{"id":17334,"date":"2012-10-15T11:38:06","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T16:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17334"},"modified":"2012-10-15T11:40:28","modified_gmt":"2012-10-15T16:40:28","slug":"jonathan-kay-on-bullying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/10\/15\/jonathan-kay-on-bullying\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Kay on bullying"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his <a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2012\/10\/15\/jonathan-kay-bullying-is-horrible-wrenching-sometimes-fatal-and-perfectly-natural\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>National Post<\/em><\/a> column, he responds to a fellow journalist&#8217;s column on the topic of bullying:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The appetite to bully cannot be treated as a social sickness, or the product of maladaptive psychological development \u2014 which is how it is universally depicted in the media, and in government-funded public-service announcements. Bullying is in our genes. And any effort to fight it must reflect that fact.<\/p>\n<p>The reason that bullying has become part of human evolutionary psychology is that it works \u2014 for both males and females \u2014 as a strategy to increase one\u2019s attractiveness to the opposite sex, one\u2019s perceived social status, and the cohesiveness of one\u2019s social alliances.<\/p>\n<p>In movies, bullies are shown to be wounded individuals whose bullying is a perverse symptom of the pain that\u2019s been inflicted on them by abusive parents inhabiting poor and broken homes, or by more dominant figures in their social pecking order. There is no evidentiary basis for this stereotype. In fact, research cited by Anthony Volk, Joseph Camilleri, Andrew Dane and Zopito Marini in a 2012 <em>Aggressive Behavior<\/em> journal article indicate that bullying-induced social dominance is correlated with reduced stress and improved physical health. Amazingly, \u201cbullying is also positively linked with other positive mental traits such as \u2026 cognitive empathy, leadership, social competence, and self-efficacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>The strategy works: Studies show that boys who bully other boys, on average, gain status with girls, who perceive the boys as more dominant. And girls who bully, on average, receive more positive attention from boys.<\/p>\n<p>As the aforementioned authors report, \u201cDominance has been found to be positively associated with both bullying and peer nominations of dating popularity among adolescents. Bullying is also positively correlated with peer nominations of power, social prominence, student and teacher ratings of perceived popularity and peer leadership\u201d \u2014 all of which translate to social capital, which in turn means social or mating opportunities with the opposite sex.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>An earlier post on this topic is <a href=\"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/03\/31\/nick-gillespie-on-the-bully-crisis-that-isnt\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his National Post column, he responds to a fellow journalist&#8217;s column on the topic of bullying: The appetite to bully cannot be treated as a social sickness, or the product of maladaptive psychological development \u2014 which is how it is universally depicted in the media, and in government-funded public-service announcements. Bullying is in our [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[66,28],"tags":[828,130,139,255,504],"class_list":["post-17334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-media","tag-bullying","tag-evolution","tag-psychology","tag-sexuality","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4vA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17334"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17337,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17334\/revisions\/17337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}