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Tai Asks Why

Season 2 – What’s the science behind bullying?

VOICE: This is a CBC podcast.

TAI: Ok, guys, so I wanna talk about bullying. For me back when I was in grade two, I was bullied. This one person made most of the air just miserable. One day he just decided to torment me.

[Music]

TAI: I think he wanted to just drive a wedge between me and a friend. The worst part was we used to be really good friends. We were like, really, really close. And they just became randomly evil. So one day we were friends and then the next day he just flipped and he just came a jerk. So what's up with that? Like, why do people just become bullies? And it's not just me. Bullying is everywhere. I looked into some of the statistics and it's not looking good for us guys. At least one in three students in Canada have reported being bullied recently, and the rate of discrimination experienced by students who identifies LGBTQ plus is three times higher than heterosexual students. And girls are more likely to be bullied on the internet than boys. So put that, guys.

[Music]

TAI: And the worst part is that this stuff doesn't end as you grow up. Forty percent of Canadian workers experience bullying on a weekly basis. But why? Like, why are these numbers so high? Is there some sort of evolutionary, societal or biological purpose to it? Is it something in our brains, something that we've been born with? What is the scientific reason for bullying?

[Tai Theme Song]

TAI: I'm Tai and this is my podcast. Tai asks why. There are just so many good questions out there that you really want to get answered. What is déjà vu? How do songs get stuck in your head? What are animals saying to each other? When the dinosaurs died, how did other animals survive? Why is space so dark? And what is the science of bullying? So I'm assuming all of you have been bullied at least once in your life.

FRIENDS: Yes.

TAI: These are my friends. Piper, Finn, Kaden and Zoe. We're all kids here and we all have dealt with it at some point in our lives.

FINN: For me, oftentimes I feel like my friends needed me for their entertainment. It would be weird because if they would be like teasing me or something and I would be like, oh, but these are my friends. These are nice people. Why are they bullying me?

KADEN: For me, it's sort of something that I'm currently experiencing. It's just someone at my school in my class who, they'll just jokingly sort of like shove me, and I think they take it too far. Sometimes. And they just don't really know when to stop.

PIPER: I I just think like for me, there is just like the little things that kind of like build up. Like there's this one person who kind of criticizes me like about maybe my grades or something like that and say like that I'm not doing well, just like making up stuff, which I don't think is very nice.

[Music]

TAI: Yeah guys, it's not a good feeling at all. It sucks, you know, and really bad bullying can actually affect your life for a really long time. I took a listen through some recent CBC stories on bullying and it made me really, really sad to hear from grown-ups who are still haunted by these harrowing bullying experiences that they had when they were young.

VOICE 1: I was a small kid and being a small kid, I was bullied a lot. I was an easy target. I constantly get pushed around, punched, kicked, books thrown on the hallway floor. I changed schools a couple of times but the bullying followed me and I dropped out of school at 16 years old.

VOICE 2: But three of them after school would pin me down on the ground and push me down and hit me and kick me. I really became a shell of who I probably could have been. I was quite an emotional wreck.

VOICE 3: I think it's something you just never really recover from. So I think, you know, in a way where we're sort of playing with fire when we think that this is just something that everybody goes through or many people go through and there aren't consequences.

TAI: If bullying is so painful and so hurtful for so many people, why would anybody ever do it, ever?

[Music]

TAI: I found someone who I think could help me get to the bottom of this.

TAI/TONY VOLK: Hello. Hi Tony, nice to meet you.

TAI: This is Tony Volk. He's a professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. He's a developmental psychologist and he spent a lot of time studying bullying. His approach is multi-disciplinary, so he thinks about it from an evolutionary, biological and historical perspective. He even as his own lab where he studies it, so I'm here to figure out what he's learned.

TONY VOLK: So what got you interested in bullying?

TAI: I was bullied. It's pretty unoriginal, I know.

TONY VOLK: Well, it's good motivation.

TAI: Mm hmm.

TONY VOLK: And you're not alone. Bullying is probably ubiquitous amongst life itself. I mean, you've got the pecking order in chickens. The dominance hierarchy in wolves. Chimpanzees. It could also probably by many definitions, see it amongst trees that compete with each other.

TAI: Hold up hold up hold up hold up, so even trees are bullying each other, is nothing sacred people?

TONY VOLK: Some bushes will inject toxins into more developing species beside them. So the strategy of being aggressive to weaker individuals is for better, for worse. Part of the evolutionary strategy in general.

TAI: This is the big thing about bullying. Tony explains that it's different from just regular aggression because it's based off of a power imbalance. Bullies always have more power than the person they're bullying.

TONY VOLK: And this power imbalance doesn't necessarily mean physical size. It can be anything that there's a weakness, the victim can't defend themselves against. So it could be social, it could be their appearance, the way they talk, the way they look. If you're really popular and you attack somebody who's as popular or more popular, that's going to be a lot different for you than if you target somebody who's weaker.

TAI: It's just you kind of want to pick on someone that's low risk, high rewards.

TONY VOLK: Yeah, exactly. That's that's a perfect way of putting it. It wouldn't be really effective if a grade 12 went in and started beating up a grade 1. Right, nobody would be impressed by that because that's not a sign that you're tough or that you can defend yourself. So it's really a way of intimidating others by putting on a display that on the one hand shows that you can be dangerous, tough, but on the other hand is not likely to cost you anything. For humans in particular, it helps us get a few different goals, either resources, so things that you need like food, lunch money, the best spot in the playground, a scholarship. It can be your reputation or your popularity. And then reproduction, which is dating and mating opportunities that allow people to pass on their genes. So unfortunately, the evidence suggests that bullying works and getting all three of those things.

[Music]

TAI: So it sounds like the reason people are bullying is because it helps them get stuff. You know, they take advantage of these people that have less power than them and they use them to get ahead in life. But that's not really right because it seems like it's making bullying like a good thing, which I know it's not because my moral compass is decent, I'd like to say, and that stuff ain't right. Tony agrees that it's not as great as it seems and there is a flaw in this whole scheme.

TONY VOLK: The problem with it is that as with everything, it has a cost. So it has a downside. And that downside is that you're burning bridges for cooperation later in the future. So in many ways, it's kind of a me first right now strategy in that while we know bullies are rated as being more popular, they're almost always rated as being less liked. And that makes sense, right. You don't want to mess with them, but do you really want to have them as your homework partner? Do you really want to go and stay in their hotel room if you go on a class trip? You know, so you can respect their power and that allows them to do certain things. But in the long run, especially if they lose their power, then they're not very appealing for other people to be with. So it's a strategy that has some benefits, but also some costs as well.

[Music]

TAI: For me as a person on the bullied side, it hurts and it makes my life frustrating, sad, hard, all these negative emotions. So, yeah, there are costs for bullies and so many more costs for the victims. Which sucks the most cause, you know, they're victims like they didn't even want this.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: And there are interesting experiments that neuroscientists have done to show that being excluded, being socially rejected or ostracized have particularly intense effects on young people.

TAI: This is Suparna Choudry.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: I'm an assistant professor in the division of social and transcultural psychiatry at McGill University.

TAI: Suparna thinks that the cost to bullying, not just socially, but also in our brains, especially when we're young, which is not great cause I'm young.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: In the last say, 20 years, neuroscientists have demonstrated how the brain goes through a really pronounced period of development around puberty and adolescence. And the brain is especially responsive to the social environment during adolescence.

TAI: Probably because since you're like totally changing as a person, you know, you have to kind of be a little bit more aware.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: Yeah, I'm thinking about your question about bullying. It's not then surprising that harmful social experiences have especially deep effects on the developing brain. And we know that, you know, being bullied persistently is a really stressful experience that is a predictor of later development of psychosis. So psychosis being the experience of losing touch with reality and quite a disturbing way so that you may see things that other people don't see or hear things that other people don't hear. And bullying can be a risk factor for the development of psychosis.

TAI: Mhmm. So this psychosis thing seems kind of scary. What are some other effects that can happen if you're chronically bullied or just, you know, if you're like bullied really hard or.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: Yeah. So, well, that can lead to depression and anxiety. It can lower young people's self-esteem. So it it it can be a part of childhood trauma, of adolescent trauma. And the outcomes can be enduring in one person's lifetime and they may even be transmitted into the next generation.

[Music]

TAI: It's so weird to think about like if you're bullied like really badly, you could affect your kids and maybe their kids and their kids and just all of your lineage. In order to understand how this works,Suparna had to teach me a whole new word. Yeah, I looked up online about this a little bit and I saw something called epigenetic epigenetics.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: Yeah.

TAI: Epigenetics.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: Epigenetics. It's very exciting science, now telling us that we can no longer think about the effects of our experiences of adverse of negative experiences as either social or biological. They are both. So the social world that we live in, the lived experiences that we have from the get go from the time in utero, shape our genes, the shaping our brains.

TAI: So what does this have to do with bullying,.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: Social experiences, early life experiences whether negative or positive, leave these lasting imprints on our bodies, on our genes. And so bullying, an obvious adverse experience during early life, during many stages of our lives, can change later experiences and our abilities to deal with certain situations by modifying our genes. In fact, there are some recent studies. They compared twins that were bullied with twins that weren't bullied, and they showed structural differences in the genome between twins that were bullied and twins that weren't. And these are the twins that were bullied and had these structural changes in their genome, went on to show different ways of managing stressful experiences in their lives.

[Music]

TAI: Well, I feel bad for all the twins who were bullied, you know, it's so sad to think if you get bullied a lot, it can have life-changing impacts on you and it can change your genome, like this is like DNA, molecular, like look under a microscope stuff. It's really scary. It just it brings me back to my main question, like, why do people bully if it has these horrible long term effects, are so people just born to bully?

KADEN: Well, there's always a different sort of levels, but I think always the root of it is like feeling insecure. And there's always like feel like there's someone that need to, like, lash out at or like put your pain on to them. Yeah. It always comes back down to just that. That's always the source that you have pain and you need to put it on someone else to feel like it's not drowning you.

FINN: Yeah. I find bullying a bit weird because people will tell you like a bully is a bad person, but it's more complicated than that. You don't know what's going on in their lives.

TAI: Yeah. Actually, that does kind of make sense. So maybe they weren't born hardwired to bully, but something happened to them that was hard and it turned them into bullies.

[Music]

TAI: Suparna says that the latest research going around says it's actually not one or the other.

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: We used to think about behaviors and causes of behaviors in terms of nature or nurture the brain or the environment, epigenetics and also the latest research on brain development. Reminds us that these distinctions, these divisions we make between bodies and their environments don't really make sense anymore. They're deeply intertwined.

TAI: Remember Tony from before? Well, he agrees with Suparna that it's not a nature versus nurture type thing, you know.

TONY VOLK: You know, it's the right combination of individual characteristics and the environment that causes somebody to bully by. Right. I mean, it leads towards bullying. And an analogy I like to use is what's more important to make chocolate chip cookies? Do you need chocolate chips? That's the individual characteristics or you need an oven and that's the environment. And the answer is you need both of them together. And so what makes somebody bully is the right combination of maybe a permissive environment that's really competitive and the person themselves having a personality that's competitive and the skill set to dominate other people. And when you put those two things together, then you're having a real high risk for bullying.

TAI: And that makes a bad cookie.

TONY VOLK: That's excellent. I'm gonna use that. Thank you. I'm totally using that title as a good analogy.

[Music]

TAI: So guys I'm back in the studio and just so I can make something clear, it was an analogy ok guys, like when it comes to dessert world, there's no such thing as a bad cookie. But when it comes to bullies, Tony actually thinks there's two different types of bad cookies. One is what he calls a bully victim. So that's like the kind my friend Cayden described. The person who's maybe a victim of bullying themselves cause sad, upset, mad, all the negative stuffs, they just lash out at other people.

TONY VOLK: It's about 20 percent of bullies are what we call bully victims. And these are kids who are genuinely victimized by more powerful individuals and then go on to do it themselves because they're angry, they have poor self-esteem, poor emotional control, and those fit the stereotype that many people have as a bully. But as I said, there are only about 20 percent.

TAI: The other kind is what he calls pure bullies. Those are the real bad cookies.

TONY VOLK: Right. So the captain of the football team, the head cheerleader. These are people who typically aren't being picked on by other people. They don't have deficits in self-esteem and mental health. And what they lack is a sense of humility, which gives them this personality trait that's really predatory. right if you're if you're low in humility, the opposite of that is arrogant. You know, you think you're better than others, and if you take that perspective, it's pretty easy to understand how that makes you want to take advantage of other people, because while you're better, you're smarter, you're better looking. So why shouldn't you get things that somebody else does if that's your personality trait, it's a much better predictor than things like anger, impulsivity or even low empathy.

TAI: So I guess all you really need to do is be humble. Yeah. I'm just kidding, guys.

[Music]

TAI: I know it's not that simple. There's all the layers and the personality things and the environment. It's really complicated. You can't just wake up one day and just be like, you know what I'm gonna be a totally different person with a totally different personality. So with all these different factors, it's hard to see how we can ever truly get rid of bullying. So do you have any tips to help reduce bullying?

TONY VOLK: Well, things that we know that reduce bullying are on the parents side. Knowing what your kids are up to and this doesn't mean that you demand it means that you have a relationship where they talk to you, and then parents can step in. At the school level there are different interventions that tend to work better for younger kids. Empathy training works better for younger kids. Older bullies tend to be more predatory and empathy training doesn't work very well. Getting the peer group involved, that can help as well. So peers stop supporting them and stand up to them. That doesn't work for popular bullies, which are unfortunately most bullies, but it does work for a particular bully victims.

TAI: Tony says that for the pure bullies, you need to take a slightly different approach.

TONY VOLK: Really encouraging people to be humble, right, and the fact that you can compete, you can get things that you deserve, but you don't see yourself as better than others. You just somebody who has a different set of skills or talents that's just as valuable as everybody else around you. And if you can shift people along that way, then you can make a significant difference. We have a program that we're piloting where we give students jobs in the classroom that allow them to get visibility, popularity, greeting people coming in the room, for example. So recognizing that this person who has this arrogant drive wants to be seen as a central figure. So if we can make them a central figure in a good way, a leader who stands up to bullies, a leader who greets people in the class, you're kind of killing two birds with one stone and that they get what they want, but nobody gets hurt.

[Music]

TAI: Tony's method makes sense, you know, give these kids an alternative so they still feel like they're climbing the ladder of popularity. But in a good way, you know, not beat up this kid, be cool way. But even if programs like that start working, it just kind of scary to think back about what Suparna said about epigenetics and how if you're bullied, it carries on into your genome, so would we be able to reverse it? Or is it just permanent damage, can it be undone? Would it be possible, best-case scenario for us to just evolve bullying out of our genomes?

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: So this is interesting because you're touching on the idea that these things may not be fixed. And the good news in a way is that epigenetic mechanisms and developing brains, they suggest that these processes are reversible. So adverse experiences like bullying or discrimination shape our genomes in our brains as they develop. But there's some suggestion that these things can be undone to some degree and that we can develop interventions during sensitive periods of the lifespan that can undo the lasting effects of these adverse situations.

TAI: But is it possible, like best-case scenario, one out of three billion timelines? Would it be possible for us to get rid of bullying?

SUPARNA CHOUDRY: I just don't know how

TAI: That's not a no.

TONY VOLK: Completely eliminated, probably not, but reduce it significantly, yes. We live in a much less violent time than we did in the past. That's in the past if I was insulted by another man, I could challenge him to go outside and have a duel at 10 paces and one of us would kill the other one over our honor. That's something that is now laughable. We don't do that kind of behavior. So I think if we keep pushing against bullying, we have initiatives like the Me Too Movement ,rights for minorities and indigenous groups, LGBTQ and these are all people who have that power imbalance, and so they're more easily bullied. Then we can start reducing bullying to very low levels. The science shows that while bullying makes you popular, kids who are powerful and nice, powerful and cooperative are even more popular. Cooperation almost always is better than competition in the long run.

TAI: You hear that bullies cooperation is the better long term strategy. Bullying doesn't get you anywhere.

[Music]

TAI: Whoo guys I have hope and bullying could be gone. I know now that bullies are bad cookies cause a complex combination their brains, personalities and the environments they grow up in. And we know the brain can be changed by bullying, but it can be unchanged or you can change it again if we do the right well-placed interventions. So it might not be a lost cause guys. Maybe we don't need this whole hierarchy thing in the first place like maybe we don't need people on top and people on bottom. Maybe we can just have people being people, you know, list this with my little brother Kien thinks.

KIEN: I think we just like need to grow up in a world where everyone is equal cause that's not definitely not true right now because racism and sexism, I think are a type of bullying, and that's just because of differences and unequality. So if we just if everyone becomes equal, not the same, but like everyone has the same problems. So you can't really bully them for it cause it's just normal. Then bullying will go down 94.62135%.

TAI: OK.

VOICE: I'm Tyler Baker. Make us all sweet. We got a flavour that no one could eat. Give us some sugar, give us some crush. A scrumptious snack you could eat after lunch, oh Tyler Baker. Make us all sweet. Make us feel tasty, a delicious treat. Right now our chocolate is actually raisin. Instead of butter, we're using margarine. We got a case of the bad cookie blues.

TAI: Hahaha I'm Tyler Baker. I'm here at the oven. These bullied cookies just need some lovin'. A pinch of kindness, a dash of good friendship. And three heaping spoonfuls of humility. I'm gonna fix your bad cookie blues. Thank you so much for listening I'm Tai Poole. The show is produced by Veronica Simmonds and Amanda Buckiewicz. Our digital producer is Judy Gu. Today, my guests were Tony Volk, Suparna Choudry, my friends Zoe, Piper, Kaden, Finn, and my little bro Kien. The theme music is by Johnny Spence another big thanks to Johnny for helping me write and record the bullying song.

KIEN: Next time on Tai Asks Why: Dinosaurs?

VOICE 2: How do we explain what survives and what doesn't after this event?

TAI: Till next time I'm Tai, keep asking why.

[Music]

TAI: Hey there are you a teacher or friend of a teacher or just ever so slightly know a teacher because if you are you can use this podcast in your classroom. We got teaching guys available for free, including things like lesson plans, handouts, videos, homework, we got it all. They're written by teachers across Canada so you don't have to worry about them not being legit. But of course, if you want, you can change them up for different courses and curriculums. You know, all is good. So if you want to learn more about this. Head to our Web site www.cbc.ca/TaiAsksWhy to learn more.

VOICE: For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca/podcasts

TRANSCRIPT: Tai Asks Why - Season 2: What is the science behind bullying?

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