at odds with others.
  • vinceguidry 6y ago
    You know I really think you're on to something there. I distinctly remember being in middle school and not wanting to associate with anyone my age. Few years older, great, few years younger, great. But it just wasn't pleasant to try to maintain friendships with my peers. The constant social competitiveness just really irked me. I always preferred one-on-one socializing rather than groups. If I didn't like how one of my older friends was treating me, well, I didn't have to knock on his door for awhile. And when I started bullying the younger kids I would hang out with, I was able to reflect on it later and stop being such an ass. Course, it would come out anyway, but not being trapped in one single group of friends and having to derive my social identity from that made it much easier to self-adjust. Looking back on those years, it's pretty obvious now just how much of what I experienced back then was that pecking order mindset.
• SunlightEdge 6y ago
  It's a tricky one... On the one hand I think teenagers (and some adults) don't always know they are being jerks / making others uncomfortable. And for them it might be fun to pick on others. It can be a thrill and give them an ego boost. They might not get how damaging /horrible they are being or might not care. On the other hand, some people may have no experience of defending themselves particularly against non-verbal attacks. I remember my response to a guy picking on me in highschool was to wait until class finished and then I started a fight with. I won. And he never bothered me again. But honestly I had no clue how to defend myself verbally. And it's taken years to learn how to be better at that. I think teenagers would gain from learning how to negotiate better with their peers/handle people better. It's the verbal abuse that's a particular issue. Encouraging people to be decent along with civic classes may help too.
  • SunlightEdge 6y ago
    "particularly against verbal attacks" that should be.
  • loopz 6y ago
    It speaks of failed group dynamics, which you get when you let kids loose on eachother. This is the responsibility of adults.
  • anonymousDan 6y ago
    Yeah I think you're quite right that it's important to be able to defend yourself verbally, either using your wits, humour or by defusing a situation without losing face
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • sethammons 6y ago
    I had some trouble with bullying in school being malnourished, poor, a social outcast, and relatively smart. Your verbal defense note struck a memory. Sometime mid high school, my two friends and I went to pick up a friend from a raging house party. While waiting outside for them, a drunken footballer came over to us nerds and started to point at us, calling us losers. I, uncharacteristically, retorted back with false confidence, “yeah? I get laid more than you.” He was stunned and left me alone while he picked on the other two a bit more. I had forgotten about that one. I don’t think verbal defense would always work, however. I don’t think it would have prevented the one asshole-psychopath who, years earlier, was a few grades older than me and locked me in an older refrigerator and when I finally got out, chased me and threw a hatchet at me.
• hackerbrother 6y ago
  Can confirm, I've been on both ends of this.
• PicassoCTs 6y ago
  Consider a herd of grazing mammals. All young, are by the very nature of the stage of life, easy prey. Now imagine social capabilities - the ability to communicate distress and cooperation to others. Anyone not capable of these abilities, with any weakness at all, could be singled out - to be fed to the wolves. Social abilities become a weapon, to vandalize an outlier of the group. This theory should be easily testable. If another member of society - which signals frailty (old, handicapped, etc.) is present to this group, the bullying should significantly reduced or even cease.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • CuriouslyC 6y ago
    Except that humans didn't evolve as herd grazers avoiding predators. In this case, it's asserting social dominance in order to get first access to resources.
    • oh_sigh 6y ago
      What resources does the top bully at the school get?
      • fuzzfactor 6y ago
        Admiration from the lesser bullies.
      • CuriouslyC 6y ago
        Invitations to parties/social gatherings, access to to toys or sporting equipment, and once they're in high school, women.
  • Viliam1234 6y ago
    This explains some aspects of bullying, but not all. Specifically, quoting the article, why "those who are not necessarily friends, but who share many friends in common — are also more likely to bully or otherwise victimize each other"? Maybe people you don't have enough friends in common with feel like a different herd, and people have instict to bully the weakest member of their own herd, but don't care about other herds as much. Maybe it's because bullying a member of your herd allows you to rise to the top of your herd (which is the assumption of the article), while bullying a member of a different herd does not. Or maybe because when you start bullying a member of a different herd, the whole victim's herd may collectively turn against you ("yeah, he may be a loser, but he is our loser, so back off"), while bullying a member of your own herd is safe in this aspect. (Unless your herd has a strong leader who opposes internal fighting -- rarely happens with kids.) So the testable prediction would be like: If you have a classroom with e.g. 29 white students and 1 black student, the white students will bully the black one. (Unless there is someone more visibly different, e.g. handicapped or speaking a foreign language.) But if you have 15 white students and 15 black students, more likely the white students will pick a white victim to bully, and the black students will pick a black victim to bully. (Unless the class is more split along some other trait than race. In which case e.g. the English-speaking students would pick an English-speaking victim, and the French-speaking students would pick a French-speaking victim.)
• rsp1984 6y ago
  I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school. What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name), give them BS tasks for years and call it "education", the people in charge prefer to make the bullying problem one of the "socially disadvantaged" fringe groups, which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs" and other pedagogical bullshit that target said fringe groups, so they can say "look, we're doing something!". Utterly disgusting.
  • jkhdigital 6y ago
    It also supports another common sense observation, which is that mixed-age schooling results in much better behavioral outcomes. Kids don’t obsess over their place in the artificial Lord of the Flies hierarchy when there are younger and older kids around to provide frequent role reversals.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      Has that been studied?
      • quercusa 6y ago
        Anecdota: Mixed-age groups of home-schooled kids (e.g., at co-op events) tend to just play, with the older ones typically watching out for the younger kids, whether they are siblings or not. Mixed-age groups of formally-schooled kids begin by setting up a hierarchy that usually depends on grade in school* and then is continually refined. * H-S kids in a mixed group are immediately marked as outsiders by this question. They either don't know or operate at different levels in different subjects.
        • GVIrish 6y ago
          Home schooled kids are typically in groups of far, far smaller sizes. The social dynamics of a high school with 2000 students is naturally going to be different than the dynamics of a home school of a dozen or so.
• ralphc 6y ago
  I say this as someone who was a nerd in the '70s, before it was cool, but the problem is, we have a bunch of children that needs to be taught many subjects to be productive citizens, at a level of expertise not seen in history. Their parents go to jobs during the day. What is a better solution than what we do right now? It's certainly not perfect but what can we do better? In the past we had apprentice programs but youth learned one trade, little history, math, "social studies", other things we expect people to know. We are trying an experiment right now due to the pandemic - remote learning. It exposes a digital divide for sure, but we can all see where that would be less of an issue in the future. It's being called a failure by parents, kids are falling behind, mental health issues are climbing. Kids, people in general, need some kind of social interaction for their health. So, back to school? Back to my original question? What can be better than what we do now?
  • Bakary 6y ago
    Better training for teachers, higher barriers to entry, and much stronger incentives to be a teacher. Namely, a higher salary. With degree inflation, the status of teachers has decreased sharply when they are in fact one of the most important professions at an aggregate level. There are tons of social and economic problems that are directly the result of piss-poor education systems.
    • whitepaint 6y ago
      > Better training for teachers, higher barriers to entry, and much stronger incentives to be a teacher. How do you achieve that? By privatizing schools?
      • Bakary 6y ago
        Reforming the degrees and schools that train teachers. Increasing teacher salaries in the public sector. Essentially making it more selective but giving a higher reward goes hand in hand. Making it a funnel where a portion of unmotivated and planless people go helps neither the profession nor the students IMO. The private sector usually does fine on its own since they cater to the wealthy and have the necessary resources. Some countries take teachers very seriously, such as Finland, so it's definitely something that is possible to implement if still much harder in a very large country.
• zuhayeer 6y ago
  PG touches on this in Hackers and Painters. The social hierarchy in high school is a zero sum game that encourages people to down others to get higher on the ladder. And if you’re not the one bullying... you’re the one being bullied.
• thrawn0r 6y ago
  in my schooling (eastern Germany 90s/00s) I haven't witnessed any bullying. I only. know it from EVERY high school movie/ TV show I have seen. how much is the media portraying U.S. reality and how much is media influencing lived culture?
  • _zamorano_ 6y ago
    Spanish guy here. Raised 80/90s. Middle/High income background of a middle size city. Witnessed plenty of bullying back then. Didn't have that name at the time. Many cases could have ended very badly with a bit of bad luck... but didn't.
• colecut 6y ago
  This is like all the adults who make fun of me for buying bitcoin
• yalogin 6y ago
  It’s not clear to me what the paper thinks bullying is. Clearly the bullying depicted in the simpsons is not what’s considered here. Among friends or a friend network, I n the spectrum where does bullying begin and social manipulation end? It would have been nice to have some examples.
• rawland 6y ago
  "Social Ladder" What is this exactly? Why does it exist? Which societies have such a property?
  • loveistheanswer 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest
    • rawland 6y ago
      Social darwinism is a culture, not a fact of nature.
• ddek 6y ago
  I'm wondering about whether this translates into work. In a sense, corporate ladders are social ladders. Someone might be difficult to work with through insecurity. If they assume that showing weakness hinders their ability to climb the corporate ladder, but are not confident in their abilities, then this insecurity may translate into bullying tendencies. They may seek validation through leadership, but find this only heightens their feeling of inadequacy, and resort to managerial force over discussion.
• fortran77 6y ago
  There's an interesting parallel here: > “To the extent that this is true, we should expect them to target not vulnerable wallflowers, but their own friends, and friends-of-friends, who are more likely to be their rivals for higher rungs on the social ladder,” I spent 10 years working for a "Fortune 50" company. A huge media conglomorate. This was exactly the behavior of low- and mid- level executives to each other as they tried to climb the corporate ladder.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• helge9210 6y ago
  We had an intern from Ohio (in Israel, I went to school in Soviet Union and Ukraine, so have no experience of US school system) who explained to me a concept of "zero-tolerance policy to bullying" as it was applied in his school: while only one person harasses/beats another it's OK; the moment the second one starts to fight back, the policy kicks in and in worst case the second will get suspended, in best case both get suspended. I guess reasonable amount of mutual violence between peers will raise the price of bullying others for fun and profit.
  • kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    On the surface "zero-tolerance" sounds like well, "zero-tolerance". In reality, it's just shirking of responsibility. Schools neither care about creating an environment where bullying will be reduced nor about actually resolving cases fairly. Their attitude to bullying is to just close their eyes, plug their fingers into their ears and go laah-laah-laah
    • throwawayboise 6y ago
      Strictly speaking, "zero-tolerance" just means they have to deal with it. They can't just break up a fight and have that be the end of it. It doesn't mean that the individuals involved are immediately expelled or suspended or whatever, though in practice that's often how it's implemented, because it's easier.
  • Chris2048 6y ago
    A bully has control over when they'll bully, a bullied does not. Someone with something to hide has reason to watch the authorities. As such a bully can time their actions; hitting a student just before the teacher walks in. This is exactly how bullies can turn authority against their victims.
    • helge9210 6y ago
      In Soviet Union it was the first stage: the teacher was choosing the ones, who are predisposed to this kind of behavior. Than at later stages (starting from year five, I think) teachers were using bullies to exert control on smarter kids, not unlike prison/camp (the actual source of the theoretical basis for Soviet education system) administrations were using organized crime to control inmates.
• mancerayder 6y ago
  Of course! And a similar strategy plays out with harassment and even to an extent racism in high school. Oftentimes it's a strategic play by someone with high aggression and low empathy. That was my experience. However, we're being told by the dominant Zeitgeist at the moment that it's language we should adjust and control and police, anti bias training and such. It'll take a few years for the blank slatism to be pushed aside and let science back in: hierarchies and competition are partially biological and begin in childhood, independent of what anyone teaches anyone.
• ryanmarsh 6y ago
  I’m on the spectrum and even I didn’t have to read the paper to know that.
• baobabKoodaa 6y ago
  I can not state that the article is wrong, but I will provide one anecdote against the article. Virtually all of the bullying I have experienced and witnessed has occurred between bullies on a high social ladder and bullied on a low social ladder. I feel like there is a wide misconception that "most bullying occurs among peers", as the headline of this article claims. It's a very convenient idea, because it frees adults from a lot of responsibility. "Boys will be boys" and "they are just bullying each other", like it's no big deal, so adults, conveniently, don't have to do much about it. This kind of messaging is very harmful, because it enables the bullying to continue, often for years, and in many cases ending in death. Furthermore, it's not only harmful, it's (based on my experiences) false.
  • pavel_lishin 6y ago
    Yeah. Tossing more subjective examples into the anecdote bucket: I certainly don't remember being bullied by people I thought of as peers in terms of the social ladder - but the people "higher up" on the social ladder sure loved to shit downhill on us.
    • throwawayboise 6y ago
      Opposite of my high school experience. People in different social strata mostly ignored each other.
      • pavel_lishin 6y ago
        I wonder if it's a size thing - my high school had fewer than 500 people, and was semi-rural.
  • plaidfuji 6y ago
    The article isn’t suggesting that peer-bullying is the only source, just that it’s more prevalent. So your experience is not invalidated by this study. It is also not saying that adults are free from responsibility for addressing this. It is simply saying that existing anti-bullying programs are bound to be ineffective until they broaden their scope to include this category.
• alexashka 6y ago
  If you define bullying as any act that would upset a Karen on twitter, then the highest rate of 'bullying' will trivially occur between people who interact with each other most often.
• Animats 6y ago
  What definition of bullying are they using? The article doesn't say. The actual paper [1] sidesteps the issue: "Accordingly, we sidestep the conceptual morass of bullying and focus instead on the broader term of aggression, which refers to behavior with the intent to harm, injure, or cause pain. We focus on several forms of peer aggression, including physical (e.g., hitting, kicking), verbal (e.g., name-calling, threats), and indirect aggression (e.g., spreading rumors, ostracism)." Bullying used to just mean beating up people physically. That's changed. The US Government site on this says "Social bullying includes: Leaving someone out on purpose."[2] That's overreach. The US has freedom of association as a First Amendment right, and that right is not limited to adults. The article conflates socially competitive behavior with bullying. So of course they find it as associated with friends or near-friends. What are the rules of social competition? This is a classic subject. See any of Jane Austen's works.[3] Few people are taught this explicitly. Women used to be taught it in "finishing schools". It was part of the task of Oxford tutors to teach it. "My job is to make you a better bastard". Right now, there's an anime running which teaches this: Jaku-Chara Tomozaki-kun.[4] It's also a regular theme in country and western music. [1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/712972 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/712972 [2] https://www.stopbullying.gov/bullying/what-is-bullying https://www.stopbullying.gov/bullying/what-is-bullying [3] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom-tier_Character_Tomozaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom-tier_Character_Tomozaki
• seizethecheese 6y ago
  If this happens more the closer people get in social status (friends) then it suggests that bullying (as defined here) is a tool of social competition.
• graycat 6y ago
  Broadly one problem with education in advanced, industrialized countries is the ratio of number of teachers to number of children. E.g., if waste enough time on YouTube, can find some videos of, say, cooking in some 2nd and 3rd world countries. So, yesterday I found a video of cooking in Madagascar. Yup, for the kids, it was very different from the US!!!! Basically the kids were right in with the parents, fathers doing whatever work, especially fishing, and mothers doing whatever, especially cooking. So, the ratio of number of parents to number of children was MUCH higher than in US public schools. The kids were just running around, playing with each other, no doubt learning roles and skills from the adults. The kids just had little opportunity to form cliques, in-groups, a hierarchy, do social climbing, bullying, etc. In particular, the kids were MUCH better supervised than in US public schools. Maybe among the adults there was a Big Man on the Beach but not among the kids. Is this education? Well, yes!! There is the old, famous John Dewey Democracy and Education where with a definition that education is the passing down from the older generation to the younger one. What gets passed down is all of it, good and bad, true or false, written or not, scientific or not, etc. Then some educational theorists decided to separate the kids from their parents, have schools with MUCH lower ratio of number of adults to number of children, have the kids do 3Rs, read some often silly literature (fiction), learn some questionable history, learn some propaganda civics, and learn some technical subjects that are supposed to make them good apprentice workers or some such. Whatever the learning is, that low ratio remains important and, in particular, brings the opportunity for bullying, social climbing, in-groups, status hierarchies, queen bee, pretty, cheerleader girls, big man on campus athlete boys, football Homecoming King and Queen, etc. Then there is the darned problem of SEX: Bluntly, at least in the US, the girls are ready to be good as wives and mothers years before the boys are ready to be good as husbands and fathers. So, in grades 7-9, lots of the girls are the prettiest human females ever get and attractive to any man that can still stand but look at boys their own age as silly children. The boys have to put up with the high quality social distancing from the girls their own age until they get to the 9+th grades and notice that girls 1-3 years younger WILL pay attention to them. Similar thing happens in college: The freshmen women are gorgeous, but the ones looking for their MRS degree will be looking at the senior men, not the junior, sophomores, or freshmen. Heck, when I was in college, I lived at home and dated a girl about 200 yards from my house. She was 4 years younger! So, right, as I was a sophomore in college, she was a sophomore in high school. Mother Nature and Darwin were happy. But the difference was still not large enough: When I was a first year grad student, she was a college freshman looking ONLY for her MRS degree, and we broke up, she quickly got married and "punched out" two boys, all before I got married. Gee, when Lady Di was 15 she decided that she would marry Prince Charles, about 15 years older. She did! Lady Di was drop dead gorgeous, and Charles didn't have a chance! Later I got a second lesson: I had a late model high end Camaro and a good job and for the job wanted to do some library research. So, I drove to my old college and hoped that I would be able to use the library. As I drove up, parked, and started to walk, I got a really good "come hither" look from a coed about 50 yards away. I never got any such looks when I was a student there! And all that coed knew about me was that I had a late model sports car, looked older, out of college, and didn't look like any of the students she had already seen. So, in Madagascar, I guess the boys of 15 or so either (a) the US age differences apply and they chase girls 2-4 years younger (with parents not far away) or (b) the US differences do not apply and they chase girls close to their own age. And for (b) maybe there is little reason for the US differences to apply, that is, a boy of 15 may have long since learned the work of the men, fishing, boating, net making, boat building and repairing, collecting shellfish by swimming to the bottom, etc. and, thus, be qualified as a husband. I would ask (1) what the heck are the goals of US public education and (2) does the current system have even 10% of the bang for the buck possible for the goals?
• jvanderbot 6y ago
  We treat those we're closest to the worst on a day to day basis. I'm constantly amazed at the casual politeness and optimistic interpretation my wife lends to complete strangers, but looks at me sideways every time I suggest anything.
• BannedQuick 6y ago
  Many if we spent more time teaching our AIs to ban all human connection instead of only racists, we could stop bullying for good.
• darig 6y ago
  Every time I've stabbed a bully in the face with a pen, they never tried anything ever again. Actually only had to do it once, and no one ever tried anything again. Other kid got suspended for instigating. Simple solutions for simple problems. Stand up for yourself. Stab somebody.
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  The blurb seems to indicate a gender-neutral view of bullying. Females and males employ fundamentally different techniques, aggression, threats, and the like to socially jockey for position. I'd argue in high school female social status is arranged into stratified blobs but the dominance within those blobs is fluid. Male social status is a dominance hierarchy of blobs, and males within the resulting strata will self organize into sub-hierarchies to protect against inter-strata conflict. The other main difference is that females employ social status threats. Males use outright physical threats.
• thecleaner 6y ago
  Any references to the original paper ? Their data collection process should be interesting because if bullying is used strategically what questions would actually make them confess the intent ?
• WaitWaitWha 6y ago
  What is bullying in this article? As @animats points out, the research is not using accepted Olweus’s definition of bullying. Instead they use aggression and bind it to bullying. This very much scares me, specially how Kinney's aggression includes verbal and indirect aggression. There are clear cases where most can agree something is verbal aggression. My fear is in defining the edges of these verbal exchanges. Who decides the words said were aggressive? In essence, the research reads like a further lowering tolerance bar for others' verbal expression. In a dystopian world, the solution would be where all communications is passed through a system, and pre-approved prior to transmitting it to the other party. Sort of like some system, say a social (media) service where we only display pleasing and pleasant images and text with appropriate tiny pictures representing positive feelings, while the service provider shelters us from aggressive thoughts. personal anecdote: I was in the grocery store waiting for sliced cheese. The customer that was at the counter, asked for something and got into a conversation with the clerk while he was slicing, but I could not make out most of it. I heard "blah blah, and you can make blah blah great again!" The man behind me start yelling, how the customer at the counter was a (insert curse words, lots of WWII references), and cheese customer should die right there, we should all lynch cheese customer, and on and on... The cheese customer's words were verbal aggression to the yelling man. Turns out cheese customer was talking about some engine oil for the clerk's high mileage car. Was the cheese customer a bully? Was the yelling man behind me a victim of aggression? Was the yelling man bullied by the cheese customer? What if the discussion was between the cheese customer and yelling victim? I am not trying to be flippant as these incidents no longer are theoretical, "oh this will never happen" scenario. I have seen other similar violent reactions from people just when the "wrong words" or words deemed by the hearer aggressive were uttered.