I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school.
What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name), give them BS tasks for years and call it "education", the people in charge prefer to make the bullying problem one of the "socially disadvantaged" fringe groups, which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs" and other pedagogical bullshit that target said fringe groups, so they can say "look, we're doing something!". Utterly disgusting.
I've seen just as much bullying at elective academic summer camps (e.g. Space Camp, JHU CTY), as at public schools. Both as a student and as a teacher. I don't agree that it's necessarily a product of the American public school system.
Particularly, in my experience, bullying tends to be exacerbated during periods of social uncertainty, such as a change in the class cohort. The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups.
Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on.
In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not.
Schools and prisons are closed systems where the social hierarchy inevitably gets established and constantly contested.
As someone who has been on both sides of the game telling kids not to fight back is counterproductive. If the situation is handled correctly it can become an incredible opportunity for growth.
It also supports another common sense observation, which is that mixed-age schooling results in much better behavioral outcomes. Kids don’t obsess over their place in the artificial Lord of the Flies hierarchy when there are younger and older kids around to provide frequent role reversals.
Every public school will be analogous to a prison no matter how good, because children have no choice on the matter. If you want to change the dynamic there the only solution is school choice because children simply must go to school, letting them (and their parents) choose which school is the right one is the way to improve the child's well being and make them feel like they have control over how they spend 200 days of their year.
One of the side-effects of the current pandemic, at least in the US, is that dysfunctional educational institutions have been revealed for what they are. There's a lot of talk about a realignment of priorities at the university level where students' money is directly at stake, but hopefully this will spur some positive changes for younger students also.
I'm hugely critical of our industrial-age schooling system. But I think it's a mistake to suggest that bullying is only a factor in those schools. Bullying happens in families, in churches, in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in any environment where you have groups of people. Primates are big on dominance hierarchies, often violently enforced, and humans are definitely primates.
Everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullying. How to recognize it, how to combat it, how to build relationships and cultures that are proof against it. And if there are things we want everybody to learn, school doesn't seem like a bad place to start.
To have some significance, you'd need to link to a statement you wrote on this topic prior to the research being published. Otherwise this looks like you're just standing on the shoulders of giants to sing about how tall you are.
To be clear-- even if you had published your 2nd paragraph prior to this research being published, that wouldn't qualify as something that is "completely obvious." At the very least you would have needed to give a hypothesis as to why it is you think the current anti-bullying programs cannot work. That hypothesis would have needed to at least include something like, "in my experience people end up bullying their friends most of the time."
Otherwise, you can't convincingly claim the truth was obvious and people who didn't get it were likely pretending. Without the research, everyone just shrinks back to become little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world.
I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school.
Obvious how? Not everybody is socially astute. Granted, I had never been bullied in high school but I wasn't much of a social operator.
That school is basically daycare (or a prison to some) is something I read often and there is maybe a tiny bit of truth in it.
But a school is also where you learn to read, write, speak, maths, some physics, some chemistry, etc.
In doubt I put my kid, from a very early age, in a top-notch private school in english (she's not a native english speaker).
My thinking being that, even if it's daycare/prison where nothing is taught (which I don't think is the case but I'm at least entertaining the idea), she's at least learning to speak english fluently : )
Don’t you see that you’re doing what the article describes, right now? Your shallow analysis and careless invective, somehow pointing the finger at school systems for something that is largely a result of human nature, is bullying. You’re throwing school systems under the bus for internet points.
Could schools handle bullying better? Probably. But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable. To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.
> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name)
I'm surprised more people haven't read Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", it sheds light on the way the prison became a blueprint for organizing labor, education, our very social fabric
> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons
The reasons for this are deliberate.
1. Parents are assholes. In poor areas many patents couldn’t give two shits about spending extra time to contribute to their child’s education. In rich areas the parents are at war with the teachers either because their little angel can do no wrong or because there is serious money on the table for scholarships.
2. Child performance is measured in numbers devised by standardized tests. The average of that performance is a primary determinate factor in state funding.
3. It would be nice if we taught children to think and to form original output. The sad reality is that most people, including adults, are utterly incapable of originality. Attempts to force that square peg into a round hole leaves many children behind while simultaneously confusing and infuriating parents.
It's baffling and yet it's not. Most people don't remember their childhoods very vividly, and high school is still in the cusp of childhood, especially these days. Combine that with our predilection to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, and it's no wonder the education system is so bad.
>I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school.
I think it should be a known idea to anyone who has ever seen a movie where a previously uncool kid gets accepted in to the cool kids group.
Sometimes the point of behavioral psych and sociology research is to take “what’s obvious” and collect the data to put a hard number on it. That way policy makers can justify putting money behind different approaches to address the problem...
Yepp, most western schools are more a social ladder creation apparatus than educational institutions. The scandinavian school system takes a very different approach. It's worth to have a look.
"Current day school system". Well, OK. But try reading about English public schools of the 19th or 20th Century. I gather that things were not much better in continental Europe.
It’d be a surprise to me. I was ethnically and culturally an outsider, and was bullied for that. It was rarely because of people I’d consider friends. When you’re different and othered, you’re targeted by the toxic masculinity crowd. It’s how the nerds ended up halfway together. High school was tame in the bullying regard. It was a magnet school full of dorks who were escaping the rest of society.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that grouping school children with others kids their age is hugely damaging.
The major figures in most kid's lives are parents and teachers, who are in an authority position; siblings, who have a complex relationship that often turns competitive; and their school friends.
Kids are missing a chance to socialise with children who are older than them, learn from adults who are not in an authority role, and to care for and mentor younger children.
Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do. You get feedback loops of bad behaviour, and put them in bubbles where their peers and their psychopathic games (like bullying) make up 100% of their reality.
The only consistent counterpoint I can think of are cousins, who are typically slightly older or younger, and are outside of kids' normal peer groups. As a result these are often very positive relationships.
I've often thought this -- age stratification to our current degree is a relatively new (20th century?) phenomenon, and seems under-studied. I think the awareness came to my mind when I went to a number of mixed polka/swing dances back in like 1999 put on by the local Czech center. It was a rare mix of seniors doing traditional polka side by side with college students (who were brought in by the swing dancing) along with other adults, their kids, 5 year olds running around, etc... And then we'd do goofy dances like the Hokey Pokey or the Chicken Dance. (This was via the eclectic and fun band, "Brave Combo.") The entire mix felt weirdly... healthy.
One reason we chose a private girl's school for our daughter is that, along with traditional (horizontal) grades, it has "sister groups," which are vertical slices of girls from varying grade levels. These meet and socialize throughout the year.
You know I really think you're on to something there. I distinctly remember being in middle school and not wanting to associate with anyone my age. Few years older, great, few years younger, great. But it just wasn't pleasant to try to maintain friendships with my peers. The constant social competitiveness just really irked me. I always preferred one-on-one socializing rather than groups. If I didn't like how one of my older friends was treating me, well, I didn't have to knock on his door for awhile.
And when I started bullying the younger kids I would hang out with, I was able to reflect on it later and stop being such an ass. Course, it would come out anyway, but not being trapped in one single group of friends and having to derive my social identity from that made it much easier to self-adjust. Looking back on those years, it's pretty obvious now just how much of what I experienced back then was that pecking order mindset.
I don't know if I've thought about this before or what, but now that you've said it, it seems obviously true. Not that mixing older and younger little monsters is necessarily a panacea (I bet it would be rocky if you started tomorrow). But strict stratification can't be optimal.
Other point about cousin relationships: interaction typically happens in a context that includes other adults, another moderating influence. I think that also runs in favor of your point.
Insightful point. This kinda reminds me of stereotypical SV startups with only young employees. Without peers who are more experienced and often psychologically more well-equipped to handle adversity, you see a lot of situations that could otherwise be learning moments instead become blow ups.
I suppose that's not the only parallel. Absentee authority figures is another one.
I would say positive things about martial arts dojos, where the experienced students often practice with the less so students to pass down skills. At least my Judo one was like that.
> Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do.
I don't think that's true but I agree with your other points if we agree that emotional maturity isn't a true false stage and that there are domains for which one isn't as mature as in another domain.
For instance, I learned at a very young age (3 or 4) that hurting others was actually painful for the other part. Not from receiving it myself but from giving it. From then I could never engage in confrontation/retaliation dynamics which put me at odds with others.
One of the benefits of Montessori is you have kids with two years age difference in the same classroom. If you’re in the 8th grade then you’re in a class with 9th and 7th graders.
I don't think this is true across the board. In my experience, the broader culture can make a huge difference.
For instance, like many others, I was bullied every single day in middle and high school in the US. When I moved to NZ and went to high school(called "college" there), I was dumbstruck at how accepting people were of me, as someone who has been constantly bullied back in the US, that I had a hard time accepting it at first. I was so used to being an outcast that I didn't know how to handle it at first when normal kids would actually approach me in a non-confrontational way. By the end of the year, the most popular guy in the school was voluntarily helping me study for chemistry.
Now some of that experience may have been influenced by me being a foreigner, but my bullying was due to a combination of being nerdy and fat, so it would have made sense if at least some people bullied me in NZ. There was pretty much only one kid who didn't like me and had to make a show of it, but he was easily handled.
Put simply, I think that culture in the US and probably other western countries that are heavily US-influenced is woefully broken, but it isn't as apparent to the conscious mind because we've become very good at polishing turds. We love to paint over rot and create rules for ourselves that just sweep problems under the rug so that they only manifest in places out of our control, such as with the interactions between children.
To your point, though...
> Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do. You get feedback loops of bad behaviour, and put them in bubbles where their peers and their psychopathic games (like bullying) make up 100% of their reality.
This is true in more ways that you might have originally imagined. Young people, and really people of all ages IMO, should be learning from their elders. Instead, we put way too much emphasis on mere socialization and compatibility. In adulthood we're even worse in these categories in that we either socialize too much or too little, and fewer of us will tolerate anyone who doesn't tick off all our arbitrary boxes.
> The only consistent counterpoint I can think of are cousins, who are typically slightly older or younger, and are outside of kids' normal peer groups. As a result these are often very positive relationships.
Cousins, unlike siblings, aren't competing with their fellow cousins over the love of their own parents, so it makes sense that these relationships tend to be positive.
it's unfortunate most kids dont get a skilled mentor by middle school. I had friends that were older than me, and my uncle, both got me interested in tech/"hacking". eventually the school let some of us help do some tech support. its such a waste of time to stuff kids into a room with no direction, just to fulfill gen ed requirements so the school boards ranks better. I had a friend get hired into tech straight out of highschool without a degree while everyone else wasted time in undergrad
The paper cites the real-life case of Megan Meier, who hanged herself in 2007 after being bullied by people she thought were her friends — with the added twist of a mother orchestrating the social media bullying scheme.
Yeah. Parents and teachers are probably the people we should be training to behave better, not teenagers caught in a system they didn't design and often desperately wish they could escape.
Edit: I will add that a lot of my social problems in high school were rooted in or exacerbated by teachers holding me up as the example to hate on. They would brag about my high scores as if that somehow reflected positively on their teaching ability (it didn't) and then simultaneously act like if other people weren't doing as well as I was, it was because they weren't trying hard enough or something (disavowing their own responsibility for poor outcomes in the classroom).
That seems to be a norm in schools and is directly related to the described teen behavior in the article.
What is even more true is that the children often pick up behaviour from adults, especially at home and in abuse relationships. So it doesn't matter how much propaganda about bullying is spewed forth in school, when the real raising of children happen in other places.
For adults, bullying, injustice, unfairness and exclusion is just standard, normal behaviour, especially at top leadership.
What definition of bullying are they using? The article doesn't say. The actual paper [1] sidesteps the issue: "Accordingly, we sidestep the conceptual morass of bullying and focus instead on the broader term of aggression, which refers to behavior with the intent to harm, injure, or cause pain. We focus on several forms of peer aggression, including physical (e.g., hitting, kicking), verbal (e.g., name-calling, threats), and indirect aggression (e.g., spreading rumors, ostracism)."
Bullying used to just mean beating up people physically. That's changed. The US Government site on this says "Social bullying includes: Leaving someone out on purpose."[2] That's overreach. The US has freedom of association as a First Amendment right, and that right is not limited to adults.
The article conflates socially competitive behavior with bullying. So of course they find it as associated with friends or near-friends.
What are the rules of social competition? This is a classic subject. See any of Jane Austen's works.[3] Few people are taught this explicitly. Women used to be taught it in "finishing schools". It was part of the task of Oxford tutors to teach it. "My job is to make you a better bastard".
Right now, there's an anime running which teaches this: Jaku-Chara Tomozaki-kun.[4] It's also a regular theme in country and western music.
I say this as someone who was a nerd in the '70s, before it was cool, but the problem is, we have a bunch of children that needs to be taught many subjects to be productive citizens, at a level of expertise not seen in history. Their parents go to jobs during the day. What is a better solution than what we do right now? It's certainly not perfect but what can we do better?
In the past we had apprentice programs but youth learned one trade, little history, math, "social studies", other things we expect people to know.
We are trying an experiment right now due to the pandemic - remote learning. It exposes a digital divide for sure, but we can all see where that would be less of an issue in the future. It's being called a failure by parents, kids are falling behind, mental health issues are climbing. Kids, people in general, need some kind of social interaction for their health. So, back to school? Back to my original question? What can be better than what we do now?
It's a tricky one...
On the one hand I think teenagers (and some adults) don't always know they are being jerks / making others uncomfortable. And for them it might be fun to pick on others. It can be a thrill and give them an ego boost.
They might not get how damaging /horrible they are being or might not care.
On the other hand, some people may have no experience of defending themselves particularly against non-verbal attacks.
I remember my response to a guy picking on me in highschool was to wait until class finished and then I started a fight with. I won. And he never bothered me again.
But honestly I had no clue how to defend myself verbally. And it's taken years to learn how to be better at that.
I think teenagers would gain from learning how to negotiate better with their peers/handle people better. It's the verbal abuse that's a particular issue.
Encouraging people to be decent along with civic classes may help too.
I can not state that the article is wrong, but I will provide one anecdote against the article. Virtually all of the bullying I have experienced and witnessed has occurred between bullies on a high social ladder and bullied on a low social ladder. I feel like there is a wide misconception that "most bullying occurs among peers", as the headline of this article claims. It's a very convenient idea, because it frees adults from a lot of responsibility. "Boys will be boys" and "they are just bullying each other", like it's no big deal, so adults, conveniently, don't have to do much about it. This kind of messaging is very harmful, because it enables the bullying to continue, often for years, and in many cases ending in death. Furthermore, it's not only harmful, it's (based on my experiences) false.
> The study focuses, instead, on a broader definition of peer aggression — theorizing that aggression can actually improve the social status of the aggressor.
in my schooling (eastern Germany 90s/00s) I haven't witnessed any bullying. I only. know it from EVERY high school movie/ TV show I have seen. how much is the media portraying U.S. reality and how much is media influencing lived culture?
We had an intern from Ohio (in Israel, I went to school in Soviet Union and Ukraine, so have no experience of US school system) who explained to me a concept of "zero-tolerance policy to bullying" as it was applied in his school: while only one person harasses/beats another it's OK; the moment the second one starts to fight back, the policy kicks in and in worst case the second will get suspended, in best case both get suspended.
I guess reasonable amount of mutual violence between peers will raise the price of bullying others for fun and profit.
As @animats points out, the research is not using accepted Olweus’s definition of bullying.
Instead they use aggression and bind it to bullying.
This very much scares me, specially how Kinney's aggression includes verbal and indirect aggression.
There are clear cases where most can agree something is verbal aggression. My fear is in defining the edges of these verbal exchanges.
Who decides the words said were aggressive?
In essence, the research reads like a further lowering tolerance bar for others' verbal expression.
In a dystopian world, the solution would be where all communications is passed through a system, and pre-approved prior to transmitting it to the other party.
Sort of like some system, say a social (media) service where we only display pleasing and pleasant images and text with appropriate tiny pictures representing positive feelings, while the service provider shelters us from aggressive thoughts.
personal anecdote: I was in the grocery store waiting for sliced cheese. The customer that was at the counter, asked for something and got into a conversation with the clerk while he was slicing, but I could not make out most of it. I heard "blah blah, and you can make blah blah great again!" The man behind me start yelling, how the customer at the counter was a (insert curse words, lots of WWII references), and cheese customer should die right there, we should all lynch cheese customer, and on and on...
The cheese customer's words were verbal aggression to the yelling man. Turns out cheese customer was talking about some engine oil for the clerk's high mileage car.
Was the cheese customer a bully? Was the yelling man behind me a victim of aggression? Was the yelling man bullied by the cheese customer? What if the discussion was between the cheese customer and yelling victim?
I am not trying to be flippant as these incidents no longer are theoretical, "oh this will never happen" scenario. I have seen other similar violent reactions from people just when the "wrong words" or words deemed by the hearer aggressive were uttered.
Consider a herd of grazing mammals. All young, are by the very nature of the stage of life, easy prey. Now imagine social capabilities - the ability to communicate distress and cooperation to others.
Anyone not capable of these abilities, with any weakness at all, could be singled out - to be fed to the wolves. Social abilities become a weapon, to vandalize an outlier of the group.
This theory should be easily testable. If another member of society - which signals frailty (old, handicapped, etc.) is present to this group, the bullying should significantly reduced or even cease.
I'm wondering about whether this translates into work. In a sense, corporate ladders are social ladders.
Someone might be difficult to work with through insecurity. If they assume that showing weakness hinders their ability to climb the corporate ladder, but are not confident in their abilities, then this insecurity may translate into bullying tendencies. They may seek validation through leadership, but find this only heightens their feeling of inadequacy, and resort to managerial force over discussion.
We treat those we're closest to the worst on a day to day basis. I'm constantly amazed at the casual politeness and optimistic interpretation my wife lends to complete strangers, but looks at me sideways every time I suggest anything.
PG touches on this in Hackers and Painters. The social hierarchy in high school is a zero sum game that encourages people to down others to get higher on the ladder. And if you’re not the one bullying... you’re the one being bullied.
And a similar strategy plays out with harassment and even to an extent racism in high school. Oftentimes it's a strategic play by someone with high aggression and low empathy. That was my experience.
However, we're being told by the dominant Zeitgeist at the moment that it's language we should adjust and control and police, anti bias training and such. It'll take a few years for the blank slatism to be pushed aside and let science back in: hierarchies and competition are partially biological and begin in childhood, independent of what anyone teaches anyone.
The blurb seems to indicate a gender-neutral view of bullying. Females and males employ fundamentally different techniques, aggression, threats, and the like to socially jockey for position.
I'd argue in high school female social status is arranged into stratified blobs but the dominance within those blobs is fluid.
Male social status is a dominance hierarchy of blobs, and males within the resulting strata will self organize into sub-hierarchies to protect against inter-strata conflict.
The other main difference is that females employ social status threats.
If you define bullying as any act that would upset a Karen on twitter, then the highest rate of 'bullying' will trivially occur between people who interact with each other most often.
[+] [-] rsp1984|5 years ago|reply
What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name), give them BS tasks for years and call it "education", the people in charge prefer to make the bullying problem one of the "socially disadvantaged" fringe groups, which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs" and other pedagogical bullshit that target said fringe groups, so they can say "look, we're doing something!". Utterly disgusting.
[+] [-] colanderman|5 years ago|reply
Particularly, in my experience, bullying tends to be exacerbated during periods of social uncertainty, such as a change in the class cohort. The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups.
[+] [-] 1experience|5 years ago|reply
In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not. Schools and prisons are closed systems where the social hierarchy inevitably gets established and constantly contested.
As someone who has been on both sides of the game telling kids not to fight back is counterproductive. If the situation is handled correctly it can become an incredible opportunity for growth.
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbg721|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|5 years ago|reply
Everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullying. How to recognize it, how to combat it, how to build relationships and cultures that are proof against it. And if there are things we want everybody to learn, school doesn't seem like a bad place to start.
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
To be clear-- even if you had published your 2nd paragraph prior to this research being published, that wouldn't qualify as something that is "completely obvious." At the very least you would have needed to give a hypothesis as to why it is you think the current anti-bullying programs cannot work. That hypothesis would have needed to at least include something like, "in my experience people end up bullying their friends most of the time."
Otherwise, you can't convincingly claim the truth was obvious and people who didn't get it were likely pretending. Without the research, everyone just shrinks back to become little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world.
Edit: clarification
[+] [-] kiba|5 years ago|reply
Obvious how? Not everybody is socially astute. Granted, I had never been bullied in high school but I wasn't much of a social operator.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|5 years ago|reply
But a school is also where you learn to read, write, speak, maths, some physics, some chemistry, etc.
In doubt I put my kid, from a very early age, in a top-notch private school in english (she's not a native english speaker).
My thinking being that, even if it's daycare/prison where nothing is taught (which I don't think is the case but I'm at least entertaining the idea), she's at least learning to speak english fluently : )
[+] [-] telchar|5 years ago|reply
Could schools handle bullying better? Probably. But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable. To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.
[+] [-] imbnwa|5 years ago|reply
I'm surprised more people haven't read Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", it sheds light on the way the prison became a blueprint for organizing labor, education, our very social fabric
[+] [-] austincheney|5 years ago|reply
The reasons for this are deliberate.
1. Parents are assholes. In poor areas many patents couldn’t give two shits about spending extra time to contribute to their child’s education. In rich areas the parents are at war with the teachers either because their little angel can do no wrong or because there is serious money on the table for scholarships.
2. Child performance is measured in numbers devised by standardized tests. The average of that performance is a primary determinate factor in state funding.
3. It would be nice if we taught children to think and to form original output. The sad reality is that most people, including adults, are utterly incapable of originality. Attempts to force that square peg into a round hole leaves many children behind while simultaneously confusing and infuriating parents.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ravenstine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|5 years ago|reply
I think it should be a known idea to anyone who has ever seen a movie where a previously uncool kid gets accepted in to the cool kids group.
[+] [-] plaidfuji|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rawland|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|5 years ago|reply
And more employment for more teachers/guidance-counselors, etc.
[+] [-] underwater|5 years ago|reply
The major figures in most kid's lives are parents and teachers, who are in an authority position; siblings, who have a complex relationship that often turns competitive; and their school friends.
Kids are missing a chance to socialise with children who are older than them, learn from adults who are not in an authority role, and to care for and mentor younger children.
Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do. You get feedback loops of bad behaviour, and put them in bubbles where their peers and their psychopathic games (like bullying) make up 100% of their reality.
The only consistent counterpoint I can think of are cousins, who are typically slightly older or younger, and are outside of kids' normal peer groups. As a result these are often very positive relationships.
[+] [-] msluyter|5 years ago|reply
One reason we chose a private girl's school for our daughter is that, along with traditional (horizontal) grades, it has "sister groups," which are vertical slices of girls from varying grade levels. These meet and socialize throughout the year.
[+] [-] vinceguidry|5 years ago|reply
And when I started bullying the younger kids I would hang out with, I was able to reflect on it later and stop being such an ass. Course, it would come out anyway, but not being trapped in one single group of friends and having to derive my social identity from that made it much easier to self-adjust. Looking back on those years, it's pretty obvious now just how much of what I experienced back then was that pecking order mindset.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|5 years ago|reply
Other point about cousin relationships: interaction typically happens in a context that includes other adults, another moderating influence. I think that also runs in favor of your point.
[+] [-] yowlingcat|5 years ago|reply
I suppose that's not the only parallel. Absentee authority figures is another one.
[+] [-] Tyr42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|5 years ago|reply
I don't think that's true but I agree with your other points if we agree that emotional maturity isn't a true false stage and that there are domains for which one isn't as mature as in another domain.
For instance, I learned at a very young age (3 or 4) that hurting others was actually painful for the other part. Not from receiving it myself but from giving it. From then I could never engage in confrontation/retaliation dynamics which put me at odds with others.
[+] [-] Zelphyr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|5 years ago|reply
For instance, like many others, I was bullied every single day in middle and high school in the US. When I moved to NZ and went to high school(called "college" there), I was dumbstruck at how accepting people were of me, as someone who has been constantly bullied back in the US, that I had a hard time accepting it at first. I was so used to being an outcast that I didn't know how to handle it at first when normal kids would actually approach me in a non-confrontational way. By the end of the year, the most popular guy in the school was voluntarily helping me study for chemistry.
Now some of that experience may have been influenced by me being a foreigner, but my bullying was due to a combination of being nerdy and fat, so it would have made sense if at least some people bullied me in NZ. There was pretty much only one kid who didn't like me and had to make a show of it, but he was easily handled.
Put simply, I think that culture in the US and probably other western countries that are heavily US-influenced is woefully broken, but it isn't as apparent to the conscious mind because we've become very good at polishing turds. We love to paint over rot and create rules for ourselves that just sweep problems under the rug so that they only manifest in places out of our control, such as with the interactions between children.
To your point, though...
> Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do. You get feedback loops of bad behaviour, and put them in bubbles where their peers and their psychopathic games (like bullying) make up 100% of their reality.
This is true in more ways that you might have originally imagined. Young people, and really people of all ages IMO, should be learning from their elders. Instead, we put way too much emphasis on mere socialization and compatibility. In adulthood we're even worse in these categories in that we either socialize too much or too little, and fewer of us will tolerate anyone who doesn't tick off all our arbitrary boxes.
> The only consistent counterpoint I can think of are cousins, who are typically slightly older or younger, and are outside of kids' normal peer groups. As a result these are often very positive relationships.
Cousins, unlike siblings, aren't competing with their fellow cousins over the love of their own parents, so it makes sense that these relationships tend to be positive.
[+] [-] hi5eyes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
Yeah. Parents and teachers are probably the people we should be training to behave better, not teenagers caught in a system they didn't design and often desperately wish they could escape.
Edit: I will add that a lot of my social problems in high school were rooted in or exacerbated by teachers holding me up as the example to hate on. They would brag about my high scores as if that somehow reflected positively on their teaching ability (it didn't) and then simultaneously act like if other people weren't doing as well as I was, it was because they weren't trying hard enough or something (disavowing their own responsibility for poor outcomes in the classroom).
That seems to be a norm in schools and is directly related to the described teen behavior in the article.
[+] [-] _y5hn|5 years ago|reply
For adults, bullying, injustice, unfairness and exclusion is just standard, normal behaviour, especially at top leadership.
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
Bullying used to just mean beating up people physically. That's changed. The US Government site on this says "Social bullying includes: Leaving someone out on purpose."[2] That's overreach. The US has freedom of association as a First Amendment right, and that right is not limited to adults.
The article conflates socially competitive behavior with bullying. So of course they find it as associated with friends or near-friends.
What are the rules of social competition? This is a classic subject. See any of Jane Austen's works.[3] Few people are taught this explicitly. Women used to be taught it in "finishing schools". It was part of the task of Oxford tutors to teach it. "My job is to make you a better bastard".
Right now, there's an anime running which teaches this: Jaku-Chara Tomozaki-kun.[4] It's also a regular theme in country and western music.
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/712972
[2] https://www.stopbullying.gov/bullying/what-is-bullying
[3] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom-tier_Character_Tomozaki
[+] [-] ralphc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SunlightEdge|5 years ago|reply
On the other hand, some people may have no experience of defending themselves particularly against non-verbal attacks.
I remember my response to a guy picking on me in highschool was to wait until class finished and then I started a fight with. I won. And he never bothered me again. But honestly I had no clue how to defend myself verbally. And it's taken years to learn how to be better at that.
I think teenagers would gain from learning how to negotiate better with their peers/handle people better. It's the verbal abuse that's a particular issue.
Encouraging people to be decent along with civic classes may help too.
[+] [-] baobabKoodaa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dandanua|5 years ago|reply
It looks like a breakthrough!
/s
[+] [-] thrawn0r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helge9210|5 years ago|reply
I guess reasonable amount of mutual violence between peers will raise the price of bullying others for fun and profit.
[+] [-] _zamorano_|5 years ago|reply
Most of the bullying I remember from childhood was mostly of a boy already high in the social status, against one low in the ranks.
The receiving guy was not a threat to the giving one.
[+] [-] tvphan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WaitWaitWha|5 years ago|reply
As @animats points out, the research is not using accepted Olweus’s definition of bullying.
Instead they use aggression and bind it to bullying.
This very much scares me, specially how Kinney's aggression includes verbal and indirect aggression.
There are clear cases where most can agree something is verbal aggression. My fear is in defining the edges of these verbal exchanges.
Who decides the words said were aggressive?
In essence, the research reads like a further lowering tolerance bar for others' verbal expression.
In a dystopian world, the solution would be where all communications is passed through a system, and pre-approved prior to transmitting it to the other party.
Sort of like some system, say a social (media) service where we only display pleasing and pleasant images and text with appropriate tiny pictures representing positive feelings, while the service provider shelters us from aggressive thoughts.
personal anecdote: I was in the grocery store waiting for sliced cheese. The customer that was at the counter, asked for something and got into a conversation with the clerk while he was slicing, but I could not make out most of it. I heard "blah blah, and you can make blah blah great again!" The man behind me start yelling, how the customer at the counter was a (insert curse words, lots of WWII references), and cheese customer should die right there, we should all lynch cheese customer, and on and on...
The cheese customer's words were verbal aggression to the yelling man. Turns out cheese customer was talking about some engine oil for the clerk's high mileage car.
Was the cheese customer a bully? Was the yelling man behind me a victim of aggression? Was the yelling man bullied by the cheese customer? What if the discussion was between the cheese customer and yelling victim?
I am not trying to be flippant as these incidents no longer are theoretical, "oh this will never happen" scenario. I have seen other similar violent reactions from people just when the "wrong words" or words deemed by the hearer aggressive were uttered.
[+] [-] PicassoCTs|5 years ago|reply
Anyone not capable of these abilities, with any weakness at all, could be singled out - to be fed to the wolves. Social abilities become a weapon, to vandalize an outlier of the group.
This theory should be easily testable. If another member of society - which signals frailty (old, handicapped, etc.) is present to this group, the bullying should significantly reduced or even cease.
[+] [-] ddek|5 years ago|reply
Someone might be difficult to work with through insecurity. If they assume that showing weakness hinders their ability to climb the corporate ladder, but are not confident in their abilities, then this insecurity may translate into bullying tendencies. They may seek validation through leadership, but find this only heightens their feeling of inadequacy, and resort to managerial force over discussion.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuhayeer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|5 years ago|reply
And a similar strategy plays out with harassment and even to an extent racism in high school. Oftentimes it's a strategic play by someone with high aggression and low empathy. That was my experience.
However, we're being told by the dominant Zeitgeist at the moment that it's language we should adjust and control and police, anti bias training and such. It'll take a few years for the blank slatism to be pushed aside and let science back in: hierarchies and competition are partially biological and begin in childhood, independent of what anyone teaches anyone.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
I'd argue in high school female social status is arranged into stratified blobs but the dominance within those blobs is fluid.
Male social status is a dominance hierarchy of blobs, and males within the resulting strata will self organize into sub-hierarchies to protect against inter-strata conflict.
The other main difference is that females employ social status threats.
Males use outright physical threats.
[+] [-] alexashka|5 years ago|reply