EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,088 words- 0:00 – 1:55
Intro
- TVTony Volk
There's far too many people who think that bullying is a rite of passage. If you have severe bullying, other researchers have shown that it affects your immune response for decades. It affects the expression of your genes for decades. It's not a minor thing. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
Why did you get interested in studying bullying?
- TVTony Volk
It actually was, uh, kinda by accident. Uh, Wendy Craig at Queen's University, uh, had a whole pile of data and she needed a PhD student to work on it. Um, I was friends with her and I said, "Sure. Uh, I'll look at it." So, I ended up looking at it. And then over time, as I was a professor, more and more students wanted to do research on bullying. And it eventually became my main focus.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think is unique or novel about the approach that you've taken to looking at bullying?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, the biggest thing is that our group really asks why, um, bullying happens. Seeing as it's ubiquitous over time, uh, across cultural, um, and really hard to prevent, it- it seems like either development has gone wrong for so many people or maybe there's something in it for the bullies.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Okay. So how do you define bullying? What is it?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, another great question. Um, we define bullying as a deliberate, uh, aggressive attempt against a weaker individual that causes harm. Uh, so it's gotta be goal-directed. It's got to, uh, be something that causes harm. So it can't be a meaningless thing. And most importantly, it has to happen in the context where the victim has a hard time defending themselves. That's the power imbalance.
- CWChris Williamson
So, bullying in that regard can't happen to somebody who is of equal status or higher status than you?
- TVTony Volk
Exactly. That would be general aggression, but that wouldn't be bullying.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting. Okay.
- 1:55 – 4:53
Why Bullying Evolved
- CWChris Williamson
So what's the evolutionary hypothesis behind bullying? What have you come to believe about it?
- TVTony Volk
So, bullying, uh, at first seems a little counterintuitive from, um, an evolutionary perspective, in that what you often find is that in nature there's dominance hierarchies. So bullying is often confused with the alpha male, beta male, et cetera, but it's really unusual in dominance hierarchies for number two to pick on number 17 in the hierarchy. That's the whole point of a dominance hierarchy. Um, they shouldn't be fighting. So we think bullying has a few different functions. Um, some of them depend on that hierarchy and some don't. The ones that don't are pretty easy to explain. You're bullying somebody to get something that you want. So you want their resources, um, you want the best spot in the play yard, you want that scholarship that they're going for that you're interested in. But when it comes to bullying for, uh, dominance, we actually don't think that it's a direct competition between competitors, um. Instead what bullying is, it's a way of signaling how dangerous you are to compete with. So why is number two punching number 17? Number 17 isn't a threat. Number 17 doesn't have things that they need socially. But what number two is doing is showing number one and number three what they're capable of doing. Um, and they're picking a target that's a reasonable threat. So if you were a, a 10-year-old and you were beating up a four-year-old, that's not really impressive. Right? If you're in grade 12 and you're picking on a grade nine, that's not really gonna intimidate the other people. But on the other hand, if you're a twel- a grade 12, or a 12-year-old, uh, picking on a peer, then that's showing your peers what you're willing and capable of doing to other peers. And it seems to be quite effective.
- CWChris Williamson
Does that mean that bullying is increased when there is an audience of some kind?
- TVTony Volk
That's a really great question. Um, a lot of bullying that we've observed happens with an audience, over 80% of bullying that we've observed. Uh, again, colleague Wendy Craig, uh, and Deb Peppley did a beautiful study, kinda like a BBC documentary, where they put microphones on kids, sent them into the playground, and then filmed them from a distance. Um, and they saw that 85% of the time when somebody was bullying somebody else, they were, uh, surrounded by peers. Now on-
- CWChris Williamson
That would-
- TVTony Volk
... the course-
- CWChris Williamson
That would explain this sort of almost performative aspect of it. It's a, a very heavy signal.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. Uh, uh, we, we can talk about private bullying. So you, you could bully your, uh, sexual partner into things that you might not want, uh, public. But as far as the majority of bullying that you see, uh, on the playground especially, and in schools, as well as in a lot of workplaces, is done performatively to show other people what you're capable of and that they should not mess with you.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting. What
- 4:53 – 12:54
The Dynamic Between Bully & Victim
- CWChris Williamson
are the most common, uh, setups or dynamics between a bully and a victim?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. W- we, for a long time, thought that the problem was one of a relationship, that the bully and the victim didn't get along, and if we could somehow sit down the lamb with the lion, then things would be better. But recent research has shown a few really interesting things that go against the idea that there's this perfect setup, um, or, or mismatch between individuals. Number one is that interventions that sit the lamb down with the lion, um, are iatrogenic, which means they make things worse. Um, so what happens is for the next few weeks, the bullying goes down, and then the bullying goes to higher than it was beforehand, which sort of makes sense. You put two, the bully with the victim in front of adults and, okay, the bully plays nice for two weeks. And then as soon as the adults are done looking, they get their revenge. The other thing, um, that some Dutch researchers have done is shown that bullies cycle through victims. They don't just pick one victim. And they cycle through one victim after another. And the more that they do that, the higher their reputation increases.... uh, the greater their popularity and their dominance. So it really seems like it's a signal. Beyond that, um, victims tend to, uh, have weaker levels of power, so they're less, uh, socially connected. They're more likely to have mental health issues to begin with that bullying exacerbates. Um, and then bullies are very good at finding victims that they could target. So if you have a bully who's physically strong, they'll pick on a physically weak individual. Somebody who's socially strong will pick on a socially isolated individual. Somebody who's, uh, mentally and socially quick will p- pick on somebody who doesn't have strong mental or social skills. So the bullies are very flexible in choosing the right target for them.
- CWChris Williamson
What else predicts a bully victim? You've mentioned what seems to be social isolation, lack of a support network. I'm going to imagine that the fewer friends you have, the more likely you are to be bullied?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, physical size, uh, not surprisingly. Um, younger age, uh, if you're younger within a grade or younger overall. Um, and then now we're currently looking at adolescents with all the data in, but I suspect we're gonna find that, um, being isolated from the dating game is also an important, uh, factor. Now, for aggression, you tend to find that being involved in a dating game makes you more likely to be targeted by aggression. But that's by, uh, equal level peers.
- CWChris Williamson
Yup, yup, yup.
- TVTony Volk
So being picked on by stronger people is usually, again, these kids who are sending the right cost benefit signal. So somebody who's strong enough that the signal has meaning, but somebody who's weak enough that the bully isn't going to be, uh, successfully retaliated against. And bullies will look at your social network and say, "Okay, well those people who the victim is connected with, I don't care about their opinions. They're a safe target. Oh, but that kid over there, he's friends with a girl who I like, so they're off limits." So it's very strategic.
- CWChris Williamson
It's interesting that there's almost like this Goldilocks zone where below a particular threshold of weakness or vulnerability, uh, the- there is no point in the bully doing it because what are you signaling? You can obviously beat up... Now imagine that you would maybe verbally take the piss because I guess that that shows still that you're quick comparatively, but certainly doing something physical wouldn't make sense. I guess this must raise some questions for kids being skipped ahead a year or two in school because what you're doing is immediately putting somebody who is physically, mentally, socially less adept in with a pool of people that are more likely to be bullies.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. That, that's a good example of a situation that could very easily backfire, um, because it's very... And bullies are very skilled at saying, "Oh, we're just taking the piss out of this guy. We're just having fun. We're teasing, goofing around." Um, and they're, especially as kids get older, they do less physical bullying. Boys do more physical bullying than girls. It's no surprise. They do more physical aggression of all kinds. But as kids get older, you know, if you have a couple of eight-year-olds punching another kid, it's not that bad, uh, in terms of the physical damage. But if you have a couple of 18-year-olds wailing away on somebody, you know, bones are broken-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- TVTony Volk
... teeth are chipped. So they shift to these, uh, verbal and social forms of bullying that are in a sense less risky for the bully, but they're also much harder to detect and prevent.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. That-
- TVTony Volk
A lot easier to deny.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. So what sort of people bully? What are the typical characteristics of someone that is a bully?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. Again, one of the things that, you know, we went into this was the assumption that these aren't broken kids. Um, and the first thing that steered me in this direction was I was working on that original data set, 10,000 kids, uh, from the World Health Organization, they look at kids' school health, and 10,000 kids in Canada, and I noticed that bullies, yes, were more likely to smoke, more likely to, uh, drink alcohol, but they had better mental health than average, which didn't fit with the picture that these are kids who have poor self-esteem, uh, who have poor social skills. And in fact, research has shown that they don't have deficits in, uh, mental health. They don't have deficits in social skills. They don't have deficits in things like theory of mind, understanding other people's thoughts and ideas. Um, they don't even necessarily have deficits in empathy and in anger. What they have is low levels of a trait that, uh, we call honesty humility. So honesty humility is part of the HEXACO, uh, it's a six factor personality scale, a really new dynamic personality scale that really captures antisocial behavior with this trait. And essentially honesty humility, I, I like it because it sounds innocuous, right? What does that have to do with anything? But really if you take the belief that you're better than other people, you deserve more than other people, and you're willing to act on that belief, then that sets you up for saying, "Number 17, sorry, this is the way the world works. It's dog eat dog. Nothing personal, but I'm better than you and I'm gonna show people it. And if you weren't such a crappy kid, or stupid, slow, ugly, you know, no friends, then this wouldn't be happening to you." So that's really the biggest predictor that we find across cultures. Um, we've seen it now in Chinese data, uh, in Dutch data, in, uh, Canadian and North American data that this honesty humility is really what's driving, uh, individuals to engage in that behavior, along with having power. So another really interesting study from the Netherlands showed that, uh, not only do bullies gain in popularity...... uh, when they engage in bullying. But kids who become more popular, power corrupts them, and they become more likely to be bullies themselves.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So there are a lot of incentives here for a bully to bully. Aside from, uh, presuming that you have low honesty humility, which I'm going to guess would be associated with things like guilt, shame, regret for social infractions and treating somebody miserably. If you're not feeling the pain from that, if you're benefiting by having more social prowess, uh, by rising up through your own dominance hierarchy, more prestige, uh, greater social, uh, circles. Also, didn't you
- 12:54 – 16:58
Why Bullies End Up With More Sexual Partners
- CWChris Williamson
do something that looked at, uh, more access to sexual partners? They have sex s- sooner or more regularly or something?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, that's one of the main benefits from an evolutionary perspective. Uh, all this other stuff is nice but if you don't translate it into passing on your genes, it doesn't matter. So we did a study, um, that kind of surprised us. It hit number seven on Reddit when it came out, that bullies have more sex, um, than non-bullies. And that accounted for both, uh, early adolescence and in later adolescence, um, both boys and girls. So it wasn't a case that, uh, it was just, you know, dominant boys monopolizing the gene pool.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- TVTony Volk
But, um, both dominant boys and dominant girls use bullying to get sex. And then recently, uh, a team from Europe, again, Netherlands and, uh, some folks from the UK as well, looked at, uh... I'm trying to think of how ... I think it was almost 50 years now, at least 40 years ago, but, uh, data on bullies from the late '70s. And they showed that these bullies actually have more kids. Um, and we've done this follow-up study, uh, looking at 30-year-olds, uh, and 30-year-olds who were bullies in, uh, high school have more kids.
- CWChris Williamson
That's very interesting. I'm trying to work out what direction this arrow of causation goes. Uh, for instance, you could just have people who are more likely to bully are more tapped in socially, therefore their socio-sexuality would be higher. It's not necessarily that by bullying, you gain more access to mates, which means that you then get more sex, which means that you then have more kids. Uh, because I don't think that that would explain particularly well why girls would get more access. Maybe some intra-sexual competition stuff here that you've derogated some female rivals and you rise up. But I don't know, man. Like, even when I was a, a young full of magic and RuneScape 15-year-old, I don't think I thought the girls that bullied were, uh, like more hot or charming. I can see it in reverse. Everybody could understand why the, you know, the dominant guy that wears the leather jacket with cutoff sleeves and stands with one foot up against a wall smoking a cigarette, why he might be highly prized by the women, but I, I don't think that it would work in reverse. So yeah, I wonder whether socio-sexuality just kind of folds into this more, the most socially adept, the most socially tuned in, they're playing that dominance and that status full game. And that means that downstream from that, they're also playing the flirting game and the dating game and the having kids game.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. No, that's exactly right. I, I think it's a bi-directional pathway. Um, and in the case of girls, we know that kids who are victimized, uh, are less likely to have sex and less likely to date. Um, so bullying is an effective way of knocking out some competitors, um, and intimidating others. Now if you see the movie Mean Girls, it's often the prototype for girls bullying. And they're pretty nasty with e- each other when it comes to guys' attention. And so, uh, certainly, intra-sexual competition is important. Uh, intersexually, these girls, uh, are dominant securing the resources. And we know that, uh, in our species, men compete for women, not as much as in the other way. Uh, but a woman who is good at getting resources and good at taking care of her kids, when you think in Canada here we talk about the hockey moms, uh, in the US and UK it's probably soccer mums, right? Uh, in Southern US it's the football mums. Those mums are intimidating and perhaps attractive to, to male partners because they say, "Look, you know, she's gonna look after my kids and get them what they want and knock the other kids out of the way for me."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- TVTony Volk
So there's benefits directly. And then, of course, personality underlying bullying also really overlaps with socio-sexuality.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So
- 16:58 – 23:00
Is Bullying Heritable?
- CWChris Williamson
given the fact that... I, I'm not massively familiar with HEXACO. Um, uh, so Big Five is at least what I have a bit of an insight in and it seems like there's a good bit of crossover. I know that the C and the O and the A, uh, have a bit of crossover. Um, given the fact that one of the best predictors for this is honesty humility, given the fact that almost all personality traits are very highly heritable, 50% on average, I don't know what honesty humility is, does that mean that bullying is heritable?
- TVTony Volk
Yes. Um, bullying has a high degree of he- genetic heritability of 60 to 70%. Now it's important for folks to know that that doesn't mean bullying is 60 to 70% caused by genes. It means the differences between average individuals in Western samples, 60 to 70% of that difference can be explained by genetics. HEXACO is like, um, the Big Five, but much better.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- TVTony Volk
Uh, it's got, it's got better cross-cultural views.
- CWChris Williamson
Throwing shade. Throwing shade at the Big Five.
- TVTony Volk
Oh, uh, uh, uh, I... The guy who came up with it is at my university, uh, along with Kim Yeom Lee and Mike Ashton. Um, and they were trying to replicate the Big Five as grad students across cultures. And it didn't come out, uh, as five. In English it comes out as five or six. So the original Big Five creators-... took parsimony and said in English, "We'll go with five." You're right that there's a lot of similarities, extroversion, conscientiousness, openness are similar, but where it's very different is that the HEXACO really maps on well with evolutionary explanations for social behavior. So, social behavior happens for three reasons, and by social I mean cooperation. Uh, mutualism is when you each get something to benefit from, that's, uh, you know, the cleaner bird picking a crocodile's teeth, they're each getting something direct from each other. Lions helping bring down a prey or helping each other directly. Or it happens through kin selection, which means look after similar genes, uh, that's usually, uh, nepotism, looking after your family. Or reciprocal altruism, and reciprocal altruism is, uh, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours at a later date. Now, the HEXACO honesty/humility maps on with your willingness to cheat on others, to look after yourself. So if you think of something like the prisoner's dilemma, um, it's a willingness to take advantage of others. If you see a wallet with 200 bucks, you take the money out before you even consider returning it. The advantage of that is you selfishly benefit. The cost is that, um, you get a reputation for being selfish and people don't like being with you. Agreeableness in the, uh, HEXACO is the opposite of that. How willing are you to forgive somebody taking advantage of you? So, now, you and your mate go out for, uh, lunch and they forget their wallet, say, "Screw it. We're done. We're through." You know? Or do you tolerate that and allow it to continue? Now, obviously that's good for continuing the relationship, but if you're really agreeable, you're Ned Flanders, people can take advantage of you. Emotionality maps on really nicely with, uh, sentimentality and a lack of risk-taking. It's the one that has the biggest sex difference. Men are a little lower in honesty/humility. Women are actually a little lower in agreeableness, um, but women are much higher in emotionality. And that-
- CWChris Williamson
Hang on. Women are lower in agreeableness on HEXACO?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, they're, they're more likely to get angry, um, and retaliate than men are. Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Is that... So is the HEXACO agreeableness a different measure than the Big Five agreeableness?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. Big Five agreeableness-
- CWChris Williamson
Right, right, right.
- TVTony Volk
... just basically says nice.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- TVTony Volk
But it doesn't map onto a specific function. Um, so you've got emotionality, which is basically kin selection. Um, are you sentimental? Do you have high levels of emotional empathy? Um, do you worry a lot? Which is what we see in a lot of, uh, mothers and women. That's why you find more vegetarians, for example, amongst women. But then the HEXACO is, uh, H and A are, do you take advantage of others and do you let yourself get taken advantage of?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Very interesting. Is there a place that people can do an online test? A, a thorough, very well-validated online test that'll explain the scores for HEXACO?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. Uh, hexaco, H-E-X-A-C-O, .org, um, is where, uh, the creators have that online test, and you can do it online there, um, and it'll give you a sense of where you're at. And it's really useful scale, uh, you know, I don't know if we want to transition a little away from bullying. Um, but one of the more interesting findings we did in our, my career was look at, uh, the Big Five and other personality measures predicting the dark triad; psychopathy, uh, narcissism, Machiavellianism, which is basically scheming, strategic. And we found that the HEXACO outperformed, uh, all the other personality measures, including the Big Five. And then the one that really blew us away, uh, was a colleague, Gordon Hodson, said, "You know, the dark triad all clustered together, if you think of overlapping circles, because it shares a common core, uh, that common core of antisocial selfishness." And so we looked to see how the core of the dark triad overlapped with the core of the HEXACO, and I was expecting the correlation to be pretty big, uh, 0.5, 0.6. Correlation was 0.95, um, so it's the same thing. And that's been replicated now in, uh, 17 different countries, that being bad is basically being the s- the same thing as being low in honesty/humility. It's a really, really strong predictor.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. The n- nail in the coffin of the Big Five personality, uh, assessment there. Okay, so going
- 23:00 – 28:20
How Boys & Girls Bully Differently
- CWChris Williamson
back, going back to the bullying thing, um, I'm very interested in the sex differences in bullying. What, why do girls bully, why do boys bully, and how do they do it differently?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, absolutely. Both are, are bullying for the similar sorts of things, for resources, uh, for reputations, for reproduction. There's a couple other potential functions, deterrence and recreation that we can talk about. Um, but boys and girls, while they have some different pressures, both of them need to secure resources. Boys more than girls. Um, and both of them need to secure a reputation and their, uh, status hierarchies. We know from primate literatures and human literatures that high-ranking women, uh, have better reproductive success. And so both are motivated to achieve those. The biggest difference that we find is that boys engage in much more physical bullying, which fits with every study on physical aggression. That's because boys have, at least, whereas men have a greater degree of variance in, uh, reproductive outcomes. So the greatest bullies in history, uh, think of folks like Genghis Khan, uh, who's father of 1% of the world's population alive today. He and his family are the ancestors, would be a better way of saying that. Um-So, there's a huge incentive for boys to take risks, um, that isn't present in girls. Um, so girls tend to engage in, uh, less direct bullying, so indirect verbal and indirect social bullying, but boys also engage in a lot of that behavior too. Um, they're, boys can be very strategic about spreading rumors, um, about their competitors. And what they often tend to use, uh, another difference is the language that they use. So women tend to go after, uh, another woman's sexual reputation. And boys tend to go after, uh, another boy's manliness.
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, just to interject there, women chasing after chastity, or females, uh, chasing after chastity and derogating that in their rivals and men, uh, about manliness, I, the first time that I learned this from, through an evolutionary lens, it blew my mind because it's so plain and obvious, and everybody knows this. You know that my favorite example of this, did you see that, uh, Greta Thunberg got into a spat with Andrew Tate, like, three months ago on Twitter? So Andrew was saying, "I'm going to drive my super cars and I'm gonna emit CO2." And, "Fuck you, Greta." Like, "You're an idiot." Uh, and she quote-tweeted him. I think it's like, it's like the, one- one of the most liked tweets of all time now. I think she's got two of the top 10. I'm pretty sure they're both at Andrew Tate. And, um, uh, she accused him of small dick energy.
- TVTony Volk
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
And I thought, (laughs) okay, anybody that needs a massive social experiment showing what people think men value the most, small dick energy. What are you derogating there? You're derogating manliness. You're derogating formidability. There's a little bit of sort of sexual prowess in there, reducing status down. If he'd replied, and he was on the streets of Newcastle outside of a nightclub at 3:00 in the morning having had a couple of too many beers, he would have said something like, "Fuck you, you slag." Like, because again, what is that? That is a derogation of chastity. Uh, one of the brutal things that I learned about this over the last couple of months is that, um ... This is from Tanya Reynolds. She said that derogating chastity is such a precision-engineered weapon because it's almost impossible to disprove. You can't walk around showing people how little sex you're having. Like, "Look at all of this sex that I'm not doing. Look at how, uh, pure I am." Uh, i- it's basically impossible. So it's a real precision-engineered strike. I just love, I love that, uh, sex difference in terms of what gets targeted. And the fact that that shows up in bullying isn't surprising.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, you know, particularly since these kids have average or better social skills, they didn't become the captain of the football team or the head cheerleader through physical prowess alone in most cases. It's because they know how to manipulate these social cues. So they really know how to hit kids where it hurts. Um, but that's individualistic. You know, one of my, I don't want to say favorite be- because it gives it the wrong connotation, but one of the more powerful or interesting stories I heard was about Lou Ferrigno, uh, a bodybuilder, who, for listeners who don't know, played The Incredible Hulk without any CGI or makeup, they just painted him green. Huge man, full of muscles. And he was relentlessly bullied, um, because he has, uh, a hearing loss. So kids would make fun of the way he talked. And that's not something you can punch your way out of. If people are causing, calling you stupid or slow, punching them doesn't change that. And so bullies are really effective at picking the impact that's gonna hurt their target the most 'cause it sends the strongest signal. Right? You're saying to number one and three, "Look what I did to the reputation of 17. We all know she didn't sleep around. Yeah, she messed around with this one guy, but I destroyed her reputation. You mess with me, it's gonna happen to you."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- 28:20 – 36:36
Are Bullies Smarter on Average?
- CWChris Williamson
Does this mean that bullies are smarter on average?
- TVTony Volk
The data on IQ, uh, shows that they are average. So they're not-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- TVTony Volk
... necessarily smarter or, uh, or, or more cunning. I think the biggest difference comes in the low honesty/humility means they're willing to use these things. I mean, I'm sure-
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- TVTony Volk
... you know, hanging out with your friends, a lot of soft spots that you could hurt them with. The difference is you don't. You don't go there. You make fun of the things that you know they'll laugh at, but you don't talk about that one thing that would really hurt them.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- TVTony Volk
Um, and bullies do.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm trying to map this onto my experience. So for a little bit of background, I wa- I was pretty badly bullied throughout school. And I haven't really spoken about it much on the podcast, but then I, I did this big episode, uh, a couple of months ago and I felt like, okay, now's the time for me to really start to open up about wha- what I felt. And I got this really, uh, heartfelt message from a guy who used to bully me in school and he'd seen this interview I'd done with the BBC and he- he had to reach out and apologize for him, like, super, super moving. Uh, and I'm trying to think back to my experience, as much as I've probably tried to shove bits of it away, uh, trying to think back to my experience and, and map myself onto the lessons that you're teaching us here. And, um, the honesty/humility thing, I find myself being, uh, quite orderly. I don't break rules very much. Um, and I think that, that like procedural, classic British stand in a line, follow the- the rules and procedures thing, I think that's- that's definitely something that I've got in me quite strongly. I don't tend to break rules very much. I have a massive amount of guilt and shame when I do stuff. I do feel like pretty bad about fucking people over. If I say something that's mean that I know has probably hurt someone or maybe even hasn't hurt them, but I'll worry about whether or not it has, so that's in there. And then when you were talking about, um, the- the bullies not using that and- and being able to kind of, uh, precision strike, derogate, uh, I was...... smaller, um, when I was in school, even though I'm a little bigger now, uh, would have been, not dumber, I would have been probably smart or smarter on average than, um, most of the kids, certainly most of the kids that were bullying me, but significantly less socially adept. So, I think high scores a lot of the time, like let's say that I outperformed a bunch of the bullies in, in a test or, or got higher grades or was moved up a class or, or did whatever, um, that would become also a justification for, uh, bullying down the line. So, yeah, I think that, um, to, like trying to map what I've learned from you onto my experience in school, I think I really had kind of a perfect storm of a lack of physical formidability and some pretty high social isolation coupled with lack of social capability, uh, that just made me, like, an absolute perfect target.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, and there's a number of things to dive into there. But I think the first and most important is victims recognizing that it's not their fault. Uh, bullies are going through ... It's, it's almost like, you know, The Terminator walking with this little scanning list saying, "Who's a good target? Who's a good target? There's the right target." Um, it's not something that you did. There are sometimes, uh, victims that we call provocative victims, who are sometimes bully victims themselves. Um, and I should qualify now that when I'm talking about bullies, I'm talking about kids who are primarily bullies and not victims as well. Kids who are both bullies and victims, they're like the Nelson Muntzes, they have bad social skills, they've dereg- dysregulated, uh, et cetera, but they don't do most-
- CWChris Williamson
How common are, how common are they?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, I was just gonna say, they don't do most of the bullying. Uh, estimates are less than 30%. Um, 70 to 80% of the bullies- bullying that's done is done by the, uh, really dominant kids. And so they're picking, i- in a very cowardly way, uh, somebody that can't effectively fight back. Right? The kids who were picking on Lou Ferrigno might have been smaller, but they knew that he couldn't respond without, you know, looking more socially awkward. The only way he can defend himself is by punching his... This guy's slow and has no social skills. So it's a very, uh, callous, very calculated predatory way of achieving what you want. Whereas on the opposite end, if you're high in honesty and humility, you have what you said, y- you believe in fairness, you know, I've seen some of your interviews, you try and present a balanced view, um, you don't take advantage of people, uh, when the opportunity presents itself. And that's so much more important than w- we often hear that it's an anger issue or, uh, a lack of emotional empathy, and those really aren't strongly correlated at all with bullying, especially emotional empathy. Um, and if you look at almost any action hero that's been in Hollywood from the '80s onward, or even before then, a Clint Eastwood, they all have the profile of they're very low in emotionality and empathy, they're very low in agreeableness, but they're high in honesty and humility. These are good people until you piss them off.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, they've got that n- noble side to them, right?
- TVTony Volk
Right. And it's that nobility, that's why we like them, uh, in a sense that, yes, you think of John Wick, how many people he's killed in his series over his-
- CWChris Williamson
Don't touch his dog. Don't touch his fucking dog. That's the lesson.
- TVTony Volk
But, eh, we still like him because he's honorable-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- TVTony Volk
... and he has that sense with him. And that, um, is really the biggest cost that we've found for bullying, is that while they are very good at getting what we call dominance, uh, or popularity, people don't like them. And that's because people can recognize what they're doing. So, the head cheerleader, um, is intimidating, the captain of the football team is intimidating, but you don't really want to spend a lot of time with them unless you're directly gaining from their power. Um, and we-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, the trickle down effect of whatever good sort of social halo they've got going on. Okay, so what about the ages of bullying? What age does bullying peak? Is there a difference? You already mentioned physicality kind of adjusts over time, but what about if we roll forward from school into adulthood, the workplace, the, the neighborhood, et cetera?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. (laughs) So we have colleagues, uh, Jamie Ostrov in, uh, Buffalo, studies actually bullying in preschool, um, so we know that, uh, it exists early on and some other colleagues have shown that babies might have a, a basic understanding of power imbalances, um, in interactions. So, it probably starts pretty early. Um, we know that in children and adolescents, it peaks right around the age of 13 to 14. And the data isn't 100% lined up, whether that's because when you, you're usually transitioning schools and so you have to reassert yourself, or whether it's because of puberty, but most of the evidence is coming down on the side of puberty, that once the mating game starts, bullying kicks up another gear. Uh, that's, there's a whole new level of seriousness, which means between the ages of about 13 to 15 is when bullying peaks. It decreases, um, but it does continue on into adulthood. Um, being a bully in, uh, high school, uh, or elementary school is predictive of being a bully in the workplace, almost certainly, in my opinion, because the shared underlying traits of honesty and humility, um, which for different but similar reasons, are also the li- they're lowest in adolescence it looks like. Uh, that's when we bottom out in honesty and humility. Uh, it's a time when you separate from your family and start thinking about yourselves. Um, so it could explain why somebody like the f- the, uh, individual you mentioned was a jerk then and he isn't a jerk later now that they've grown up a little-... um, but there are many jerks who persist into adulthood and are happy to continue bullying people throughout adulthood.
- CWChris Williamson
So
- 36:36 – 47:58
Environmental Factors Affecting Bullying
- CWChris Williamson
childhood bullying is predictive of adult bullying as well? Some people will age out of it, but not everybody will. Dude, I- I have to say, one of the things that... Oh, okay, before I say that, is there any correlation that you have found between the family socioeconomic status, the presence of a father in the home, race differences, um, like, uh, family environment, stuff like that? I'm trying to separate out, you know, the, this honesty humility thing from some of the more environmental factors.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. So, um, father in the home, we've looked at briefly, um, and I've done other work, say, on pubertal maturation and father in the home that I think shoots down that hypothesis, even though I kind of backed it up in the past. Um, bad neighborhoods and competitive environments exacerbate bullying. Uh...
- CWChris Williamson
What's a competitive environment?
- TVTony Volk
So where people endorse competitive attitudes, um, that status really matters, um, winning is more important than having fun, things like that. Um, that increases bullying. Uh, having role models who bully, uh, increases bullying. Uh, there's a really interesting study that was done by some colleagues in, um, I believe it was North Carolina. Uh, and North Carolina's a purple state. And in 2016, they did the study in 2015 and 2017, and in the districts that went hard red for Trump, um, a year after, so from 2015 to 2017, there was an increase in racialized bullying, uh, in those districts, which why in only those districts? Our assumption is they're copying their role model, um, and what their role model is doing. Uh, so role models matter. The really interesting thing about SCS, um, which typically, you know, being poor is associated with risk factors, not in bullying. It's the opposite. Um, wealthier kids are more likely to be bullies. And the reason for that is because, uh, they have power, right? If you're the kid who has, uh, the best clothes and you just came back from Europe, um, and kids can come over to your house and go, you know, jet skiing, uh, at your cottage, then you have a lot of power that you can use over kids who don't have that. So we actually see that higher SCS is a risk factor for bullying.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So I'm just trying to think that the kids who have more... that are higher in socioeconomic status, that have more resources at home, this isn't necessarily due to the fact that the lessons and worldview that they have is, "I can do things and not have repercussions." It is more that they, uh, are given this baseline of just higher status, and from this higher status, it means that there is a- a greater number of people to punch down on. That's kind of an interesting way to do it. Uh, so I- I've got it in my head, you know that famous graph, the hypergamy graph of sort of men dating across, but then women only kind of dating up? I'm kind of seeing the same thing, but for bullying, where, you know, number one can bully everybody down, but number five can only bully from number five down, and number 10 can only bully from number 10 down. It's very difficult to bully up. Um, so the people that are higher up in terms of socioeconomic status have a larger pool of other people from which to bully.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. Uh, I also suspect that you're right, uh, that some of it, although our early analysis don't suggest it, but we're doing more refined analysis, I think some of it is going to come from the parents. Uh, wealth is correlated with the same sort of arrogant attitudes of, uh, winner take all, uh, first place-
- CWChris Williamson
High competition.
- TVTony Volk
... yeah, first place and then there's losers. Um, to balance out our samples, for example, when we work with undergraduates, uh, we always get students from the business school, um, because they're habitually lower in honesty humility, because it's a cutthroat world in business, right? It's dog eat dog, winner takes all. Um, so some of that is certainly trickling down from parents. But one of the really interesting, uh, studies we did was showing that, um, maternal monitoring, and maternal just because women are, on average, primary caregivers, um, but you could say caregiver monitoring, uh, is associated with a reduction in bullying. But then we split that between kids who are high in honesty humility and kids who are low in honesty humility. Kids who are high in honesty humility, it didn't make any difference at all. They were always low in bullying. So if you're a good, sensible kid, it doesn't really matter, uh, what your parents are doing or monitoring you, because you're not gonna be tempted to take advantage of other kids. It was when the kids were low in honesty humility themselves. And of course, there's going to be shared genetic and, uh, environmental influences from the parents along those lines. But for kids who were low in honesty humility and whose parents didn't watch them, then they were the ones who by far engaged in the most bullying.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think is happening there? Just a lack of supervision and a disposition that tends you towards being... like, breaking rules and social norms and stuff? Without the parent there, you're more likely to, uh, succumb to your base instincts?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, exactly. Um, and it's also potentially, you know, if you want to be ............................ about it, it might be more sensible for the parents to suggest, uh, more subtle ways of gaining power. Uh, because bullying can still, especially in some modern environments, land you in trouble.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- TVTony Volk
Uh, schools have very poor records in general on, in dealing with bullying. Um, but I think that's really what's underlying it, is that, uh, you know, without parents there to guide the child, those instincts are kicking in, say, "Okay, go for the throat." Um, and they do.
- CWChris Williamson
Just...To reiterate what you said earlier on, fatherless homes, you haven't managed to find a particularly strong correlation?
- TVTony Volk
No, uh, single parents, single parenting doesn't seem to be a major predictor. Um, again, probably because, uh, if the cause of the single home isn't honesty, humility, stress in and of itself isn't going to make a good person turn bad.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- TVTony Volk
We do tend to see, uh, what's the... Conscientiousness if that gets lower, then yes, you engage in more risk-taking behavior but that risk-taking behavior doesn't turn in a dark direction unless you have the dark predispositions. So if you get a... Once you start loading up all kinds of different factors-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so interwoven, man. It's so interesting. I love it. I love how, how, um, complex it is. It, it really does seem though, you know, that as with everything, behavioral genetics comes and smashes all of your ideas in the face. That (laughs) like, just, you've got a lot of raw materials and you have a disposition, and there are things that you can do to kind of nudge it around, but really, you kind of are the way you are. Um, what, what... There was something that you said before... First off, I'm realizing the reason I probably, uh, didn't lose my virginity until the age of 17 is because I got bullied in school, which I don't know whether that's an advantage or a disadvantage to have an extra year under my belt before I decided to have sex. Um, the relationship between alcohol use and bullying was something that I thought was super, super interesting, especially coming from the UK, a country where the, uh, age of, um, legal age for drinking is 18 as opposed to 21.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, it, it's a great question, um, and the answer is, with everything, it's complicated. Um, so for example, kids in China, um, the other major predictor in Chinese bullying is conscientiousness. So willingness to plan ahead, think long term, versus being impulsive, lazy, et cetera. That doesn't show up in North American data. Um, and we think that's because in China, where many schools have, uh, in local parentis, which means they can act like parents, the punishments for bullying are much more severe. Um, so if a kid is caught bullying, uh, they have the power to physically discipline the child, toss the child out of class, uh, expel them, et cetera.
- CWChris Williamson
You're kidding me. You can get spanked in China still?
- TVTony Volk
Yep. Uh, I'm not gonna say I know every school in China. (laughs) It's a big country. Uh, but in the schools we work with, yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- TVTony Volk
Um, the... In North America, um, we tend to find it's low agreeableness, being angry is associated with it, probably because it's not as risky a behavior. So you, it's not showing up with just these really impulsive kids. Having said that, uh, alcohol is associated with an increase in all kinds of anti-sociality because it releases impulsivity. So I'd expect it to be a bigger effect in China than it would be in North America or in the UK, but I would suspect that alcohol use would both increase bullying directly as well as correlate with the general pattern of anti-sociality. That's another big-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, you, you're also gonna have probably the people who do start drinking sooner will have a social group. Very few 15, 16, 17-year-olds are drinking in the house on their own. Uh, it's, you're part of a group, that means if you are part of a group, you probably got status. That means that you have this, uh, let's call it, um, like, the bullying pool. Uh, the bullying pool has been opened up for you a little bit. Uh, I also, I, you know, to fold another thing into the Chinese discussion, Asian people suck at drinking.
- TVTony Volk
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Like, Asian people are not good at drinking. And, you know, that, that may be another sort of racial difference. One other thing, I forgot to ask you about the, the family set-up. Um, I'm going to guess that only children are more likely to be bullied than children that have got brothers or sisters and/or cousins that live in the neighborhood or go to the same school.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, I would have thought the same thing. But the data on that is, is ambiguous. Um, and I think that's partly because, uh, data shows that being bullied at home is correlated with being bullied at school. And so if your older brother or sister... And sibling bullying, uh, is a newer area of research, it's not my area of research, um, but what's been done seems to show that it's as toxic as being bullied by strangers. Um, so if your older brother or sister is picking on you, that, A, might carry over into school, and B, your behavior and reaction to other kids might carry over into school, making you a, a, a more appealing victim. So it's not the protective factor that we thought, um, in that I'm sure it is in some cases. If you've got a good older brother or sister who looks after you-
- CWChris Williamson
Mediated by what the relationship with the siblings is like.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. So, uh, yeah, double-edged, I guess, is the short way of saying it, having siblings. As in so many other categories with bullying, it's a double-edged sword.
- CWChris Williamson
Is bullying... So, okay, so
- 47:58 – 50:18
Why Our Ancestors Bullied
- CWChris Williamson
getting into the sort of more ancestral reasons, we've spoken about kind of, I guess, the school yard mostly. Um, I'm gonna guess that bullying must have been used ancestrally to foster social cohesion in one form or another. Uh, what else... That and then what else was it used for?
- TVTony Volk
Similar things, getting resources. So you want that piece of meat. A lot of hunter-gatherers divide their meat equally. Well, you bullied people to giving your family better meat or more meat. Um, you bully the people across hills not to come and hunt in your territory, even though you, you go into theirs on occasion. Uh, you... In-...derogate the reputations of competitors, uh, especially adolescence, when you're- you're getting ready to enter that dating pool. Like, "Hey, you don't wanna be with her, she's- she's not faithful." Um, interestingly one of, you know, one of the things that really tuned me into the evolutionary research is a book by Jean Briggs, Never in Anger. And it's a book about her life with the Labrador Inuit, uh, the Eskimo, for those who don't know what Inuit are. And they have a social norm that you're not allowed to express anger, which is probably really useful if, you know, you're living in an igloo and it's minus 40 and if somebody gets pissed and you break the wall, everybody freezes to death. So, you're not allowed to get angry. But they still bullied. Um, there was a main group of- of people who stuck together and there was a smaller group, and the main group would make fun of, uh, the smaller group, uh, talk about how stingy they were, they didn't share, um, they weren't as social or friendly. And then the main group had, uh, a bit of a food shortage and had to rely on the weaker group, right, and flip things around, and there's some really interesting dynamics. But there's a case where that group versus group theme, which is a really, really powerful driver of human behavior, uh, it is very easy to turn one group against another. Um, which is something we're looking at in adolescence. It- it's trickier to do, but we're really interested in seeing what happens when two groups start bullying each other's weaker members. Um, my guess is it either fades away or very quickly escalates.
- 50:18 – 57:35
How Social Media Has Changed Bullying
- TVTony Volk
- CWChris Williamson
Talk to me about how social media has changed the landscape of bullying.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, social media, uh, I'm really not a fan of. Um, you know, uh, I heard, uh, somebody describe it well, it was Max Tegmark, um, that it's our first experiment with AI, uh, interfering with our lives, and it did not go well. Um, the algorithms that it uses are not friendly. Um, so there's a number of impacts. The first and most obvious is that it's made it really hard to track down, uh, bullies. And when I talk to the school principals at the schools that we work with, some fantastic schools here in the Niagara region, um, the principals tell me how difficult it is when one of their students is being bullied but it's being done online. So, what authority does the principal have to, you know, shut down an Instagram account or, less rarely done on Twitter, but, you know, Snapchat or, uh, TikTok, wherever it is? It makes it much easier to bully without having repercussions, which means it's an attractive option. Fortunately, the data shows that the kids who bully the most online are the same kids who are bullying in person. So, it hasn't encouraged these kids, who I would say are probably not low in honesty/humility, to suddenly start taking up bullying. But it has made it much harder for us to prevent, uh, cases of bullying where the bullies are smart enough, and it's not a giant leap of intelligence to say, "Okay, if I hit this kid in school-"
- CWChris Williamson
Just make an anonymous account (laughs) .
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, exactly. There's nothing that they can do compared with if you, you know, slam a kid into a locker, uh, in front of the teacher. And so, that aspect has certainly been very toxic. The general dynamics of, uh, social media are, especially for girls, toxic. Um, it's not my area of specialty, but one of the interesting things we found looking at, uh, data from pre- to post-pandemic is that girls suffered a higher decline in mental health than boys. Um, and we think part of that is because of how much time they spend on social media. And we know young boys and social media, I can see it in my sons, they do the same sort of thing that we did when we were little. You know, play video games with their friends, uh, they're yelling at each other, "Oh, you idiot, why you do that?" You know, "No, you shot me, you picked up my health pack." But it's the same sort of thing they'd probably be doing if they were in the room together. Girls spend a lot more time doing social comparison, um, and those algorithms don't show you a balanced view of life. Like, they show the worst or the best, um, you know, the most sensationalized views, which makes girls more vulnerable to the effects of bullying, um, as victims. You know what I mean? You're not just comparing yourself to the best looking girl at school, you're comparing yourself to the best looking girls on the internet which is, uh, not a fair or smart comparison to be making. And the kind of media that they use is- is more conducive to that kind of bullying, um, than it is in the social media that boys tend to use.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it's, uh, I had Jean Twenge on the show recently, the lady that wrote iGen and her new book, Generations, and it's not good, man. So, what is it? 60% of teenage girls say that they have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness. Like, it's just such a dark statistic, and, um, yeah, I ... Uh, the- the weird thing is that it's such a high number of girls. Unless you're saying that 60% of the girls are being bullied by 40% of the girls, which, you know, I wouldn't imagine that 40% of all girls are bullies, especially not up against this other group, it's just like a- a- an ambient, uh, permeated displeasure that everybody feels. It's- it's- it's not done by somebody, it's- it's baked into the code and the experience of the, uh, technology itself. Which makes it, you know, even worse. At least you could do an intervention with the individuals if it was coming from individuals, but if it's coming from the medium that you exist in, that's even harder. Um, looking at modern civilization then. School, we've spoken about an awful lot today.... compared to an ancestral lifestyle, have we created an environment which is more conducive to bullying? Is school a perfect storm for bullying?
- TVTony Volk
Yes and no. Um, it's ... I'll start with the yes. Uh, one of the things that mediates bullying, um, and Peter Gray wrote a really nice, uh, series of articles about this, is, um, you have mixed aged and often mixed sex play, uh, in hunter gatherer groups 'cause for most times of the year, almost all hunter gatherers live in small bands about 20 to 25, and then seasonally when times are good, they get together with the extended family, 100, 150 for a few months. So most of the time, you only have, uh, in a, you know, say half the group are kids, you got 12 kids to pick from, so it's harder to, um, have these isolated cliques. Everybody sort of has to get along. Um, and the mixed age play reduces the need to show off. The, the 12-year-old doesn't need to show that they're better than their 8-year-old cousin, like that's ... It's a given and the 12-year-old boy isn't as motivated to compete against a 12-year-old girl. Uh, so-
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So because each cohort that would be competing for status and is sufficiently similar in status for bullying to be a useful tool is so small, there is basically no point in but there's one person from this age and this age and this age and this age at each gender, and that's it.
- TVTony Volk
Right. And on top of that, most of them are gonna be related, uh, so that's, um, kin selection, so that's a break on, uh, attacking copies of your genes in other bodies. So those are reasons why I think modern society, uh, and in parti- as well, you'd have adults who'd step in, they are motivated to step in. And we know that one of the big factors that motivates teachers is whether they feel, A, motivated, B, confident in intervening. Whereas in the past, you know, you'd be living with your aunts and uncles and they would have no problem saying, "Knock that off." Um, in large part because that sort of behavior is rarely tolerated. The downside to ancestral environments is that the stakes could be potentially higher. So if you and I were siblings and there's one piece of meat, um, yes, you have 50% of my genes, but I have 100%, so unless I'm saving two of my brothers, I should be bullying to get that meat. And so the competition in that sense could be life or death, which would increase the benefit of engaging in bullying. So my guess is that bullying was probably less common in the past, but when it did happen, it had the potential to become very serious.
- CWChris Williamson
I wanna talk about some interventions and stuff now.
- 57:35 – 1:12:44
Which Interventions Actually Work?
- CWChris Williamson
So you mentioned, uh, one of the challenges that teachers face, so on and so forth. There's a quote from you which I really liked which was, "Bullying is neither innate nor learned but it is the interaction between two natural predispositions, selfless versus selfish, and our individual environments, the households we grow up in, for instance, promote or hinder these predispositions. That's why it's possible to reduce bullying, but challenging to do so." What have you learned about interventions that work, what is bad, uh, what, what, what is bad, what is good, where do teachers struggle, where do parents struggle, et cetera?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. Uh, that's, you know, in some ways the million dollar question, and when I tell my students about development, um, the two things I tell them, uh, in the big class that I teach on development is, number one, we don't have brains this big to find food and avoid predators. We have brains this big to figure out how to interact and compete against other brains this big. That's the only reason we have big brains. So it's gonna be complicated, number one. And number two, development is never nature versus nurture. It's always the combination of the two. So what's more important in making a chocolate chip cookie? Having chocolate chips or having an oven, like the, the major ingredients or the environment? You need both, right, and every child is the product of both. So I don't believe in pure determinism, either from the environment or genetics. Having said that, you know, some kids are gonna come with different ingredients. Some kids are gonna be, uh, having different predispositions and some kids are obviously gonna come from different, uh, ovens, different environments. And so some of the things that we've seen are that purely social interventions where we rely on kids, uh, just plain learning don't work. Um, and my favorite example of that was, uh, in Norway where the father of bullying research, Dan Olweus, integrated a huge program where every level of government from federal to whatever their version of provincial or state is, city to schools to parents all got in and everybody cracked down on bullying. And they reduced bullying by something like 30 to 40%, one of the biggest reductions we've seen at a large scale ever. That worked really well for three years and then what did the government do? It's expensive, so the government said, "Hey, this problem's done. Stop spending money on it." And bullying shot right back up to normal, right, which is a really strong argument against it being learned because if this was a learn, purely learned behavior, kids would've seen low levels of bullying for years and they would've just stuck with that behavior. The fact that it popped back up suggests that it's really this cost benefit. Um, so that's where the better programs are, uh, aimed at. So one of the more widely distributed ones, and then I'll talk about the one that, that we're promoting, um, is Kiva, uh, done by, uh, Kristina Samovalli and some other, uh, Finnish folk, uh, that's now gone across the world, and it relies on peers to knock down bullying, say, uh, "This isn't cool. It's not effective. Uh, we're not gonna give you status and popularity." And it knocks down bullying by about 20, 25%.Really interestingly though, they found that it only works on low and medium popularity bullies, probably a lot of the bully victims. When the bullies are high in popularity, their peers don't impact them, which makes sense. Like, the popular kids aren't going to listen to what, you know, a group of well-meaning, empathic, uh, you know mid-popularity kids are telling them. And the problem is, most bullying is done by really popular kids. So, i- it's very hard to change peer behavior when the leaders of the peers are the ones who are doing the behavior. So that's a limitation of peer-based interventions. We've tried something called the meaningful roles, uh, which is an attempt to try and give, uh, students some way of meeting their goals that they want, their predispositions. So that kid who's low in honesty, humility, is arrogant, uh, wants attention, wants to be at the top, find a way of, A, keeping them busy so they're not able to bully, they don't have the time, but also, B, that they're able to meet that goal. And so one of the things that we do is we assign a variety of jobs to different people in the class. And we think that being the Walmart door greeter is not a high status thing, but if you're, you know, a- a 13-year-old in grade eight and everybody who comes into class, you say, "Hi. Welcome to Mrs. Smith's grade eight class," and they have to say hi back, you're getting a lot of social spotlight on you, right? A lot of attention. And so in a way, you're getting that status and visibility that you want in a pro-social way. And we found that reduces overall school, uh, violence by 70%. Um, so you're giving them a way of getting what they want without harming others. Now some people say, "Is- is that rewarding bullies?" And that's- that's a tricky thing, because in a way we are. But the hope is that over time, and we know personality isn't fixed either, personality is a predisposition, not a destiny, that they start shifting towards a m- more pro-social way, realizing, "Hey, I can- I can get what I want and still be kind to others." And I think we really need that combination of the carrot and the stick, because overall bullying interventions have largely failed miserably. Um, it's a very hard behavior to get rid of, uh, which suggests we need these really multi-pronged, uh, multimodal interventions. And of course, it doesn't help that in the adult world kids see all kinds of examples of people getting away with bullying, um, and getting great things. You know, D- Donald Trump, whatever you, whether you like him or not, I think he's a fantastic example of a bully who's been very successful. He's got millions if not billions of dollars, uh, married three supermodels, has six kids, uh, and reputation and dominance, became the president of the United States. Right? He ticked the boxes for how being aggressive and- and kicking down can work. And he's not the only one. There's lots of celebrities in sports, in, uh, in- in- in- in media, that show that being mean can work. And so even if we have a perfect school intervention, if kids are learning that, okay, uh, once you hit Wall Street, you have to be ruthless, you know, tear out other people's throats. Once they see their parents playing in their sports league and, you know, stomping on the competition and- and... or cheating on their taxes, doing whatever they can to get ahead, kids are gonna copy that. So it's a really difficult behavior to get rid of because there's not only genetic predispositions, but there's so many examples in the environment of how being a bully can be effective.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you been able to track whether or not bullying has increased longitudinally? Because I would bro-science my way into saying that because we see in popular media now, at least on the surface, more dark triad adjacent type behavior, people being back bitey, reality television, that kind of trend of like proximal... like ancillary to psychopathy, Machiavellianism, manipulative type stuff, um, that that would have trickled down to more young people seeing that as a path to success. Is that something you've seen? Is it trending up? Is it trending down?
- TVTony Volk
In Canada, uh, the data that I'm aware of, and these are data from tens of thousands of kids, um, over the last 20 years, despite bullying interventions at every school and lots of... there's bullying awareness days, we have Pink Shirt Day, et cetera, so lots of interventions. Um, the number of people who say that they bully others has decreased by 20%. The number of kids who say that they've been victimized hasn't changed at all. And I think that's because of these opposing forces that, you know, we are trying to make inroads. Um, kids today are more empathic. Uh, there's a really neat study I just read that over the last 50 years people have become more generous in, uh, economic games and prisoner's dilemma. So, there's an argument to be made that we're more cooperative than we were 50, 60 years ago, in general. Um, but there's also many of these examples of these hyper-competitive individuals and hyper-competitive, you know, media, uh, incentives that are still creating a lane for kids who think that they can really do well by bullying others.
- CWChris Williamson
Is the implication there that the number of bullies has reduced or the number of people who say that they bully has reduced?
- TVTony Volk
We don't know. Um, it's a great question.
- CWChris Williamson
Crying little bastards that they are.
- TVTony Volk
You know, one of the things that I often hear is, you're setting honesty, humility in. How do you expect people who are low in honesty-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- TVTony Volk
... to be honest with-
- CWChris Williamson
... to do self-reports (laughs) appropriately? (laughs) Yeah, get fucked, Tony. (laughs)
- TVTony Volk
But they, they admit to a lot of stuff. Uh, you'll have, once you give anonymity, uh, they'll admit to bullying, they'll admit to dating violence, uh, if ... We don't do it in the high schools, but if you go into universities, they'll admit to rape, abuse, um-
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- TVTony Volk
... they'll admit to serious stuff if it's anonymous. Um, if you made them stand up in front of the class-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- TVTony Volk
... they don't.
- CWChris Williamson
Everybody put your hand up that's been a raper this year. Yeah, I imagine that that's-
- TVTony Volk
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... that's not exactly gonna happen very commonly. Um, what about for, uh, we, we ... Does punishment work? Like, are there any punishments that work to disincentivize bullies? Uh, forgetting rehabilitation, just simply encouraging them to stop doing it. Does anything work?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, well, yeah, I've always said it's a cost-benefit behavior, um, and that these kids are behaving rationally or, you know, adaptively. Um, and so if you increase the cost, uh, it makes you less likely to do the behavior. We know that the very best defense against bullying is retaliation, fighting back. We also know that the very worst thing for escalating bullying is fighting back. Um, it's double-edged, in that if you are able to deter the bully and they say, like, "Okay, jeez, this is too tough of a nut to crack," then they'll find somebody else. But if you do it in a way that, say, shows up the bully, well, then they have to give up everything they got or they double down, and they double down, and it gets much worse. So, direct retaliation, which is what most people, kids and ad- and adults say to do, is very risky. It, it, it's high risk, high reward. Um, the study in the, in Norway shows that if everybody clamps down, you can reduce bullying, uh, but you're, if you only focus on the negatives, you know ... I joke with the school board and, and with my colleagues that I used to be invited to lots of schools to talk about bullying, but now that my message is, uh, bullying will get you sex, power, popularity, and resources, and this is the next bit, and we have a hard time catching you and prosecuting you, so please don't do it, right? I, I don't get invited-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- TVTony Volk
... to a lot of schools anymore. Um, which is the other part of it. It's really hard to find them. Um, that same BBC-style video, uh, documentary of these kids, filming them in the schoolyard showed that adults were present only 20% of the time. So, kids know not to do it in front of adults and 10% of the time, or sorry, half the time that I was there, so 10% of total, 50% of the time that an adult was there, the adult did nothing about it. Um, so kids know that adults are gonna miss a lot of this, and then wh-
- CWChris Williamson
Is there an element, is there an element there that when the adult is around, there's a selection bias that the kid who is doing the bullying is more likely to be the one that's maybe a bit likable, they're probably socially a little bit more adept? The kid that is being picked on is the one that's maybe a bit less likable, they're a bit weird, the adult doesn't really feel as much of an affinity. How much does that contribute, do you think?
- TVTony Volk
Huge. Uh, and we've done some informal studies on this. I've never had the time to sit down and do a formal study, but I guarantee, well, I shouldn't say I guarantee, I'm very confident that the stereotype of a bully, of being lonely, poor self-esteem, uh, bad social skills, came from school teachers and principals catching the bully victims. You know, these kids who really do come from a broken home, have bad social skills, and they solve everything with their fists.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Yeah.
- TVTony Volk
Uh, but whereas the kids who come from those affluent homes, who are heading up the, uh, it could be the chess club or the, the cheerleading team, who are really popular in the class, have good social skills, uh, they don't get caught. And when they do, they say, "Oh, we were just kidding. We're teasing. We're so sorry. You know we'd never do that."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- TVTony Volk
"We're sorry." And-
- CWChris Williamson
You know that-
- TVTony Volk
... and they school the adult-
- 1:12:44 – 1:24:54
How to Positively Fight Back
- CWChris Williamson
Um, you mentioned before about this double-edged sword of, of fighting back. It's both the best and the worst, uh, response that you can give.In what ways can fighting back be done in a manner which will make it more likely to be a good response and less likely to be a bad response?
- TVTony Volk
The, the best thing to do is to recognize that this is a cowardly, unfair fight. Right? This isn't two guys, you know, squaring off in the octagon, in- in- in a sanctioned fight to see who's toughest. This is an MMA fighter picking on some guy on the street who doesn't even know what's happening, and the MMA fighter's got five buddies behind him. So bringing in support, changing the power imbalance by bringing in adults, bringing in friends. Uh, you change it to an arena where you have some power, and preferably do it privately. Uh, I- I wouldn't advise kids to fight back, but if you're gonna do it, don't do it publicly. I mean, uh, I've written a couple of articles, uh, or opinions, op-eds on Putin, and how he looks just like a schoolyard bully, and the problem he has is the same as schoolyard bullies. If he backs down now, he loses a ton of his cred, right? Because it's not-
- CWChris Williamson
'Cause it's such a public, uh, audience that's watching. Right? Obvious- okay, so if you were to fight the bully in the schoolyard, or your kid was to fight the bully in the schoolyard in front of everybody else, it's not ... even though you might think, you know, you could bro psychology your way into believing that sends a message to him and his fucking friends that they shouldn't do it again, but what you've done is you've caused that bully to lose a ton of status in front of the people that are the most important. Whereas if you were to see him on the walk home, if this, if, uh, physical intervention or whatever, like, standing up to him is gonna happen, doing it where they're not going to lose face is actually a much more effective way to do it. Because it may be a final full stop that they can bow out of, uh, whilst being relatively costless to them.
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. E- exactly. And, you know, it's one of the ironic things that, uh, people who are low in agreeableness ... I'm a little low in agreeableness, uh, as my whole family is. The joke was don't poke a vogue. Um, w- we make, and I sense probably there's a little bit of that in you, uh, because these, these are the kind of people who are high in H, which is, uh, humble of me to say, but low in A, make good crusaders. You know, the people who stand up for other people, who don't tolerate injustice, who do not put up with people taking advantage of others. But we've seen from victims, uh, in schools, victims in workplaces and whistleblowers, that that often blows back against the person who's reacting back. Right? So they'll say, like, "Why is he flipping out? But the other person's really calm. Tony or Chris is really upset." Well, he's upset 'cause he got kneed in the head, right? Or Tony's upset because this person was bullying a graduate student and Tony didn't, didn't like it, but all they see is one of us yelling. Right? And that's one of the skills that bullies have, is very quickly pivoting. So it looks like the person fighting back is the one who's the aggressive one.
- CWChris Williamson
They're being unreasonable. You can see how unreasonable they're being. Okay, so what would you say to parents? Let's say that there is a, a parent listening whose kid is either ... or first a bully, and second being bullied. What are your best piece of advice for them?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah. First, for the parent whose kid is being a bully, um, they're being a coward. Um, they're engaging in a behavior that is going to likely keep happening in life. So they'll behave this way with their siblings. They'll behave this way with you when you get older and you're elderly. They'll behave this way in the workplace. They'll behave this way with their spouse. They'll behave this way with this kid. So if you don't want to live around a bully for the rest of your life, step in and intervene. And, and, you know, recognizing that 20% of kids do this mean it's not ... These kids aren't psychopaths. You know, your kid is not irredeemable or, uh, you know, going down a difficult path. I don't wanna say that all psychopaths are irredeemable. But, uh, I'm just trying to not catastrophize it. Um, but take it very seriously. Um, if you have any kind of sense of fairness and ethics, your kid is breaking the rules, and you can't let them do that. For ... And don't buy their excuses. Right? That's, that'd be the other thing that we've been saying, which I think parents would've begotten, is, "If- if your kid is willing to bully, they're probably willing to lie about it."
- CWChris Williamson
What- what- what's the intervention? What do you say to your kid?
- TVTony Volk
It depends on the specific child and what they're doing. I'd first ask, you know, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Do you know that there's a power imbalance? You know that this is really weak? You know, this is, uh, not something I support?" It's a moral based one that's aiming to change the underlying honest and humility. In the short run, we know that monitoring works, so keeping a tighter leash on them, uh, until you have confidence that they're not doing it is effective. Following up with the teachers, telling the teachers that we know this, um, and that you're happy to be contacted if anything comes up again. You know, is- is again, ratcheting up that monitoring system so that you're essentially making it more costly for them to engage in that behavior. They're not gonna be believed if they say they were just teasing. Uh, they're gonna get caught. They're gonna get punished. And then if they do well, reward them. You know, as I said, carrot and a stick. If it's been two, three months and you legitimately have the sense that things have gone better, then, you know, you don't have to take them out for ice cream but praise them. Uh, tell them that you're proud that they- they've changed, they're being more mature. That's the way that good people and good societies work. And then if your child is being victimized, um, the first and most important thing, especially with adolescents, is trying to have open lines of communication. Um, and I've got a 20-year-old, a 14, and a 12-year-old, so I'm well aware of how challenging it can be to, uh, communicate with adolescents at times. But the more you're able to do that, the more you're likely to hear about the victimization or see changes relating to it, which are commonly, uh, symptoms of anxiety or depression that increase.... and in particular, desire to not go to the place where bullying is happening, to no longer wanna go to school. "I, I just need a day off, I'm sick," et cetera. Um, and that's a real red flag to jump in and get involved. Uh, because the bully has chosen this person. Uh, I, I can't emphasize that enough, that almost every bully strategically chooses a victim who can't effectively fight back. And so it's, it's, it's very rare that if they picked on somebody who could potentially punch their way out, they would probably bully them in a way that if they did that, um, it would be really bad. So bring a girl with them. So a boy and a girl tease a guy. So what is he gonna do? Punch the girl? Then everybody knows that this guy's a psycho and he's, he's lost the fight. So number one, lines of communication. Number two, contact the school and make sure they take it seriously. Um, there's far too many people who think that bullying is a rite of passage. And the analogy I like to use is that conflict, like exercise, strengthens you. Um, so you know that if you exercise and you stress your bones, they get stronger. But if you have too much stress and you break a bone, that bone is never as strong as it was when it was, uh, you know, whole, before it was broken. And the same thing happens to bullying. If you have severe bullying, uh, other researchers have shown that it affects your immune response for decades. It, uh, it affects the expression of your genes for decades. It's not a minor thing. Um, it, i- it's not a rite of passage. And if your child, uh, has been chosen as a victim, it's ... You say, "Fight back," it's because they can't. The, the bully is... In most cases, they have found a way to prevent the victim from doing that. So bring in allies, you know, the school, uh, the teachers, um, if they have any friends. That's really important. If they don't have a lot of friends, go out of your way to try and help them make friends. We know that having friends doesn't reduce, uh, bullying dramatically, it's about 10, 20%, but what it does do dramatically is it reduces the long-term impacts of bullying. Because if you're 13 or 14, or not 15, um, you're a teenager, and your peers are telling you you're worthless, right, either directly or implicitly by bullying you, it doesn't really help to hear from mom and dad say, "You're a fine, lovely person," or your grandma or your aunt to say it. You really need to hear that from peers. Um, and so having even just one friend cuts the odds of serious mental health outcomes by over 50%. Um, so get involved, listen to your kid, and get them support.
- CWChris Williamson
What are the potential serious mental health outcomes from somebody that is being bullied and it's un-... Not untreated, but you know what I mean?
- TVTony Volk
Yeah, it's lifelong. Uh, lifelong, uh, risks of depression and anxiety. And of course, we've seen, unfortunately, a number of tragic incidents that result in suicide. Um, some of the murder-suicides and school shootings have been blamed on bullying, but we certainly know there's many more kids who are dying on, of their own hands, um, because they can't take it. And of course, that's an area where, uh, the internet has become particularly pernicious or, um, dangerous is because it doesn't go away. You know, if, if, back in my day, uh, you know, I went to school in the '80s, early '90s, if you were bullied at school, which I really wasn't, but if you were, you know, you could go home and you, you'd have a sanctuary from all of that. Now you can't, right? It's on your phone, it, it's on the messages, it's on the boards. And so you're putting your child in a place where they're fighting an unfair battle against people who are actively trying to hurt them. Uh, I, I can't imagine, as a parent, anything that would motivate me more strongly to stand up and say, you know, "Get lost," which is ultimately why I went down this, you know, road of research. It's, it's really not fair to the kids who are being picked on.
- CWChris Williamson
What about getting your kids to do some sort of team sport-
- TVTony Volk
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... getting them involved at a local either team sport or maybe a boxing gym as well? I guess that's probably a pretty common, uh, response from parents.
- TVTony Volk
You know, uh, anything that you can do to help offset the anxiety and the depression will help. Exercise is fantastic. Uh, and building those friendships, uh, is really useful. Sports, uh, I, I always tell my s- grad students that, you know, everything's gray. There's... Other than the shirt, nothing's black and white. Uh, because sports can sometimes be a risk. Um, and we've looked at bullying in sports and have found that, uh, for girls, uh, it can be a risk factor if you participate in com- competitive sports, both in the sport and outside. And for boys, it depends on the sport and the team. Um, our local, uh, hockey team just had its captain and his brother barred from the league for bullying other players, uh, on the team. It, it, it's another area that you need to be s- aware of. But anything, it, well, even if it's not a team sport, if your child likes, I don't know, dancing?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- TVTony Volk
Uh, or wants to learn to play the guitar, anything that will help alleviate that, including, if necessary, you know, switching schools, getting away from it. If your child is stuck in a toxic situation where people are picking on them like it's an episode of Orange Is the New Black, get them out of that situation.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- TVTony Volk
However you can.
- CWChris Williamson
Here's the thing that's interesting, man. So
- 1:24:54 – 1:36:09
The Importance of Caring for Bullying Victims
- CWChris Williamson
I, I've seen pretty much both ends of the status spectrum, right? So in school, was probably the most, close to the most, like, pitiful person there, had the lowest number of friends, was smart or whatever, and I was always gonna go to college and, and university.... but i- in an area that, that wasn't very, very common. Um, and then through probably '16, '17 was kind of middling. '18, '19, '20, very, very quickly ascended to be one of the best-known people in, you know, a city that's got a million people in it. By '22, '23, I'm doing reality TV, I'm on TV all the time. Then '27, I have another crack at reality TV. All through this period, I've been the guy in the front door of a nightclub. And then now, from doing the show, which is, you know, transcended... to this much more kind of global, I guess, w- widespread type of status, um, I've seen both ends of it. And, and observing the texture of my own mind, especially through this evolutionary lens is, is fucking wild. Like I- I know what it feels like to be so like downtrodden and, and self-deprecating and, and, uh, like lost and alone and in not just in solitude, 'cause solitude is okay, but i- in, uh, like abandon, feels like abandon. So, I- I really have seen this fucking trajectory, man, I'm telling you, from like the absolute bottom of the bottom of the bottom to now, you know, being somebody that's relatively well-known. And, um, yeah, it's crazy. I- I- I totally understand how it could impact your immune system, uh, you know, in girls, especially, um, if it's a lot of, uh, social bullying. It can even mess with their menstrual cycle. It can stop them from releasing eggs. That's one of the, uh, suggested reasons for why women have got concealed ovulation is that it means other, the other women can't go and fuck with her to stop this egg from releasing. 'Cause if you did, that's basically like a big, a big flag of, uh, "I'm fertile and you can-"
Episode duration: 1:37:01
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