At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Bullying as Evolutionary Strategy: Power, Sex, Status, and Solutions
- Tony Volk explains bullying through an evolutionary psychology lens, arguing it’s often a strategic behavior that brings bullies status, resources, and even greater reproductive success, rather than a symptom of damage or low self-esteem.
- He distinguishes bullying from general aggression by its deliberate harm, goal-directedness, and power imbalance, and shows how bullies carefully select vulnerable victims to signal their own formidability to an audience.
- Key drivers include the personality trait of low honesty–humility, social environments that reward ruthless competition, and structural setups like age-graded schools and social media that amplify bullying’s reach and concealment.
- Volk critiques many common interventions, outlines why some approaches backfire, and highlights evidence-based strategies for parents, schools, and peers to reduce bullying and buffer its long-term psychological and biological harms.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasBullying is strategic, not random cruelty or a ‘cry for help’.
Volk defines bullying as deliberate aggression against weaker individuals in a power-imbalanced relationship, often used to gain status, resources, and a reputation for being dangerous to challenge rather than stemming from poor self-esteem or social deficits.
Low honesty–humility is the strongest personality predictor of bullying.
Bullies tend to believe they deserve more than others and are willing to exploit people to get it; this trait is highly heritable and strongly overlaps with the ‘dark core’ behind psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.
Bullies choose victims tactically and usually perform in front of an audience.
They target peers who are weak but not so weak that the signal is meaningless—isolated, smaller, younger, or socially awkward individuals—because public bullying efficiently advertises their formidability to other high-status peers.
Bullying can pay off in popularity, sex, and even offspring.
Longitudinal and cross-cultural data show that adolescent bullies become more popular, have more sexual partners, initiate sex earlier, and later end up with more children on average, making bullying evolutionarily ‘successful’ despite its moral costs.
Victimization has deep, long-term health and mental health consequences.
Severe, chronic bullying is linked to decades-long changes in immune function, gene expression, and elevated risks of depression, anxiety, and suicidality, making it far more than a character-building rite of passage.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesBullies are behaving like selfish assholes. And like all other selfish assholes, they’re ruining it for everybody.
— Tony Volk
Bullying is not a rite of passage. If you have severe bullying, it affects your immune response and the expression of your genes for decades.
— Tony Volk
The biggest predictor we find across cultures is low honesty–humility… being bad is basically the same thing as being low in honesty–humility.
— Tony Volk
Why is number two punching number 17? Number 17 isn’t a threat. What number two is doing is showing number one and number three what they’re capable of doing.
— Tony Volk
It’s very rare that if they picked on somebody who could potentially punch their way out, they would probably bully them in a way that if they did that, it would be really bad.
— Tony Volk
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