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

How did you get interested in studying bullying?

I get asked that question all the time.

People want to think that it was because either I was a bully or I was bullied. But the truth of the matter was, I was just really interested in popularity.
And popularity led me to bullying because the kids at my high school were the ones who bullied the most. I went ahead and looked at that for my dissertation and found that

they were four times more likely to bully others than those who didn't have power, who were not popular. And then it just kind of snowballed from there.
Okay. So how much work is being done in the world of evidence-based bullying, intervention, stuff like that? So the past 25 years, we've studied this in earnest.

It's been primarily correlational. I mean, it's going to be hard to do experiments on bullying when you think about it.
I mean, it's just not going to work, really. But we've looked at it primarily from a correlational point of view.
The first thing was just to sort of document the prevalence and the like. And then after that, then people looked at individual factors that were associated with it.
Dan Olves kind of led the charge. He's a Swede who was living in Norway at the time, conducted the largest study at the time, largest longitudinal study, but also intervention study, and then found a 50% reduction, but easy to do in Norway when you have everybody involved.
It's a small country. So anyhow, so he looked at what happens to kids who bully as they move forward.
So identified boys in grade nine, found that a large percentage of them were criminally were involved in the criminal justice system by the time they were age 24. So that was kind of like the first, I think, well-conducted study in this area that was beyond just descriptives, although there are it is still descriptive to some extent.
And then some people then focused on the sort of like the broader context that it happens in. So like not just at the individual level, but what do school related factors look like? Kids are nested within schools, they're nested within their families, how do those interrelate? And then my focus was always on the neurobiology of bullying.
I was really interested and documenting how it hurt people, not just at that level where it could be easily dismissed, where people just say, ah, you know, you just need to be more resilient, suck it up. Yeah, she's sad, but she'll get over it.
I wanted to show that, no, it affects them in a way that's profound and places them at risk for the rest of their lives.

So that was kind of like my area of research. And since then, others have followed.
There's not enough of us. I think that we need to be looking at the neurobiology a little bit more carefully.
It's a profound psychosocial stressor. So that's kind of like the evolution of bullying research.
And then there's another side group that looks at it from an evolutionary perspective. And I know you had Tony Volk on before, and I do that a little bit too with Tony and the like.
So yeah, I think we're getting there. What's next? What would you want to look at next? Or what do you think the broader bullying research community needs to be focused on? why interventions don't work.
So when we look at the big meta-analyses,

there was one that was just redone. So you'd think like when you redo the meta-analysis on bullying intervention efficacy that we would have improvements over the course of a decade, and we don't.
So we're still only seeing about at best a 20% reduction in bullying. And, um, and that I think needs, obviously it needs to improve because kids are so profoundly affected and so are teens and so are adults.
So what is it that, um, why does this persist? Why can't we move that to be in a, like move it so that we have better rates, but I mean lower rates of bullying and we're just not there. Like there was one, I think there's one promising area they're looking at, again, power.
I think that's really what you need to focus on because bullying is a systematic abuse of power. But the kids who were most and teens who were most impervious to bullying intervention programs were the ones who were the most popular in the school because they don't want to give up their power holding position oh that's interesting okay so explain to me the the motivations for why people bully like what what's the reason doing it? I think there's a lot of different motivations, but I think primarily it's about the corrupting influence of power.
So our longitudinal studies show that, okay, so there's a certain percentage of kids, probably about 10% of kids. And when I say kids, I mean anybody under 18.
So there's a certain percentage of kids who just have sort of like emotional dysregulation. So prefrontal dysfunction.
So ADHD, conduct disorder, that sort of thing. The Nelsons, Nelson from the Simpsons.
So that's a great, great representation of who I mean. Our past studies and our past intervention efforts have focused on Nelson, or the Nelsons of the world.
But they are so different, and they don't really represent the true bully out there. So when you look at it, what happens is that kids have assets and competencies that the peer group values.
They're good looking, they're good athletes, they're whatever. Every school has a different context or a different culture, I mean.
And so those kids then are afforded power. And then that power is then abused.
So then they use aggressive means to maintain hegemony, but also to have achieved it. So like the beauty gets you there first and then it corrupts you and then it just escalates into you being a complete jerk.
And then ruling the school and then in a sense like creating the norms of the school because these kids are so powerful and so salient that everybody pays attention to them and everybody emulates what they're doing. And then next thing you know, you have the entire environment has been corrupted, not just the individual.
And that's 90% of bullies? That's 90% of kids who bully others. okay why is it not the case that you get a benevolent leader at the top

why is it that when people get power that they end up going toward cruelty rather than kindness? There are some. There are definitely some kind leaders.
I make a distinction in my research between implicit and explicit power. So implicit power is the type of power you achieve by having competencies and assets that the peer group values and you don't abuse your power.
And then explicit power is the type of power that you achieve through coercive means and it elicits fear and compliance and submission. And then kids who bully others tend to be this melange of implicit and explicit power.
So they do have some redeeming qualities. They can be pro-social.
They tend to be strategic. They're interpersonally exploitative, like that sort of thing exists.
So Machiavellian. But we don't have a good grasp on who those just pure implicit power people are.
But they exist. We just don't know enough about them.
So the kids who are pro-social and only pro-social, but extremely powerful within their school community. What's the personality profile of a typical bully? Have you done Ocean or Hexaco or anything else on them? Have they got a star sign that we need to look out for? Yeah.
So right now we're focusing more on the dark triad and looking at how that unfolds. And it's what you would expect.
They're really high on narcissism. They're high on Machiavellianism.
They're high on, they're psychopathic in some ways. They have psychopathic traits.
So they're callous and unemotional in a lot of ways. They're very well adjusted.
They're good at explaining their terrible behavior, at justifying it to themselves and to others. They're socially skilled.
You know, so we used to think, like, based on Olvaeus' old study, that kids who bullied others were just destined to be locked up, in a sense, or just have, like, a life of misery and cause harm to society. And yet, what our studies have shown, and we've been following kids for over 16 years from the time they were 10 until now, they're 26, actually they're turning 27.
And that's not the case. These are pretty successful individuals.
They're successful because they have this blend of pro-social and anti-social. They have, like I said, a lot of assets and competencies, so they don't get shunned.
I've said when it comes to the girl world that being beautiful, you can get away with murder if you're attractive. And then on the boy's side, there's a lot of things.
If they're a good athlete and you're in a very um athletic school they can get away with murder i think that if you act the way some of these beautiful girls and athletic boys act um without those features the peer group's going to turn on you pretty quickly and that's what you see with nelson right so no tolerance for n Nelson because Nelson doesn't have a lot going for him. Does that mean the bullies are smarter than average if you were to do an IQ test? There's evidence that they have better social skills.
Their emotional intelligence is higher. I think that there probably is higher intelligence, just like a general intelligence, because to be able to manage and manipulate interpersonal relationships is quite complicated.
To really understand the nuances, the politics of the playground, that takes some skills, some cognitive skills. So they're privileged in one of many ways, athletically capable, good looking, presumably probably people from rich homes or homes that have got that and then even the more sort of difficult to observe privileges of social skills of i'm going to imagine they're higher on disagreeability uh and assertiveness and stuff like that um yes and no so they could also be higher on both like so you would think like um like in some ways they're agreeable in other ways they're not the lack of agreeableness comes with the um entitlement that comes again like holding wielding power is really bad for an individual's um like i mean it's good for their personal trajectory but it's not good for society's trajectory i mean you could just see leadership around the world um and how corrupt it is in a in a lot of ways this is what i'm i'm describing um you know like a lot of people aren't fans of donald trump but donald trump didn't get to where he is by just being purely um in his power, right? He does have some assets and competencies.
He's got the prestige as well as that sort of dominance thing. Yeah, you know what I mean? And then there's this other thing that we haven't really looked at and we should.
I'm going to just move over out of the sun again. One of the things I think we also need to get a handle on is like, um,

people who are dirty fighters. I think that gives them power too, because, um, you know,

anxiety is the root of human restraint. So at the end of the day, unless you're a psychopath,

you are going to pull back a bit. You are going to be a little bit anxious about how people view

you. You are going to be worried about crossing a line, right? Unless again, you're wired different

I don't care. And so they use aggression in a way that you and I would never use.
And that then wields them power because it's just so off the rails and so atypical and quite scary. So you actively avoid them or you placate to them if you can avoid them.
And then it gives them this erroneous belief that they're respected when in fact they're feared.

That's interesting.

What's the truth around bullies being from broken homes?

So I don't know that.

And I thought I knew the research literature pretty well. I think that that would be this idea that they come from broken homes would be studying more aggressive behavior.

And, you know, keep in mind that when we're talking about bullying, we're talking about the end of that spectrum, right? So all bullying is aggressive behavior, but not all aggressive behavior is bullying. Bullying happens in the context of a power imbalance.
So there is an over-representation of kids from dysfunctional homes where there's family discord and they're not intact, who have a more higher, they're higher on aggressive trajectories. There is a bit of a genetic load attached to that too that people don't like to talk about, but it does exist.
But I don't know of any study off the top of my head where you see kids from broken homes more likely to bully others. That's interesting.
I think it's one of the kind of go-tos of the hopeful, slightly dismissive person when it comes to bullying, which is, well, you know, this is just a normal response to an abnormal raising situation. And that's kind of the place that they go to.
And that is true, but they're talking about aggression and they're conflating it with bullying. And we really need to keep them separate because the evidence on bullying suggests that those who bully others have a different profile, right? So like, again, they're higher on these dark triad traits, but also those who are victimized, who are victims of bullying don't fare well at all.
And it's because of that power imbalance, because they can't fight back, because they can't defend themselves, because it happens over and over again. It places them at a huge disadvantage that really hurts them today and tomorrow.
So I see this happening all the time in education where parents and students and even educators mistake aggression and bullying. They think they're the same thing.
If it happens once, it's typically not bullying. When it happens over and over again, and the reason it can happen over and over again is because there's a differential, there's a power differential, right? Yeah, talk to me about the, I don't know, if you were to make a meal that was bullying, what are the ingredients, the component parts that go into it in order for you to sort of have that? You've mentioned about power, power imbalance, sort of inability to fight back, social exclusion,

stuff like that. What are the individual components of bullying? I think we'd have to build two different meals.
We would have to build that Nelson meal, right? And that kid would, again, have a lot of, so they would be dysregulated. probably have a lot of prefrontal dysfunction they would be um they wouldn't be strategic they would be reactive in their use of aggression um they would run amok of their school by just indiscriminately picking on everybody they would be rejected uh marginalized their future would not be that positive.
But then if we built the other meal, they would be rejected, marginalized, their future would not be that positive.

But then if we built the other meal, it would be kids who have, who come in thinking they're it in a bag of chips because they've been told that they're it. They have a lot of assets and competencies, which I already mentioned.
They are probably a little bit lower on anxiety, so they're able to treat people poorly and not worry about it too much. And then it just snowballs, right? Because then that accrues power, then that power then corrupts them, and then they want to usurp even more power by being a total asshole how many people sorry i need to qualify they're not total assholes they're assholes to some people and good to others because if you're a complete jerk you then alienate yourself and your power base um also then um gets corrupted and corrupted in a different way like meaning like you just can't hold on to um your your power holding position yeah because you need the sort of sycophants and exactly around you and if you're too if you're too much of an asshole, you become a Nelson.
Yeah, you need a base to help you out. How many people are victims and bullies? So bullies represent, so victims are about 30% of the population are victimized and 10% are bullied ruthlessly every single day.
We're talking millions of kids as we speak were bullied today around the world, hundreds of millions. So 30% of the population

is bullied, 10% are ruthlessly bullied. And then in terms of those who bully others,

it's a bit lower. It's probably around 8% bully others.
But, you know, most of it is relying on self-reports and most kids don't admit to doing this to others. If we use peer nominations, then you're getting closer to, let's say, 20 to 30.
Again, it would map on, but it really depends on the methodology. So the benefits to bullies, maintaining power, popularity, it seems like they have in some ways better outcomes in later life.
I assume that that's not because they don't get better outcomes because they were bullies. They get better outcomes because the things that permitted them to bully are also useful when they become adults, like socially being quite adept, maybe being a little bit more ruthless and assertive than other people are, having this lowered sense of anxiety, which allows them to maybe be a little bit more risk-taking in a calculated way, etc., etc.
So if those are some of the benefits, are there any costs to bullies bullying? So again, if we just focus on high status, high powered bullies, I guess the cost would be one that's born by society and those in their lives more than at the individual level. And that kind of hurts to tell you that because I would want there to be a cost that dissuades them from acting this way.
But the

truth of the matter is that they're a menace to those in their lives, not necessarily to themselves.

And so I think the cost, one of the costs to themselves would be maybe in the end, they have

more difficult relationships because it maintains their narcissism or it influences their narcissist

the they have more difficult relationships because it maintains their narcissism or it influences their narcissistic traits. So it makes them more pronounced.
They become more entitled. And then that is challenging to be around.
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That's kettleandfire.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Okay, so moving on to the victims, what are the types of people who get bullied? So, I mean, that was like a really big focus back in the day.
Like, could we identify kids who get bullied so that we could protect them? And obviously, those who are not able to defend themselves are going to have a harder time. You know, think about this, like if, and we're talking again about the Nelson, and I know I keep making this distinction, but that's, they're really different animals.
It really looks different. So those kids come into grade one, let's just say, and they, they just pick on everybody.
And, you know, I pick on Tracy and she goes and tells the teacher right away. And then I pick on Chris and he doesn't tell anybody.

And so that gets me coming back. Right.
So one of the things that you see is that those that are willing to intervene on their behalf. So meaning like saying, no, I'm not going to allow this to happen or tell somebody immediately, they tend to not get victimized again.
Now that's not always the case. But, you know, as a general rule,

saying no and sticking up for yourself is a good way to go. But not everybody has the capacity to do that.
So I'm not asking people to do it because I recognize that's inherently unfair. Kids who are shy and socially withdrawn tend to get picked on a little bit more.
kids who are girls who have ADHD who are just a little bit atypical, neurodivergent kids get picked on a little bit more. Kids who don't have the cool stuff that everybody has can be picked on more.
So if you're in a middle-class school and you're not wealthy, you're not in that economic bracket, you could be more at risk. Kids who have poor social skills can get picked on.
But then there's also kids who challenge those who wield power who can get picked on. So if you're a very attractive girl, let's say, and you move to a new school, God help you.
It's just not going to go well. You know, those girls are going to eat you alive and make sure that you don't usurp their power.
If you're a very athletic boy and you come into a new school, I think you'll be okay because boys tend to tolerate hierarchies more than girls. So it's, you know, it's a little complicated.
I know you maybe want just like a list of here are the things of kids that like, but that places kids at risk, but I just can't give it to you because it's far more complicated than that. I think it's more interesting to look at it this way because, you know, it's not a one size fits all.
There's some fundamental, you know, power imbalance, aggression is being used um it feels to me like bullying is playing on the need to belong and that social okay so is social exclusion and the need to belong is that sort of one of the the fundamental components of of how bullying works i think bullying exploits that fundamental need to belong for sure. And that comes back to, remember, we talked about their social skills, like how do they know that and how they know that so early for sure.
And then bullying also exploits, well, I mean, it thwarts people's fundamental need to belong, but it's not always exploiting it. So some kids are just better at it, at better picking up what your sensitivities are and then, um, then just treating you poorly as a consequence, right? Like they just know which buttons to press.
Um, I don't know if we know really what that ingredient is. So if we're still building our meal, like.
Yeah. I, I wonder whether, you know, one of the kind of ruthless things I guess about, about bullying is that if you as the high powered, prestigious, slightly dominant person, make it socially cancerous to be associated with the person that you're always picking on ruthlessly, the 10% or whatever, or maybe more, it means that it becomes increasingly difficult for other kids to step in and give the victim the thing that they really need, which is a support structure, because they don't want to be in the blast radius of the super cool kid that's always being mean.
100%. And exactly what the research shows so uh so if i'm a bully um the kids that i bully and then you're in my group you're also bullying them so they can't they can't win right and then they become um in a sense uh avoided not in a sense they do really do get avoided because nobody wants to be the next target.
And I always think about like, it's like social singling, right? Like we talk a lot about virtue singling now and everybody pretending they're good and look at me, but there's another singling that's happening. And it's about like, hey, you mess with me, you're going to be the next target.
And this is what it looks like. So the kid's head really is on a stake for everybody to see.
And then when we talk, we talked about this already, but this is what I mean why we can't, we shouldn't mix up aggression with bullying, because you can imagine how isolating that is to the kid who's been victimized. How do they get out of that? And then they tend to learn that the way to get out of that is then to act like the jerk who's doing it to them and now instead of having a prevalence rate of 30 percent bullying at your school you have a prevalence rate in the 70s because do you know nobody's fixed it yeah do you see this sort of um contagion within schools if there's within schools? 100% I go to schools where and we do research across

hundreds and hundreds of schools in Ontario

and some have low bullying

rates like 15%

and others have 70% bullying rates

and it really is about that

is anybody

holding them to account

and if you don't

hold them to account they will

correct rights. And it really is about that.
Like, is anybody holding them to account? And if you don't hold them to account, they will corrupt your environment. And presumably that gets passed down from year to year as well.
Exactly. So they're like, think of it like, and I know you know this literature, but like, if you think about like dominance, the dominance literature really tells us that when somebody wields power, we pay attention to them.
We emulate them and they don't pay attention to us. They are impervious to our signals of distress.
They're not that interested in us, but we're profoundly interested in them. And they also represent a really important socializing component in their environment.
So they're socializing everybody who's paying attention to them in a way that we don't want them to be acting, right? Like we don't want this to be the model of our citizenship at our school. Which is why you have 15% schools as well as 70% schools.
Exactly. Yeah.
What about ethnic group differences in bullying? Yeah. So we did a really big meta-analysis and I was a little bit surprised because if you look at, like you just are going to think that there's going to be ethnic differences, ethnic and racial differences, just expect it.
And we didn't find that at all for perpetration and for bullying victimization. Not at all.
I mean, there's a little bit. At the end of the day, it's about numeration.
So if we are at a school where it's primarily South Asian, and we're the only two white kids, then we're a little bit

vulnerable. But if you're the only two South Asian kids at a white school, you're vulnerable.
So it really doesn't have to do with one race or ethnicity, or it really has to do with who's wielding power in your particular school. So being a minority anywhere, probably not are not fantastic unless you've i know you're some sort of sexy minority i don't know i was gonna say there are some minorities that like um are more protected than others so like in canada black youth are seen as more cool um wow they're like a rare shiny charizard in in canada i imagine yeah i'm not too sure but i do know that like there's um there's something going on there um i mean we don't have the same history as the united states right we didn't have slavery and the like um our immigrant profile looks different um but so in our studies we don't see black youth being bullied as much but we do see Asian students and South Asian students being bullied more than black students but we always see white students in our studies being bullied the most and bullying others the most but they represent the majority in our country right so that's always going to be the case all right what about um the relationship between overweight So, okay.
So there has been a lot of research showing that kids who are overweight and obese are more likely to be bullied. And then we did the study that like blew my mind because it was not at all what I thought was going to be the case.
So we follow kids prospectively for seven years. And what we found was that there was always an association between being bullied and being overweight, but that kids gained weight as a consequence of being treated poorly.
And that's what was driving the association primarily. So it's not like they were big and then got bullied.
They got bullied and then became bigger and then got bullied. And then it just kind of spiraled.
So really unfair, but it makes sense because they become depressed and depression is associated with either overeating or under eating. So you're going to go one way or the other.
And so to me, it fits like when I stood back and looked at it, I was like, oh yeah, this makes sense. But this study needs to be replicated.
It's only one study. We are the first to show it.
I'll be interesting to see if others show it as well. It seems like for both boys and girls, attractiveness is one of the protective mechanisms or one of the enabling mechanisms.
A very obvious bestowed type of prestige, which you can then transmute into dominance And being obese is one of the things that's going to damage your attractiveness, whether you're fat coming in or get fatter as it goes on. But the last thing that you want to do when you're a teenage boy or girl and everybody is highly scrutinizing the way that everybody else looks and changes day to day, month to month, year to year, is to lose some attractiveness.
And yeah, I suppose it's a vicious cycle that being bullied causes you to... I don't know how many people get bullied in school and become more attractive because of it.
Yeah, I don't know how that would work. Now, there is a little bit...
So can we talk about skinny kids a little bit? So skinny boys are vulnerable and, um, and especially skinny boys who are adolescents are very vulnerable, um, because that's not perceived as masculine, which kind of goes hand in hand with, um, being vulnerable, which is unfortunate. And then, um, thin girls get bullied, but because of intersectionalsexual competition so like even though like you're going to see it on both like so thin children and thin adolescents are at risk but the mechanism is different for boys and girls so interesting so for the boys it's insufficiently masculine you don't have that dominance you don't have that physical presence that would maybe say hey don't fuck with me but for girls it's because other girls see that as potential like uh i guess sexual competition for want of a better term for when talking about teenagers but like precocious sexual competition or whatever a future rival in one way or another because of the way that they look.
Exactly. Exactly.
And then there was a study that just came out that showed this curve, and it was looking at how weight status maps onto mental health. So this was published in JAMA, just came out like a few months ago, and you see both ends.
So you see the really thin kids being overly represented on having poor mental health, and then the overweight kids also having poor mental health. More on the overweight side than the underweight side.
But it really, I think that that could be explained through peer processes. Talk to me about, you've kind of touched on it there, this difference between girl bullying and boy bullying how do they differ um boys are so obvious in their bullying they're really like they value dominance and submission so they are going to put you in your place either physically or verbally and you're going to know where you stand if you have any flaw chris they are going to tell you what it is right and it's going to be immediate and everybody's going to know where you stand.
If you have any flaw, Chris, they're going to tell you what it is, right? And it's going to be immediate and everybody's going to mock you. With girls, it's more circuitous.
Like we value inclusion and exclusion a little bit more than boys. So we use our relationships as a vehicle to cause harm.
So we're more likely to use indirect aggression, which is also called social or relational aggression. So we will spread rumors about you.
We'll exclude you from the peer group, those sorts of things. We'll give you a once over and give you a death stare and mock and laugh at you and do that over and over again.
We'll pretend we are friends with you, but we're really just trying to elicit information from you to use it against you. So we are, I think, are more instrumental and boys are more reactive.
So we're proactive and boys are more reactive, although they can also be proactive boys. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
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That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. How much cross-sex bullying happens? So there's a little bit of cross-sex bullying.
It mostly happens in elementary school. When they get to be in high school, they really just want to date each other.
So they don't do it as much. Right? Yeah, that's funny.
They're interacting in one way or another, but it changes. Yeah, exactly.
And also, I think we've done a pretty good job at really making it clear that, you know, good boys don't pick on girls. So I think if you're doing that when you're 17, there, you know, there's something pretty wrong about you.
So yeah, so you tend to not see it as as much as they get older. But when they're little kids, and they haven't got the script yet, and they haven't, or the memo hasn't been received.
Yeah, little boys can be little shits to girls, but little girls can be little shits to boys. I suppose until puberty kicks in, little boys and little girls, apart from one very specific part of their anatomy, are basically physically the same thing.
There's not much difference between them. So I imagine even physically, an eight-year-old girl could pick on an eight-year-old boy, but it's going to be very rare for a 16- 16 year old girl to be able to pick on a 16 year old boy.
Yeah, it's interesting though. So the sex difference in the expression of bullying.
So a lot of times people want to say that there's no gender difference when it comes to indirect aggression, but they have not looked at it in terms of proportion. So they look at it in terms of means and it's true, boys use it just as much as girls, but girls only use this.
And they tend to focus on this form of bullying early on. So we can see it in three-year-olds, four-year-olds, five-year-olds where, you know, you can't sit with me during circle time.
They spread little rumors, you know, Chris Pease's pants, that sort of thing.

So they're pretty mean.

We did a couple studies where we looked at toddlers and we did direct observations and these girls were nasty. What do you think that is? Is that just some really precocious version of the same dynamic, the venting, the intasexual competition, the sort of very manipulative ways that females are going to have to use sort of social networks and stuff when they grow up? Is this them just sandbox training grounding it very early on? I like how you described it.
I think that really is what it is. They're practicing, they're honing a skill for the future.
Kai Bjornquist proposed this heterotopic continuity model. Heterotopic continuity.
Yeah, of aggression. And basically, he talked about how, I mean, everybody eventually moves towards indirect aggression because it's the thing that society tolerates, but we don't tolerate little girls punching little boys.
We tolerate boys punching boys up until a certain

point. But he also talked about how this happens.
And one of the things is that girls just have

superior verbal and social skills early in life. And it continues across the lifespan.
I know a lot of people are turned off by sex difference research, but you can't call yourself a critical thinker if you don't think sex differences exist because they certainly exist. This is a safe space for you, Tracy.
It's such a robust finding. It's been shown in so many labs around the world.
So little girls start it early.

I had this conversation with Joyce Benenson probably 18 months ago two years ago and she was telling me it made so much sense I know that even in you know three month old six sorry three

to six month gestating uh humans you can see sex differences in the brain already. Like you're a minus three-month-old and we can already begin to see structural differences in the brain.
And then I think by age 10, an fMRI is 93 or 95% accurate at working out whether this is a male or a female brain, which is about the same accuracy that adults have when just determining a human face. It's like that's the level of accuracy, however accurate you think you are at picking out whether that's a man or a woman, that's the same accuracy at 10 years old.
And obviously the sex differences before birth kind of gets rid of the socialization, social roles theory thing. But what she taught me that I thought was just super interesting kind of makes so much sense.
Even when I think back to my time in school, she was saying that if you look at the sort of games that girls play, they're being veterinarians, they're being nurses, they're raising something. It's about caring for something else.
It's sort of collective, but it's usually sort of outward focused toward an individual. Whereas if you look at what boys are doing, it's warfare.
It's they're cowboys or aliens or they're whatever, and we're going to take them down. And it's practicing for ancestrally, I guess, what the most salient, most important roles would have been when we grew up to become adults.
And no matter how much you sort of emancipate women from the kitchen and put them into the boardroom or tell men that they can be stay-at-home fathers or whatever, like it's going to take a very long time for our biology to catch up with that, especially when you're only three and you have no, like you haven't been exposed to second wave feminism at three years old yet. You haven't been exposed to sort of the metrosexual movement for men and, and, you know, like holistic masculinity when you're five.
So yeah, we still get to see maybe in a sort of a more unencumbered, uh, unmolested nature, like what, what that is like for, uh, humans when you're looking at kids. A hundred percent.
Like, I mean, it's hard for some people to swallow it. As you know, I have a book coming out and that's basically the topic.
It's about how our brain today represents hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressure. We may want to say that it's all socialization, but there's just no way.

There's no way that we are where we are today without evolutionary forces at play.

We did the study that really speaks to this. So like we're talking a little bit about indirect aggression.
And we did a study where I was really interested in what the early origins of that were. And so we looked at two year olds and like so not very advanced in their language their language not very sophisticated and we looked at this thing called love withdrawal so it's basically relational or indirect aggression but a baby version where you are mad and you won't kiss your mom or you refuse to hug them you turn your back you know give them the a baby silent treatment and we found that close to 80% of toddlers did this, as reported by parents and by their preschool teachers, their daycare teachers.
So we're pretty sophisticated social animals. Have you ever seen that video of a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat of a car when the owner it's a truck and in the back seat of the car is a like baby cow so there's a baby cow sat in the back seat that the owner's just going to go and buy and there's a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat and the owner's trying to reach over to sort of stroke the golden retriever and the golden retriever is just refusing to look like it's just looking straight ahead and the guy's next to him and he keeps leaning back and as he gets touched he sort of moves his arm away like this i thought that's yeah that is that that love withdrawal thing that's you know i'm mad at you because the dog thought that he was being replaced by this baby cow that was sat behind him and it's interesting because like in that we talked about how um there was a relationship to how it's used between parents.
And is it the case that, you know, parents think, well, I'm not hitting my spouse, I'm not yelling at my spouse, but I'm stonewalling them for two weeks straight. And that's like a better way of expressing it.
And then the kids are picking that up or Or it's like, what is the origin of this? And

I don't know. I'm not here to answer that at this point.
It was the first study that was done.

It needs to be replicated. Everything needs to be replicated now, as you know, Chris,

you got a good idea. Go to avoid the replication crisis.
Yeah. I think it's fascinating.
I think

that's so interesting to consider how young this starts. If you're two, what can you really do? Especially what can you do to mom and dad? But that's something I've been thinking about an awful lot more recently, which is Lyman Stone or Brad Wilcox or whoever you want from the Institute for Family Studies, both of whom have been on the show, but they have an agenda, like they have an agenda of keeping families together.
They're very pro-marriage. You know, Melissa Carney's work, the two-parent advantage or two-parent privilege.

if you're looking at this stuff and you think well it's really important that parents stick together because we know that the outcomes from single parent homes aren't aren't fantastic

but the way that parents stick together what what are the lessons that your kids are learning

about what love is and attachment and dealing with disagreement and regulating dysregulation and how do people come back together? And what does that tell you about what you should expect from your friends and from future relationships? Is this really the best that you should hope for? Like this sort of silent, objectively successful, but experientially miserable relationship. Like, is that really the pinnacle of what you're expecting in the rest of your life? Exactly.
It's attachment theory, right? It's about, this is the prototype. And is this the prototype you want kids to have? There was some studies done.
I think Sarah Jaffe is the one who did it like maybe 15, 20 years ago, showing that it's actually really dangerous for kids to be in a home with an antisocial dad. Their outcomes are better than not having that antisocial dad in the home.
Wow. So keep families together but at what cost i mean it really you know it's like everything there's always going to be variants there's always heterogeneity and we have to be thinking about these nuances because it's not going to be one size fits all yeah having um a dad who's you know modeling really inappropriate behavior know people are going to say, well, what about moms? This is the study that looked at dads.
But yeah, any of these, these role models being corrupt is a problem. And that's also the peers, like having the leadership of your school be corrupt is not good for the health of your school.
yeah I you're so right. And I think I pushed Brad on this point.
And I think he arrives at the right place, which is basically, yes, there are many cases in which a marriage would be better to break up than it would be to stay together. But it's his belief that the threshold for when you should break up has been lowered too much.
That, you know, this person isn't helping me fulfill my highest ideal or, you know, I really hate the way that they slurp their tea or whatever it may be because of a million different reasons that we don't need to get into. But I think finding out and resetting where that barometer lies and looking at interventions for relationships to, okay, how can we come back together? How can we have a hard reset on this so that we can really restart and thinking about what is it that we're modeling for our kids? You know, am I begrudgingly making my way through the next 18 years of this marriage so that my kids can leave a non-broken home? But, you know, how much are they taking from the way that we interact? There's this video that you might have seen that's been floating around on Twitter, which is the best thing that parents can do for their kids is show them how much they love each other.
And it's this video of a child sat down on a couch and it pans to the two parents salsa dancing out on a balcony together. It's a little bit kind of a meme, but definitely in that regard, I think, yeah, it's not just about sticking together for the kids.
It's about sticking together in a good way. And I'll just add this because I think we'd be remiss if we didn't.
One of the challenges about families breaking up is that oftentimes women and children are left in poverty and poverty is a huge stressor. Poverty changes the brains of children.
And so this is where like beyond the behavioral things that we're talking about and the socializing influence that we're talking about, if we could have kids and women not live in poverty, then I think we would see different outcomes. And if we were to hold that statistically, account for that statistically, I think that we would be making different decisions, but also we would hold a different viewpoint about this.
Yeah, that's interesting. So a broken home isn't just a broken home.
A lot of the time it's a poor home and a poor home is a stressed home and you can't separate those out.

Yeah. I think those variances need to be separated, accounted for, or their interactions need to be

examined. But at the end of the day, we don't want kids to be hurt.
Obviously, that's never going to be good for a kid's life. And living in a home where everything is about love withdrawal and control, social

control and the like, that's also not healthy. What about bullying for LGBT youths? This is a topic that I keep seeing online.
Terrible. They are so unwell and they're so poorly treated.
And especially right now with the current anti-trans movement, I mean, they are not living a good life at all. Let's separate, just before we go any deeper, actually, let's separate this to LGB and T.
Because even though they fly under the same flag sometimes, I don't think they're the same thing. Okay, so we'll talk about lesbian, gay, bisexual students are bullied at higher rates than heterosexual students.
But again, the context matters. So if you're in, let's say, performing arts school where there's an over-representation, you're not going to be as bullied.
It gets back to enumeration, that sort of thing, and also what the culture of the school is. But on average, they're not treated well.
They're bullied at higher rates for sure. And trans youth are particularly vulnerable.
And also their mental health is off the chart, like their poor mental health is higher than anything I've seen in my career. So we have this really massive study where we're following hundreds of thousands of kids in Ontario and those who identify as trans are not doing well.
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That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. I guess with that point, it's difficult to know whether the kids are mentally distressed because they're trans or whether they're trans because they're mentally distressed.
I think the temporal precedence has not been established because it's been so politically challenging to study this. And this is always a problem.
When politics get interfere with science and knowledge, then you can't get to truth. I think that, well, you know that.
We both know that this is a problem. Yeah, I mean, the significantly higher rates of OCD, of autism,

of neurodivergent, truth. I think that, well, you know that, we both know that this is a problem.
Yeah, I mean,

the significantly higher rates of OCD, of autism, of neurodivergence in these groups,

and, you know, you're right, it's when you're just talking about the well-being of kids,

and you just want somebody who can't really advocate for themselves, who's still very much

at the mercy of their parents, or their school, or their caregivers, or the state,

they don't have agency, and you shouldn't expect them to have that same kind of agency

the can't really advocate for themselves, who's still very much at the mercy of their parents or their school or their caregivers or the state, they don't have agency. And you shouldn't expect them to have that same kind of agency over this stuff.
And I think it's one of the reasons why the discussion around trans youths becomes so fraught, because you can very quickly go from biological man who wants to be creepy in women's bathrooms to confused young girl who has really horrible mental health outcomes and you go well you need to be able to hold these two worlds in your mind at the same time you're saying that you're you're sort of being empathetic for women but you're not being empathetic for this young girl who is even more uh vulnerable than the women the adult women that you're supposed to be protecting so yeah it's it's a really interesting one. And I don't know, I think I kind of hope slash get the sense that the defocusing on the trans discussion, which it could go either way with four more years of Trump, but by actually focusing on it less might normalize it a little bit more.
And I feel like there was maybe a little bit of sort of, I don't know what you call it, like conceptual fatigue around people hearing these sort of stories all the time and maybe actually allowing them to take a backseat will help to sort of normalize the discussion and make it a little bit less fiery. I don't know.
And also too, it's frustrating to see the exception always being hailed as truth, right? Like these are, they are very sensational stories. They elicit a lot of reaction.
They get circulated a lot. They get stuck in your brain because of how salient they

are. And that then is weaponized against this group that's quite diverse.
And that's a problem because we're really causing harm to individuals who don't fit that minority that is hailed as being the boogeyman and it yeah, I feel for trans kids. I very much do.
I think that they're in a really tough spot and we really need to be thinking about this. These are young people.
So ultimately, society should be judged on how well they care for their most vulnerable. And I don't think our report card's very good in this area.
Yeah, I think that's a good point. So getting back to, I guess, the relationship between bullies and victims, how do bullies see their victims? There has to be some kind of moral disengagement, some sort of disrupted self-concept thing going on.
What's happening here? That's precisely the mechanism. They think that what they're doing is justified, that the person deserves their poor treatment.
And if they don't think it, they will convince themselves that they do. So they may have reacted impulsively and then justified it using moral disengagement principles, or they had already, you know, they've already said this person's less, they've already dehumanized the individual, and then that has given them license to treat them poorly.
Moral disengagement, I think, is the most important theory that explains how everyday people become bullies, how everyday people can treat others poorly and still sleep with a good conscience because really it's about making our egregious acts more palatable. What is the process of moral disengagement? So there's a variety of different cognitive strategies, but basically you're trying to make your shitty behavior seem justified.
Okay. So you may dehumanize the victim.
You may blame the victim. You may diffuse responsibility.
You may make advantageous comparisons. So like, listen, I just called her stupid.
Chris is the one who shoved her in the locker. Like, come on, not even comparable.
So those are like, we use these mechanisms, these cognitive mechanisms to live with ourselves for the crummy behavior that we did. The other thing that people who bully others tend to do is they tend to not pick up on the cues of distress.
But in fairness, part of it is because the power has corrupted them, so they just don't see it. Their brain actually works differently.
But the other part of it is that it's so embarrassing and humiliating to be bullied that a lot of times, and it's done so publicly, it really is typically a public event that kids then hide their distress. So the one cue that is needed for the public, the bystanders to come in and support me is what I'm suppressing.
And it's the one cue that maybe will get that bully to be morally engaged instead of disengaged is the thing that I'm suppressing. So it gets really ugly.
Yeah, I mean, the shame of being socially excluded, of being picked on, causes you to hide your sadness. And sadness is the very

thing that might cause this bystander effect to cease or for teacher to notice or for parents to realize or for the bully themselves to actually breach this threshold of reduced empathy. Is that something actually have you seen as you're tracking longitudinally? Do adult ex-bullies have less empathy?

I think in the moment, so there is some evidence that yes, but I think in the moment is when they have an empathetic gap, because that is when the moral disengagement is taking place. And that's when they feel fully justified.
So maybe when they look back at it with fresh eyes and none of the emotional valence attached to it, they're able to be a bit more objective. You pointed at one thing though, and I just wanted to say, because if I'm not plugging my studies, what's the point of even being here? That we did a study of 1,700 teachers and we asked them like, why would you intervene on behalf of a kid who's been bullied? Like, what are the cues? Like, what is it that's going to motivate you to do something? And they said distress.
Distress was the number one reason that they would intervene on behalf of kids who are bullied and teens who are bullied. And as I just said, they're suppressing distress.
So we're counting on adults to lead in this area, and they're not able to pick up the one cue that they need to to realize that something nefarious is going on. Yeah, it's so interesting.
So why does it happen so much in school? Is there something special about the setup of the school environment? Is it something about the teenage and puberty years that encourages bullying? What's going on? So first of all, bullying goes down as kids get older. So it is a lot more atypical in high school students than it is in elementary and middle school students.
It really has to do about, like there's so many different factors, but part of it is going to be social skills, where their brain is, their brain development, social development, moral development, cognitive development, all those things interacting. And there's also, like, they're vying for limited resources.
So there's a little bit of resource scarcity, which I mispronounced as scarcity twice the last time I was on your show. Didn't get bullied over that, Chris, so that's okay.
So there's also a bit of resource scarcity that's involved. So all of these things interact.
They're just not that socially skilled. In our intervention programs, we never talk about power.
We never talk about how power corrupts.

We never talk about how when you're afforded power, how it behooves you to be a good citizen to not abuse your power. So, you know, we're not expecting kids are going to have these lessons.
At the end of the day, we're animals, right? We're primates. This is what all primates do.
So we're socializing kids out of this.

They're not necessarily socialized into it some of it is maintained through socialization as we've spoken about like i've said this over and over again but i also think that we're coming to um the school with like these deficits to begin with yeah yeah you're having to fight against something that there's like a bullying entropy, which is always going to be there and you're permanently going to have to intervene and intervene. But I guess one of the things that at least to me seems quite hope inducing is that if you can intervene and create kind of a circuit breaker in the school, you can have this recursive culture thing work for you as opposed to against you.
You can go from the 70% school to the 15% school. And that seems quite reassuring.
So I remember I was having this when I had my chat with Tony and he said, there's something to do with the ossification of social hierarchies and the fact that you don't move out of them much for a very long time. What's the role that that's got to play with childhood bullying? Because there is an obvious question.
You get to university and it's not happening as much. And then you get to the workplace.
And even in the workplace, people are there for a while, not quite so long. So you think, well, is it immaturity? Is it some hypervigilance to social hierarchies that we have during puberty when we're trying to flee the nest and we're looking for who our partner might be and all the rest of it? What's the unmoving long-term exposure to the same social hierarchies and social people? What's the role that that's got to play? It's precisely what you said everything all of the above and you and i talked about it in the last time we spoke too is it really is like the hierarchies are pretty pronounced in elementary and high school um they're maintaining their power holding position um coercively but also using pro-social means so it it really has to do with that.
So, you know,

how do you maintain power? Well, you abuse those below you, you scare them, but then you also

charm them. So like, it's, it's complicated.
It's again, this blending of pro-social and

anti-social behavior, but, and then there's lack of autonomy. You spoke a little bit about that

before. And it really is that like, they don't have the same autonomy that you and I have.
You know, as friends in adulthood, you treat me poorly. I don't have to worry about seeing you again at school.
So we're done. I can move on.
Um, whereas in high school and elementary school, you are going to see them again.

Um, and you're going to have to manage that.

And there's just some kids that are going to see them again. And you're going to have to

manage that. And there's just some kids that are just more dominant than others, right? And they're imposing their will on others and not everybody's appreciating that, but not everybody has the same skill set to be able to impose their will on others.
There's little primates put together and same age bands. And then that same age band is then mixed with other age bands, and we wonder why it happens.
How does bullying impact victims? What does it do to them? It affects all aspects of their life. It affects everything in the immediate and in the long term.
It affects their mental health, their physical health, their academic achievement, their sense of self. It changes who they are fundamentally.
And not only that, it lasts a lifetime. So studies that have followed individuals 30, 50 years show that you can identify somebody who was bullied at 10 and they still have higher mental health rates at 50 and at 60.
It's a scar that never heals. Now, some, of course, will get by, but for the most part, you won't.
And the reason why you won't is that it's so salient. It's so disruptive.
It serves a function for you to never forget. So it's a social pain that's seared in your amygdala and you're never going to get past it.
You may be better. You may get better, for sure.
But you think about it, so like if you and I did a thought experiment right now, and I know you said you were bullied as a child, and you think about those moments, you're probably going to still have a visceral reaction. And that has an evolutionary significance.
That not belonging is so salient. It's how we got ahead as a human species.
It's how we collaborate that the neural alarm is massive when you don't. And so your brain is going to never forget it and neither will your body.
Are there some biological or genetic vulnerabilities to the effects of bullying? So when we look at, you and I talked about this last time about 5-HTT-LPR, the serotonin transporter gene. So, and obviously like genetics have advanced, epigenetics is kind of like the new thing.
They're doing full scans, full gene scans and the like. So there's a few people looking at the genetic vulnerability and there is a little bit that exists.
I can't tell you what specific genes are involved. I don't think that's the way to go.
It doesn't make sense to me. I think that was the way to go 20 years ago.
That's how we thought about it, but we don't think about it that way today. I do think that there are other things that like that obviously genes influence everything.
So the way a person sees the world is going to also be attached to how they interpret events. Some people are just more sensitive to cues of belonging and not belonging.
So they're high on rejection sensitivity. Some individuals are more anxious.
So if you think about it from a biological perspective, their limbic system is more active. Their prefrontal cortex, in a sense, gets hijacked by their limbic system, and it won't let them calm down.
It won't let them be rational. It won't let them see things as more nuanced.
So all of these individual differences affect how a person deals with bullying. I think it's really important.
And that's the bulk of my work is showing that this kind of heterogeneity because it's really important because some kids do better than others. And then the kids who do better are kind of seen as the poster child of like, this is what you should aspire to be.
Or the fact that you're not doing as well as Becky is because there's something wrong with you, Chris. If you just weren't so whiny, if you just weren't so squeaky, whatever you want to call it, then, you know, you could be okay.
Just suck it up and you'll be okay. So I'm really trying to chronicle this.
There's a lot of individual differences, but there really is a difference in how they see the world sometimes. But again, back to that temporal priority, is it the case that they're treated poorly and then it changes their worldview or do they have a worldview that's different that then causes them to be treated the peer group picks up on and then it moves forward our studies typically show symptoms driven effects meaning that kids who have poor mental health are picked on then that makes their mental health poor and if you've ever been around depressed people you can kind of see what's happening they seem aloof they don't don't seem interested.
They don't have a lot of motivation. They're not a lot of fun.
I'm not expecting them to be. I'm not saying that at all, but the peer group doesn't quite like that.
So then they pick up on those cues of being unwell and then pick on these kids and then make them even more unwell. So, and then there's going to be some kids who arrive at school ready to get at her, and then they're treated so poorly, and then they become unwell, and then their worldview changes.
I suppose the ruthless thing about that is that if you've got this predisposition to ruminating brain, to being a little bit more anxious. And then something happens to further activate that.
Like the very fear that you had about the world has sort of come to pass. And the raw materials that you had that were there ready to be activated, whether it's from an epigenetic, genetic predisposition standpoint, whether it's from a worldview perspective, whether it's from the patterns that you've learned from your parents at home or whatever.
Yeah, you kind of get a 2x, 3x multiplier bonus that pushes you further into this sort of dysfunctional perspective. I love how you said that.
And it's kind of like, okay, so if we think about it, so the biology has changed in some way, right? So we know, and I'll just pick on the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the HPA axis, which is our stress response system. I've done a lot of work on that.
We've published longitudinal studies. We know what's happening when it comes to HPA dysfunction and bullying.
So kids who are bullied tend to either overproduce or underproduce cortisol. And in time, they underproduce cortisol.
So when you're faced with an acute stressor, your HPA axis reacts, right? Like you ramp up a flight or fight reaction. I mean, obviously, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
But, you know, I'm just giving a basic mechanism. And then 20 minutes later, cortisol has spiked.
And so that's what we're measuring. We're measuring cortisol and how it's coming up.
And so your first time you're getting bullied, Chris, your cortisol is going to be high, high, high, high. And then as I follow you for the next three years, eventually, one thing I'm going to see is that your cortisol cortisol is going to be low and it's an adaptive process.
So there's a, you know, the body is set on for homeostasis. It's set to like keep you doing well, surviving, thriving as best as you can, even in difficult environments.
So bringing down your cortisol is a good way of doing it and

it could be brought down because your glucocorticoid receptor sites are now damaged from your brain being bathed in cortisol. There's other mechanisms that also explain this but the point of the matter is is now we have low cortisol and so your reaction to future stressors looks different now and not just the stressors of bullying the

stressors across your life and so now we have changed the way a person is interacting and behaving in their world is a function of being terrible to them and that bothers me because these behavioral and biological changes set them up for future risk. So they're more likely to be at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder.
So now, Chris, you've been bullied as a kid, long-standing bullying issue. Now your HBA has down-regulated itself as a protective factor, and you get into a horrific car accident when you're 22 years old, and you end up with PTSD that's debilitating, and it causes you significant harm for the next five years.
If you hadn't had that experience, PTSD probably wouldn't have been in your future. And that's the stuff that we're looking at and we're working on.
So risk is exacerbated in the future because of the relationships that our grade three children have or our 10th graders are having. So it really behooves us to step it up in terms of intervention and prevention, right? Yeah.
What about overcoming childhood bullying as an adult? Has there been much work done on how people after the fact can help? So I focused on not overcoming it. And I know that sounds horrible, but that's kind of like, because I'm trying to get people motivated to change this.
So I've really focused on the ones who aren't doing well. I don't think we have a good grasp of those who have done well, just like we don't really understand the true positive leaders.
So if I, you know, if you have young scientists that are listening and they're just starting their career, I want to know more about those who were bullied and seem to do okay. I wanted, and maybe they had a protective gene.
Maybe there was something about the way, like maybe the other protective, it might not even have been biological protective mechanism. It could have been their family was so amazing.
You know, like there's going to be so many things in the, but that would be great because historically we haven't focused on positive side of things. We've really focused on deficits and what's negative.
So I want to know that. I think, you know, even the people that have got the deficits in later life would be interested in knowing, okay, this thing happened to me and maybe I'm carrying it with me to varying degrees.
How can I learn to overcome or how can I learn to move past that, maybe reprogram some of that worldview that you said? And I think that comes down to therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy would be really good.

Can I mention another thing that kind of makes me, so like in my book, I really mentioned

that like at the end of the day, we don't know what the long-term implications are.

Like, well, we have an idea that it's not going to be good.

We don't know if this can be fixed, if we can change this, how bullying gets under the

skin to confer a risk.

You know, I imagine we can because

we're quite plastic. There's a lot of plasticity.
One of the things that we're doing is we're trying to reduce bullying in earnest. And what studies are showing, and we just showed it, we still need to publish it, but it's just replicating what's been shown across Europe.
There's this healthy context paradox where if you reduce bullying, the few kids left in the school who are bullied have worse mental outcomes. So in a sense, we've now made some kids even more vulnerable by reducing bullying.
So what do you think that's about? Because I know you're a smart guy and you usually have the answer. Look, if I was to totally bro science this and pull it out of my ass, I would guess that what you're able to do is lower the threshold or increase the threshold basically for what high status bullies think is acceptable behavior or who they think that they should be able to go after.
But the problem being that they still need to maintain power and control in one form or another, which means that a smaller number of lower-status victims are bullied more intensely because you're spreading the same or a similar amount of bullying across fewer victims. so I think there's going to be a little bit of that.
And that part wasn't, hasn't, to my knowledge, hasn't been really looked at, but I love your answer. So I will tell you the answer to that because we have the data and I'll be able to know that.
I think it comes back to also attributions. If there's a lot of us being picked on, the attribution is, these guys are just jerks.
It's not about me because I'm not the only one. But if I'm the only one or there's only a few of us, there's something fundamentally wrong with us.
That is, I think, the attribution error that occurs. So we're trying our best to reduce bullying.
And in doing doing so we're causing harm to a certain segment of the population. So now I'm going to school after school tomorrow I'm presenting to 170 principals in Quebec but I do this all the time and I present the data and I say here are the rates in your school.
We've done a great job at reducing bullying in your school. Can we get your school counselors to now recognize that you have even, you have kids that are even more vulnerable than they were before? Isn't that a bit messed up? It's ruthless.
It's, I mean, I don't know what the, I don't know what the solution to that is because you're the suffering of the few, saving the suffering of the many, but then it's more on those few. So if you end up with worse mental health outcomes.
I know. It feels a little bit like.
It's not what you would ever have expected, right? You would just think like, in a sense, we're doing God's work

by reducing bullying. And yet, the precious few who are left behind are doing worse than we've ever seen.
What do you say to people who push back and say, well, bullying is good for developing resilience? Or, you know, I was bullied as a kid, and it made me a stronger person, or it prevents you from being too weak? I hate that. And I get asked that all the time.
It triggers me. So I always think like, well,

okay, so you think you've done well, but let's just say I do a lot of stuff in sports because

I'm a high performance soccer coach. I coach Team Ontario for the U17 girls and our Canada Games

team. But in any event, the reason I mentioned that, because it's a really easy way to explain

Thank you. coach.
I coach Team Ontario for the U17 girls and our Canada Games team. But in any event, the reason I mentioned that because it's a really easy way to explain this.
So you are now an Olympian, Chris, right? You've won two Olympic gold medals in swimming. And you say, you know, the reason I'm an Olympian is because I was bullied.
It made me stronger, made me more resilient. And I always say, what if you were supposed to win 15 medals? So you don't know what your top performance is.
You don't know where you're supposed to be and how far you can excel. You think that it didn't do anything to you, but there's going to be a biological component that definitely did that.
Now, there are always exceptions to the rules.

So I would be open-minded to maybe some people do better as a consequence of that.

I'm struck by how often people don't want to change their experience. If they could go back, they don't want to change their experience

because they think it's what made them who they are today.

But you could never know what your life would look like without that because you've experienced it and it can't be erased. Well, it's the difference between saying, I achieved this because of that and I achieved this in spite of that.
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. Fascinating.
I mean, look, in many ways, it's cope. It's a way for an adult who went through a tough thing as a kid to look back and say well this wasn't so bad i don't need to hold on to the grudges because without that i wouldn't be who i am as opposed to without that i would be more of who i am and also too it's about making meaning from really terrible circumstances like we all want to be able to explain why that terrible thing happened to us and make sense of it.
So it makes sense to me. The people that I work with, so I'm a professor of counseling psychology.
I supervise counseling psychologists of the future. The clients that they are managing, which are numerous, more than I would be able to do as a single clinician, these individuals are not doing well.
My students are overwhelmingly seeing individuals who had poor interpersonal relationships, either with peers or with a caregiver. A lot of people are not forgetting these experiences.
How effective are most interventions at the moment? Give me the world of interventions. 20% max.
Not at all. What does 20% mean? 20% reduction in bullying is what we're doing at our best.
School-wide? And we're doing it in younger kids and not in high school. It becomes entrenched as it gets it gets so it goes down but the few victims that are left are in a sense lifetime victims so it becomes entrenched we're not doing a good job at all when we use a whole school approach we're better when we have multiple components we're better when we involved younger kids we're better I think that that group I told you that's not moving are the really high status popular kids who are creating the norms for your school so really problematic we can't we can't figure this out quick enough and I think it's because we have focused in a way I think we have to bring it back and like in a sense like strip it down to its essence and its essence is I think this is part of the human condition and if you do that then I think your interventions are going to look a bit different and so I came out of a lab as a postdoc Richard Trombley is like the highest cited Canadian psychologist, maybe one of the highest cited psychologists in the world.
I was this postdoc student and he taught me about how kids are socialized out of aggression. They're not socialized into it.
Of course, there's going to be some socialization component to it for sure. You know, we're not saying that never exists.
But the idea that most people hold is that kids are aggressive because they've been modeled, they've been influenced by aggressive models, right? Role models. But the research that I did with Richard and has been replicated worldwide and is longstanding, like we follow kids from birth all the way long into adulthood, is that most kids get socialized out of this.
Now, I know it seems like I'm not being consistent because I really, really emphasized a lot about how popular bullies socialize the group, but they came in probably with this need for dominance. They came in with a Machiavellian worldview.
They came in with the tools that were needed in order to be effective in what they're doing. And so if our intervention programs focused a little bit more on that, maybe we'd be more successful.
Does that make sense?

It does. What are the current most commonly used anti-bullying interventions? So there's one that's pretty popular.
It's called the Kiva program. It comes out of Norway.
Sorry, not Norway, Finland. and Christina Salmovalli is the one who put this together and it has quite a bit of success

in Finland, but Finland's a small country. It's rollout in a bigger place like the UK or Canada or the United States may not be, is not as, is not, it's not as successful in these contexts, what the preliminary data are suggesting.
There's also the Olvaeus anti-bullying program. So Dan Olvaeus, we spoke about the Scandinavian who did most of his studies in Norway.
His early efforts had a 50% reduction in bullying, but they implicated every aspect of society. So everywhere you turn, you had the same lesson.
So quite successful there. Not as successful in North America or in the UK.
What's the principles behind it? The principles behind it. So Olveus is about creating awareness and involvement.
And the Kiva component is really about engaging the bystanders, which is the way to go. So if you, because the source, you know, so bullying tends to happen in public.
Bullying tends to be used in order to achieve and maintain power. And so it's the peer group that's affording you that power.
They're the ones who are either going to accept what you're doing or they're going to reject what you're doing. So if you could get the peer group to reject what popular bullies are doing or even the Nelson type bullies are doing, then you'd be in a better position of reducing it.
Because you've removed the incentive to do it. Exactly.
Interesting. Okay.
So how much or how effective is it to make bullies realize how much of an impact that they're having you know you've given all this compelling evidence about what it's going to do in later life and what it does to them at the time and their educational outcomes and they're going to gain weight and they're going to be blah blah blah you know as adults this is the entire way that campaigns for malaria nets and stuff like that are done, right? Here is a story of what your effort could have as a positive or a negative impact. How effective is it to say to bullies, look at all of the downstream implications of doing this? This is what, is that not an option? So there is, so there's a few programs that are um designed to increase uh moral engagement and so there are interventions bullying interventions that specifically target moral disengagement and moral engagement and they are they're they're not nothing is like very efficacious but you know they're doing something there something.
There's a bit of a reduction. So I think that that should be applauded and replicated.
The issue is that schools invest in this when they have a bullying problem. And then, but for the most part, they're not consistent in their investment.
So whatever we're going to do, we're going to have to do it early and then maintain it over time.

Social emotional learning is really efficacious at just reducing aggression, which is part of bullying.

But there's a huge anti-social emotional learning movement in the United States.

I don't know if you know about that.

No.

Because you can't socialize kids in schools. That's the purview of the parents.
Like, how dare you even try, you know, get that woke BS out of our schools, that sort of thing. And yet, the evidence is pretty strong when it comes to social emotional learning.
So there's a bit of a backlash against it.

But I guess it depends what direction sustaining our efforts. Yeah, it depends what direction the social and emotional learning is going toward, whether it's going toward that there's no genders or the biological sex.
Well, that's what they think it is, but it's not. So, you know, I saw this last year.
There was a pivot in UK schools

away from criticizing toxic masculinity

and toward promoting positive masculinity.

Now, the campaigns were exactly the same.

It was very much derogating lots of typical behavior

that you would see from boys and young men

and done in the classic frame

that everybody that isn't insane hates. But this is one of those times where maybe a rebrand could be useful.
And you might be able to, you know, it's cool. It's called social emotional learning.
Not anymore. Now it's called, now it's called like holistic interaction treatment or, you know, behavioral success or something like that.
And yeah, this is one of the times where a rebrand might be a good idea. Yeah, we're gonna have to do something.
I mean, again, this derails individuals' potential, not all. I mean, I don't want your listeners to have been bullied and worried about what this is gonna mean for their memory and their health and all of those things in the future.
I mean, that's not, it's not a fait accompli. There's a lot of heterogeneity, as I keep saying, and I think hope is really important.
One of the things I think is the saddest part, so beyond the fact that we have some few remaining kids who are very vulnerable, is that we could do a pretty good job at getting people to not actively bully others, but we can't get kids to include kids. And we started off talking about the need to belong, right? And how we didn't talk, we didn't use these words per se, but it's a fundamental human motivator.
So at the end of the day, I can maybe get kids to not call you stupid or shove you in the locker or whatever it is, right? But I can't get them to include you. I can't get them to invite you to their birthday.
I can't get them to sit beside you at lunch. And so we still have isolated victims who are not actively victimized.
And that breaks my heart.

Yeah, I suppose it's the difference between getting somebody from sick to well and well to fit, that you can stop them from being. And you're right, that it's not even that, it's that we don't have a need to not be bullied, we have a need to be included.
Exactly. It's not avoiding exclusion it's uh creating inclusion.
You mentioned there about memory. What's the impact of bullying on memory, childhood memory, and then later life? So I think we might have been the first study to show this, but we did a study that was published in 2011 in Brain and Cognition, followed kids' perspective for three years.
We looked at how memory was affected as a consequence of being bullied vis-a-vis cortisol, because too much cortisol is terrible for your brain, for your memory. And so we looked specifically at areas of the brain that are high in glucocorticoid receptor sites, so the hippocampus of the prefrontal cortex.
And we found that kids who were bullied increased their cortisol. That in turn affected their memory in the areas that we would expect it to be.
So that means it affects their memory. That means they have fewer recall.
Their verbal memory is not as good. Episodic memory can be still intact, but there is some issues also with episodic memory.
Yeah, so it's just all of these things. We tend to think about kids not doing well at school as a function of them being bullied, so they disengage, and then that influences their poor academic outcomes.
But we argued in this paper, and it's been replicated, that kids who are bullied also legitimately have poorer memory as a consequence of that poor treatment. Yeah, neurobiology is stepping in to put a cap on your capacity.
And again, this is the you succeeded because versus you succeeded in spite. Yeah.
Yeah, not nice. What about, I read something to do with increased supervision, restricting bullying, and something to do with spatial design, spatial planning, the way that schools and physical environments are put together.
So this is my passion is telling schools that if they want to invest in anti-bullying efforts, they should invest in supervision because it's one of the best ways of reducing bullying. It's not a program.
It's just getting teachers out of the classroom and managing what's going on on the playground and in the hallways and the like. So during the pandemic, we did a study where we did a a random design and keep in mind, kids were still in school.
So we're not saying, of course, bullying should go down if they're not in school. They're not face-to-face, they're not interacting as much.
But anyhow, so when they were still in school, we did this, we randomized kids into, we looked at their bullying rates before the pandemic and during the pandemic, and we found a 50% reduction in bullying. I've never seen that reduction in my lifetime.
So you're saying that another pandemic would be great. Yeah, exactly.
No. Run it back.

Yeah.

So this reduction came vis-a-vis increased supervision, which is something I've always been arguing for because we did a paper, we published a paper in 2010 called Places to Avoid, where we just chronicled all the places in the school where kids get bullied. And guess where they get bullied, Chris? Where there's no school, where there's no supervision.
So they get bullied on the playground and the hallways and the stairwell, you name it, right? So anyhow, so this 50% reduction had to do with, they were so motivated to make sure kids had their masks on, that they were washing their hands, like they fully engaged in this virus mitigation strategies or these virus mitigation strategies that they inadvertently reduce bullying by 50%. So how about supervised kids? We used to have dinner ladies and, you know, they weren't teachers, but they were just adults.
They were adults that were on the playground. You know, look, I don't mean to badmouth teachers.
A lot of them, I was dating a teacher for a long time and she would get into school at, you know, some ungodly hour and she'd be there for two hours before the kids got in and then work through. And it's like, you've got this one 50-minute block to have some food and reset before you go again in the afternoon.
I'm aware teachers get to leave at 3.30 p.m. sometimes, but also it is the one break that they get during the day.
All of that being said, paying somebody who is maybe a working mom for a couple of hours to help with a bit of supervision seems like a relatively low cost to improve the well-being of the kids in the school. Exactly.
The issue is the unions are so strong. Teachers unions are so strong.
So I'm a huge fan of teachers as well. They have very strong unions, good for them.

You know, nobody's going to fault them for advocating for themselves. But the unions just prohibit a lot of what we want to try and do.
They just don't allow it. So I'll give you

an example. In Ontario, high school teachers do not need to go into the hallways during school

classroom transitions. That's in their collective agreement.
Where does bullying take place in high school? In the hallways during classroom transitions. So, I mean, you need to get them out of the class, greeting them at the door, just those little things.
There was this study, and I may have got this wrong, but I don't think I do. I remember this study from years ago where they were looking at why this particular school had low bullying rates.
And it turns out that across the street, so it's an elementary school, across the street was a senior complex and there was a bench and they had the little old ladies sitting on the bench. And so the kids in the playground thought they were being spied on by the little old ladies.
And those ladies were never going to get across the street in time to intervene in any capacity. But just that was enough to reduce bullying rates.
Wow. Make grandmothers great again.
That's what I see. I love it.
There you go. What about, so is that increased supervision, the spatial planning intervention, is that the same thing? That would go hand in hand.
So thinking about like, you know, areas that if you can't get supervision in, like we don't want scary spaces in a school, right?

Kids are afraid of the bathrooms in schools because you can't get security cameras in there, obviously.

You have to keep the door on them.

Everybody has biological needs.

So, yeah.

So think that.

Think when designing schools, thinking about increasing visibility. School trips and stuff like that, back of the bus.
Pardon me? School trips, back of the bus. You know it.
Staying overnight, doing camping, whatever it might be. So I guess one thing that I'm kind of interested in, we skirted around some behavioral genetics-y type stuff today, you know, interaction of nature and nurture of environment and genes.
What about parents who were bullied then trying to parent their kids and, you know, this sort of hyper-awareness, this maybe this fixation on their experience as a child and then the inability to regulate what their future child is going through? So studies show that there's a genetic component. So parents who were bullied tend to have, their kids have a higher likelihood of being bullied.
So beyond the genetic influence, there's also an environmental influence. I think a lot of it has to do with attributions.
So let's just say something's ambiguous and you tell me about it. And I put my lens of how I was treated as a kid and influence your perception of an ambiguous situation.
Chris, they're being mean to you. You just don't realize it.
They're bullying you, right? And yet it it's ambiguous so it can go left or it could go right that's part of the mechanism of what's also going on so in a sense parents are creating a threat sensitivity in their child based on their experiences we do that across all aspects of life right like we're about finding patterns, making inferences, that sort of thing. We tend to be our child's prefrontal cortex, like we're, you know, their surrogate prefrontal cortex.
I mean, that's what parenting is. The problem is, is in ambiguous situations, you don't want to have a hostile attribution.
So you're basically making the child see threat where there may not be any. And then when you see threat, you behave differently, right? So then maybe I've guarded myself.
So now I'm seen as being aloof or arrogant. And then that influences an interaction.
I mean, social interactions are pretty complicated. There's a lot of little things in the equation.
So that's just one example of how it can happen. what about the differences between childhood bullying and workplace bullying have you ever

looked into what happens people get out they're now 25 they're no longer 15 and

if there's anything that's interesting or place bullying have you ever looked into what happens people get out they're now 25 they're no

longer 15 and if there's anything that's interesting or illuminating so the interesting thing is there's a lot of poly victimization so if you're bullied in childhood you're bullied in the workplace you're so we still we showed a study um where you see that across all um areas So intimate partner violence, dating violence, that sort of thing, workplace, peer relationships in adulthood. So it kind of, there's some continuity.
But at the end of the day, we're using self-reports. So I'm not saying that these are not people who are, like that their perception is not true true but there could be a bias in their perception and you know again if you're looking for evidence that you're not well liked if you're looking for evidence that people are going to treat you poorly you're going to find the evidence and so I think some of that is happening I also think that there's probably some of the vulnerabilities that made somebody that led to their victimization not not blaming victims at all like never ever would I suggest that you were treated poorly because of something that you did like you should be spared from oppression and humiliation you know full stop but there's some cues that are being picked up by others that may still be there, that may still be present in adulthood.
Well, you've seen from Bad Men by David that study where criminals or sexual assaults were shown, maybe it was silhouettes of women walking, or maybe it was

videos of women walking, and they were asked who they would pick. And they converged a lot of the

time on the same sort of women. So it's exactly the same.
You're not laying this at the feet and

say, oh, it's because of the way that you walk. But there is some sort of signal which is given

off, which portrays, bestows, exposes a vulnerability of some kind that a cohort of people may pick up on and then try and take advantage of. And the single is hard because it reeks of victim blaming, right? And yet it's not what the intention is.
in the ideal world. So a lot of times what we do when kids are really bullied,

we... blaming, right? And yet it's not what the intention is.
In the ideal world, like, so a lot of times what we do when kids are really bullied, we change them schools. In the past, they were put into programs, social skills training programs.
So it was all about the deficits of the victim instead of thinking about their rights and how they should be allowed to exist in this world being the way they are. That really the onus should be on changing the perpetrator's behavior.
And so I just need, I think we need to be cautious because, you know, this is a sensitive area. We don't want people to ever think that whatever they did, they deserve their poor treatment.
But at the same time, there is something that some really terrible people are picking up on. And then it could be a lack of confidence.
It could just be like, as I said, there's, when I talked about if you were squeaky, you know, you probably would be left alone. But if you're not, you're going to be picked on again.
We do know that there's victim shopping, that that exists,

that kids do that. And there's probably- Oh, they try it out on a bunch of different-

You try it out on a bunch of different victims and you wait and see what the reaction is.

Oh, that's so interesting. Exactly.
And so that's not been studied in adults, but I imagine

that it probably will be like that.

That will exist, that there is going to be victim shopping.

Yeah. Very interesting.
Tracy, you're awesome.

No, you're awesome.

No, you're awesome.

Yeah. Well, be careful what you wish for because you've got a book coming out soon.

Yeah.

In the interim between now and is it still called Mean Girls?

It's not called Mean Girls because it's women. It's called Mean.
Between now and when that comes out, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing? You seem to be publishing an awful lot of studies. Publishing for sure.
I'm still on X. I'm still hanging on by a thread on X.
Anyhow, they can find me there. I'm on LinkedIn.
They can find me Google Scholar, of course, that sort of thing. And then they can also find me on your podcast next year.
Let's go. We're doing it again.
We're ready to run it back. You're great.
You're great. I adore speaking to you.
And I can't wait to see the new book and go through it. And everyone here will be there to listen as well.

And thanks for putting attention on this.

Like a lot of people are hurt.

So I think that you have a huge microphone

and people are going to appreciate hearing what works,

what doesn't work, and my mispronunciations.

They're going to appreciate that too.

And they won't put it in the comments.

I can't imagine that.

They've never put it.

No one's ever commented anything mean on the internet.

So you're going to get it.

No, no, it's never existed.

All right, until next time.

Thank you. They're going to appreciate that too.
And they won't put it in the comments. I can't imagine that.
They've never put it. No one's ever commented anything mean on the internet.

So no, no, it's never existed.

All right.

Until next time.

Thank you, Tracy.