The Evolutionary Psychology Of Bullies - Tony 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)

Why did you get interested in studying bullying?

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.

What do you think is unique or novel about the approach that you've taken to looking at bullying?

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.

Mm. Okay. So how do you define bullying? What is it?

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.

So, bullying in that regard can't happen to somebody who is of equal status or higher status than you?

Exactly. That would be general aggression, but that wouldn't be bullying.

Interesting. Okay. So what's the evolutionary hypothesis behind bullying? What have you come to believe about it?

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.