Your mother may have told you growing up that bullies do what they do because they crave attention or have unhappy home lives. According to recent research, it seems that your mother may have been wrong.
According to a study done by researchers from the University of California-Davis, the more popular a middle or high school kid becomes, the more likely their aggressive behaviour.
Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee, authors of the study, extracted this finding by interviewing public-school kids over a 4.5-year period. They asked the students to name their friends and used the data to create friendships. Then, they asked them to list down kids who were unkind to them and whom they picked on to map out the pathways of aggression.
They found that only one-third of students engage in bullying. This includes more extreme actions, like physical bullying, to the milder forms, like gossip spreading. It seems that the more students engaged in bullying, the more popular they became.
Students who were found to be less aggressive comprised only the top and bottom 2% of the school's social hierarchy.
Said Faris: " Seemingly normal well-adjusted kids can be aggressive. We found that status increases aggression"
While the researchers are not ruling out psychological or background influences are the main motivations, they propose that popularity is just as important in determining a student's likelihood to become a bully.
Faris also found that the more a student cared about popularity, the more aggressive they tend to be. Ironically, bullying does not help boost a student's popularity.
This research can give educators a better understanding of the psyche of a bully to help curb bullying in middle- and high- school.
"Those are the ones who give these kids their status. We need to change their minds, " said Faris.
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Bullying is a widespread social problem that affects most students. 77% of students said they had been bullied more than once in their lives. 14% of those who were bullied said they experienced severe reactions to the abuse.
Source: Time, Belinda Luscombe
