The Vicious Ways Women Compete - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt

Do women have an intolerance of sexy peers absolutely um 100% uh I we say we don't we say that we just love women and we promote women but um we look we love certain women and we promote certain women so uh yeah we're we're not the angels that we purport we are to be um I think we do a lot of impression management who are the women we do Support and love um it depends like obviously we're going to have um different qualities that we admire in a person and so if they have those then

I think that that's who we're going to promote we're pretty good at um tolerating our friends and promoting our friends um but I don't think we're universally kind to all women and it's interesting because I think that there's been this like change in zge where people where women talk about how The Sisterhood has never been stronger and we support each other unconditionally and yet we really don't why why why do you think that that's the current pop culture summarization of female friendships uh and why is it not the case well I think that it it's

funny cuz it's kind of said but it's not really said so have you seen the Barbie movie yet no okay you need to see it it's really good okay but anyhow so it's Funny because there's this big speech where she talks about like all the pressures that women are under and everything that we have to manage and you know and then there's also this like Thread about women supporting women and yet there's like plenty of examples of women not supporting women in that movie right so I think that there's this like a little bit of

a disconnect where we say it but then we don't actually um live that ideal um now the reason I Think it happens that we don't support each other as much as we should is because there's like a resource scurity that affects women I think more than men and I or this perception of resource scurity and in some places in the world there's absolutely resource scurity um with women you know they're not they don't have as many privileges they don't make as much money those sorts of things um and when things don't seem fair it's hard

to be uh Generous right so what's the sexy bit of the sexy peers why be particularly intolerant of the sexy ones so so that would be um the idea that it's going to sound sexist but it's a robust finding I did a study on this so the idea that um historically we've sort of maintained uh control over what the opposite sex wanted and so if we um you know are giving away sex freely you mean we as women we as women then then we Don't hold that we don't the power of that resource is um

is less it's even non-existent so it would behoove us to then punish those who give away sex too freely so shame um debase women who are a threat to that power holding position and so this is a study that I did that showed that exact phenomenon it has since been replicated around the world and basically um women are intolerant of certain types of women but in Particularly they're particularly intolerant of women who are sexy and it's a universal phenomenon right so sexy is a very specific word to use here this isn't necessarily just attractive I

it's like presumably sexually provocative exactly it's not attractive per se although I think that if you get to the end of that Spectrum on attractiveness so like you're incredibly attractive I think that that would publicly unnerve Some women because that person would be um would be revered by men and that would then debase their own standing in terms of competition but generally speaking I mean yeah so the the impression would be that you're sexually provocative or available what was the study that you did or are there any that came along after yours and did it

even better that you prefer well I don't know if anybody's done it better because I think I did it the best But because I thought about it forever and ever it took like over a decade to for the study to come to fruition so basically what I saw the time was that when a woman violated Norms so the norm of you know you could be sexy but not too sexy um then women would mock them they would use indirect aggression an indirect aggression um takes the form of gossiping peer group exclusion um but also more

non-verbal things like you know the once over where you start at The top you look down you look up but you don't smile to convey disgust or you stare at each other and then when she leaves the room you laugh those sorts of things so anyhow I saw that over and over again so I um designed a study with my post-doctoral student anel Sharma where we had women come into the lab they were part of this previous study where we were looking at their use of indirect aggression then we invited them into the lab to

talk about female Friendships how they deal with conflict um we randomized them into one of four conditions with their friend with a stranger and whether or not they were going to be interrupted in their conversation by a very sexy dress Confederate or a conservatively dress Confederate and the person was the exact it was the same person Lisa gorgeous absolutely gorgeous anyhow we standardized everything right down to the number of Steps she took everything was scripted so they came through they didn't know that we were recording them right from the get-go she came through and walked

right between the two women and mentioned to anel in the back room that I needed to talk to her about something and then she left with anel and we recorded what they did and everybody in the sexy condition treated her poorly with two exceptions um and I think they were just not paying attention because Had had they be been they would have done something and those that when um Lisa interrupted them and she was just dressed conservatively they didn't even pay attention so the only thing that was different between the two conditions was her sexy

outfit wow okay so what are the implications of this what does it what does it tell you about female psychology it tells us that like I mean a lot of times people think that the suppression Of women's sexuality is done by men and it is done by men um for sure that exists and especially in certain countries but it also is policed by women and women do to suppress other women's sexual expression so on average would you say more shaming comes from men or from women I think it depends on the country it really does

there's a cultural component to that but let's just talk about Western cultures um I think that Uh that women are particularly intolerant of sexy peers more so than men does it bother you to see a sexy woman me no but I I would campaign for more if there was exactly and would would you be upset if women were more promiscuous yeah precisely I mean this this is from Roy bow Meister I learned this from him that he was saying it it's very strange to lay at the feet of men a restriction in female sexual Freedom

given the fact That almost every man if given the opportunity would campaign for that precise thing like exactly I I haven't been to a parade downtown here in Austin but if there was one for that that would be up there with one of the you know for for my other male Brethren I'm going to stand firm and I will help I you know you will you will finally be able to get your endway so yeah I I I it makes complete sense to me and I learned from Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max as well This

insight about the game theory of shaming where if you think about sex as having a price and if one woman is prepared to lower the price from three dates to one date or from x amount of resources to.5 x amount of resources that lowers the market value of whatever that thing is overall so you need that's exactly what I showed y you you need a price enforcement mechanism it's a cartel yeah and that's and bow meister's theory that So he wrote a paper with Jean twingy where they talk about this and this is what I

used as the theoretical basis for the study along with what I knew about uh indirect aggression so it's interesting because uh intr competition is like one area that people study but indirect aggression is very similar it's like the behavior the manifestation of intr seexual competition it's the enforcement mechanism of intr seexual competition and people hadn't really Considered that so I wrote a theory was published in trans B of the royal Royal Society and it did very well and um people have used it now to springboard other studies but basically I was arguing just that that

the form of intersexual competition the form of in women is indirect aggression interesting I've got a quote from you here sex is Coveted by men accordingly women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the Negotiation of this resource women who make sex too readily available compromise the power holding position of the group which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are or seem to be promiscuous and it's the seem to be bit I think which is particularly interesting there exactly it's interesting because after that study came out I was in

Florida at Disney with my daughter who was eight and I we brought along her two Girlfriends and there was a woman who was dressed um in a very sexually provocative manner she was probably in her mid-50s uh tiny tiny skirt tiny tiny shirt Florida baby out Florida look gorgeous look gorgeous anyhow and uh I turned around and I saw these three eight-year-olds doing exactly what was done in my Stu so so she was getting she was getting the once over by three mean eight-year-olds well what I mean that's Fascinating what why would it be the

case that animals who aren't even sexually active who don't understand what sex is How Deeply wired is this at the base of the brain stem that even they have got an idea she might be too promiscuous and maybe she's going to take some future husband away from me I don't know if it's at the brain stem but it certainly there's like a lot of socialization around this think about um school dress Codes so we've had tons of pressure in Canada a lot of schools have had to revoke their school dress codes because they're sexist where

they punish girls for dressing um in small clothes but not boys and so they've gotten rid of them and under that the premise that it is sexist which it is hang but anyhow hang on a boy do boys want to wear small clothes well they wear tank tops I think that's a small clothing right okay so girls are girls are allowed to wear Things like skirts and vests so we don't typically wear um so we don't wear uniforms in North American schools unless you go to a private school okay but my point is is that

these um dress codes exist and they've long existed and just now in 2023 are we getting rid of them and um little girls know about them and little boys know about them and they know about why they know that they're unfair or they feel that they're unfair they are unfair um so where does that Come from so it's like really hard to separate um The evolutionary significance of this from the the mass of socialization pressure that they're under so I do think that it's rooted in our evolutionary history I wrote that in a in a

paper that two 2013 paper I talked about that theoretical paper um I do think that there's an evolutionary signific against to our Behavior but I also think that um you know we're Society in general across the world um Is quite intolerant of this why is it the case if this is true and I believe that it's true and I've been singing this game theory of shaming song for at least a few years now why is it the case that we are a Sisterhood that is all together these men need to stop controlling our sexuality it's

all girl power stuff how is that meme remaining so sticky if the truth doesn't seem to actually match up to the that sort of zeitgeist I think it's easy for us to Blame you and not look at ourselves right and I do think that there's truth that some sometimes it does exist like we talked about like do you get upset by somebody dressing sexy absolutely not but some men do for sure and in some cultural groups they really do right um we know that that's the case um but that said I just think that and

this is the book that I have coming out next year called mean with Simon and Schuster and it's basically just that Trying to reconcile that so you know a good feminist doesn't say what I'm saying so um a good feminist supports women no matter what and yet a good feminist actually doesn't support all women like if you really look at the behavior of women you see that um you know we say that it's men oppressing women but it's also women oppressing women and if we can acknowledge that uh we can manage it in direct competition

do men use that too what's the what's The ratio of indirect competition between the Sexes So proportionally speaking and I'll talk about indirect aggression because indirect um competition I'm not too sure what that means per se so indirect aggression um is used by men for sure men talk about each other they gossip they give give each other the silent treatment that sort of thing but not as often so men use a mange of behavior so you guys are like straight out in your face um you uh Are physically aggressive and you also use indirect aggression

uh indirectly aggressive tactics whereas women proportionately speaking only use this form of aggression of course there are exceptions there's some women are really violent but they are rare and they're so Salient when we see these women they make the front page of every news Outlet in the world world because we don't see them that often so this is our exclusive way of dealing with each other when We're um being less than appropriate being less than kind interesting okay so and we're more affected by it so if I rolled my eyes at you it it's not

GNA cause much distress if I did that to a woman it would cause some problems and there's quite a bit of study showing that we have a high physiological response to being um ostracized rejected um all of the things that Encompass indirect aggression so women are more attuned to More attuned to it and we res we respond to it more and that has an evolutionary significance because belonging was far more important to women than to men not to suggest that you didn't need to belong you needed to get your coalitions set right so that you

could win the war and kill the boar but um for women we also needed um Alo parents we needed support from other women and so it's a really interesting um issue because on the one hand you need the support of Women but in the other hand there's not enough resources to go around so there's also a zero some game in a sense attached to that so it's trying to reconcile that so then the way to do it then is to be strategic is to um appear to be on your side but not really be on

your side why is it so important to not be directly aggressive as a woman so um an Campbell wrote this really great theory about this and basically it was about She called it staying alive and so if women historically um got into a physical battle a fight and they died or were injured and not able to take care of their offspring those Offspring did not survive so historically and in some places in the world it still exists um infant survival is inextricably um linked to maternal survival so we can't be fighting all over the place

I think it's not good for Our health and wellness and it's certainly not good for our Offspring so how do you get your jeans into the Next Generation they got to grow up and make babies and cells okay whereas if the man was to die in some fist fight gone wrong the kids are still probably going to survive mom's still around men also a little bit more physically robust bit more tolerant of being hit in the head that's why you've got the brow Ridge and the bigger hands and blah blah blah okay How how effective

is indirect aggression and just before we say that to get to that um before I answer that the other thing too is that men don't always stick around and yet we still we still have managed it better if they did historically they haven't always though and they still don't really always stick around I just needed to put that dig in okay see because I'm like really good at indirect aggression from that research it is effective it is effective it I Felt it in my soul what is that me search research so um it's incredibly effective

it really is and again because women are so attuned to it so it doesn't have the same hit on men so us using it against men doesn't have the same effect but man are we ever good at picking it up women we see it in a nanc I coach adolescent girls I'm a high performance soccer coach and I tell them I can hear them roll their eyes like a kilometer away I know when it's going down and we Do we we notice that um there are memes like you go on to any social media platform

and there's tons of memes of like you know a woman like opening the door real quickly because she heard somebody like roll their eyes or do a you know we come back in we hear it we know it there's a number of interesting studies going on at the moment to do with female sports I think um tennis players and basketball players on opposite teams given that you've been Doing your ethnographic uh in place research with your high performance female soccer team what have you observed about inter int team love and distaste and all that stuff

oh noticed so much and in fact I've studied a lot of the things that I've noticed so one of the things I've noticed and then we actually have a study that showed this to be true more so for adolescent girls than for adolescent boys but adolescent girls make a lot of social comparisons Is she prettier than me is she better than me if she smarter than me is she more popular those social comparisons elicit jealousy and the way that jealousy is managed is either it's turned inward they become depressed anxious or they like I'm not

as good as so and so or they turn it outward which is more common and they tear down their rival so the only reason that she's playing Left fullback and I'm a left fullback is because her dad's the coach Or her mom's the coach that sort of thing so we show we showed that longitudinally that's the pathway and we showed it to be stronger in girls than in boys one thing I noticed all the time is that um like when somebody's done you wrong on the field you can't let it go if you're a girl

or a woman but men just go out for a beer right after the game they don't give a it's done with let's move on right does that matter to whether it's your own team or the Opposition we can't let it go from the opposition so I'll get to this so what happens is um it's very common to do a handshake after the game in North America and um and for you to not get your hand shook by somebody who thinks you did them dirty on the field whereas man just shake hands and get on with

it and there was a study that looked at this across I think it was 44 different countries post affiliative Behavior after competitions and it showed that Women around the world just can't let it go so like if somebody's done us wrong it's there it's there for life like if you did me wrong in grade five and I ran into you just now it's on okay so anyhow so I noticed that and I don't notice that and I've coached little boys too and I've never noticed that and then they talk about the girls the other team

and the women on the other team and what a I can't believe she did this this and that like they are personally Offended by a slide tackle gone wrong whereas you know men don't don't really seem to care about that and then the other thing I've noticed that is that on a girl's team or a young women's team the best player on the team is not necessarily the most popular player on the team whereas in boys teams and men's team teams the best player on the team is almost invariably always the most popular person on

that team is always the leader so we don't care if you're The best per se unless you get to like the high high high end of um of elite women's sports um that's not what makes you popular and in fact being the best might actually make get you bullied on a girl's team or a women's team because how dare you think you're so good so there's this whole theory about tripping the prom queen I've written about it um knocking down the tall Poppy and we're pretty good at making sure women stay in their place and

if they're not going to Stay in their place and they're going to think too well of themselves we'll put them back there real quick okay so status and competence are split apart in female hierarchies in a way that they are not in male hierarchies 100% And it's interesting because I read Carly Lloyd's autobiography and she talked about how um Lloyd is one of the most decorated women's uh football player in the world she won the Balon do um for the uh and also the best player for uh The FIFA World Cup when it was here

in Canada in 2015 she order her in her autobiography she talks about how when she joined the national team that sometimes she felt that women weren't passing to her the ball even because she was seen as competition and can you imagine like you know if you're playing a sport even if it's like a beer league and you're not that good as a guy you take yourself off and sit on the bench so that you guys can win the Championship whereas I think and it's been said by many of my colleagues in some ways women and

girls would rather lose the game and have everybody play than win now of course I'm not talking about at the elite elite level because that's going to have different parameters and different personality types but you've got this a preference for egalitarianism the you have preference for knowing your place and staying in your Placees yeah I uh I learned some interesting stuff to do with the behavior of male and female students as they walk out of exam Halles and they talk to each other and the guys will say oh yeah question three absolutely smashed it I

I revised that like that was absolutely great whereas the girls would go oh you know I was all really high probably failed it's not so good and the guys will also say that too but it seems like the guys have less of An issue proclaiming their successes uh again also super interesting study where um girls will tend to downplay qualifications and accolades if they think that their responses are going to be seen by other people as opposed to if they're being kept private so there is this very below the surface you know under sea current

that's going on on here with how women play with status uh what they want other people to know about their accolades and their Accomplishments they do not want to enact the ey or the jealousy or the Envy of any of the other girls specifically that are in their location and I think that final bit is they're probably at least partially aware that many of the accomplishments that they could be talking about probably don't impact their mate value all that much so it's going to be a detriment to me to the females that are around me

and maybe not that like is the is the guy around you Going to be that much more attracted to you if you say that you smashed that exam than if you didn't like is your socioeconomic competence going to be a big part of it he's not going to be turned off by it that's for sure but what's going to happen is like the reason why women they make themselves smaller not because of men they make themselves smaller so that they don't get they don't attract the negative attention of women we can't brag we Can't say

what we're good at because then you think you're special and you'll get torn down and then and then we wonder why we lack confidence right like it's it's just really interesting a lot of times people will talk about how women dress for other women and it there's some truth to that right like we really are trying to um please other women and um and minimize the discomfort that could come um from not pleasing them um Amy Schumer has this really Funny skit and you should try and find it after where it's like women basically use

we use a lot of self-deprecating humor so we put ourselves down all the time like oh my goodness you know if somebody says something nice about us like are you kidding me I just found that in the garbage and put it on me you know like whatever you know we go on and on and and make sure that um we don't think well of our ourselves or give the impression that we think well of Ourselves so the skin goes on about women just putting themselves down all around and then this one woman somebody compliments her

and she just says thanks and all of their heads explode what do you mean thanks like we just said something and nice about yourself you're supposed to put yourself down those are the rules so it it's spot on what she did in this in this skit talk to me about how jealousy mediates this relationship then between uh Attractiveness comparison and indirect aggression so it it it actually works just like that it's it's a mediator right so it explains the relationship so if I am jealous then um I need to remedy that icky feeling that's not

a good feeling and so I have a couple different ways I could do it or more than a couple I have a few different ways I can manage it but the more often the more common way it's managed is by attacking myself or attacking the source of my comparison The person that's making feel jealous and women are very good at attacking um other women whom they perceive to have more but again they justify it so back to remember we started off with impression management um so they use a variety of cognitive strategies to make their

egregious acts more palatable and um and one way they do it is they they make it so that the the person that's being targeted um had it coming to them it was justified so if she wasn't so Arrogant if she wasn't um you know whatever it is it's going to be then I wouldn't have treated her poorly interesting did you see and by the way like I can predict what the reaction's going to be when this comes out and when my book comes out too the reaction is going to be that um you know I

have internalized the misogyny myself that you know what I'm your data apparently pardon me so is your data apparently yeah exactly like I I Obviously don't like women and I don't like women because I've believed what men have said about women um and yet you know we do these really sneaky studies and in the right context we see it done we it comes out like in full force so I don't know like maybe there is a bit of internalized misogyny I'll own I'll own some of the variants but a lot of this is uh it

persists because it works it's very very effective effective you don't need to worry we've had Tanya Reynolds And Joyce benon and you know there are there are many female heads that have been chopped off by the internet before you've got here I think everyone that's listening is fully aware of the fact that being a woman being a female and trying to navigate the delicate Samurai blade that is the female status hierarchy is really really tough and it does not get any easier it is not made you're no more prepared by ignoring the sort of thermodynamics

of how these Interactions work it but I mean how do you change it if you can't acknowledge it right so like I I'm prepared I've you know I've dealt with it for many many years I know what's going to be said and ironically they use indirect aggression to make their point and I just think like seriously you don't see the irony and and how you're behaving because certainly we should be tolerant of people holding different viewpoints it's not like I'm exposing hate speech but um Mr Rogers of all people said that if it's mentionable it's

manageable so how do then we change our Behavior if we can't acknowledge it and it causes a lot of harm like I mean we've we've kind of been joking around here but some young women take their lives over this some older women take their lives over it teenage girls take their lives over this um you know the bullying uh that they injure is real it's significant it's linked to eating disorders depression Anxiety suicidality so I mean this is an important uh worthy area of study we got to get this right the issue that you come

up against is anything which is seen as not being upfront very very positive for whichever the maligned or lower down group is is always presumed it's always castigated very quickly as being the thing which is at fault and it's the child wants to eat ice cream every night that is what the child wants and would be enjoyable but is ultimately Not good for it in the long run so your frontloading compassion but backloading all of the issues that come from not actually understanding what the problem is in the first place exactly um I I would

love for women to be and some women are I mean women in Academia I find are very tough and and can handle uh opinions being um expressed directly and in contradiction to their own viewpoints but I just wish just generally speaking I think if we were a Little less um sensitive a little bit more tolerant um a little bit more honest then I we'd probably be in a better position in terms of uh wielding power holding power um progressing with power did you see this uh hypothetical hairdressing client study that came out a little while

ago okay so give me one more hint I feel like I know this uh I explored how women sabotage hypothetical hairdressing clients through disingenuous Beauty advice which would Detrimentally impact clients physical attractiveness in both studies the more attractive the client the more hair was recommended to be cut off both laay women and female professional hairdressers cut most hair off women who were of the same attractiveness level as them with women cutting the most hair of women they perceive to be about as attractive as themselves they sabotaged women whose hair was in good condition and had

requested a smaller amount cut Off to a greater extent than women with hair in poor condition client makeup caused lower mate value lay women to cut off less hair suggesting the dominance incited by women wearing makeup resulted in reduced sabotage more inex competitive women including hairdressers cut off more hair confirming competitor manipulation as intrasexual competitiveness strategy being employed yes it that study finds itself in the book Amazing um it's interesting because I had this one um girlfriend in high school we were in that popular group and everybody was very attractive and had a lot of

um assets and competencies that the peer group valued but anytime she told me that I looked really good in an outfit I automatically had to change it anything she said like I mean I just like it was almost like a given that opposite day I look like crap and this is why she's saying it wow that Is so good and that's not my reaction to all women right but like experience tells you what's going on Bill Burr has this amazing bit about the body positivity movement he thinks basically that the body positivity movement is women

encouraging other women to push themselves further and further out of the appropriate mate value dating pool that you know as you applaud women for being the side that they are it makes a really good case that well yeah you get All of the points of being you know morally grandstanding and I am empathy and I care for the the the downtrodden group and so on and so forth but you are also doing something that benefits your own mate value right which is moving more and more women away from wherever you are so are we that

Ma of alien I think that the underly uh turbulence that happens below the surface is so effective it doesn't Matter whether you are or whether you aren't the net result is what works and ultimately I think that this would you know because that's some sneaky that is some sneaky but I don't think that it's I don't think pretty much any woman is cognizant of this I this is again it's a bit from Bill Burr that I was listening to and as I was listening to I was like wow this sounds like really comprehensive intersexual competition

from women to push the women Out of the mating pool hm I wonder if that's so this is total Bro Science here right and you know it's interesting because I have a reaction to it because like here I know people are GNA women are gonna have a reaction to everything I said and now I'm having a reaction to this so I'm gonna have to give this some thought because like I want to believe that we're not that Mack of alien and I also want to believe that um we we I I do know we have

free will and we're Consci conscious beings and conscientious individuals as well so I don't know I'm not I'm not buying that one just yet high hopes for Humanity okay so one of the other things you mentioned it earlier on about um bullying the sort of the effect of Youth ostracization on especially young girls uh some of the stuff that I learned from your work one in four children report that they have experienced clinically Elevated rates of depression 25% of children and Adolescence reported that they had experienced significant depression incidents and H hospitalization rates for new

onset Eating Disorders increased by 60% during the pandemic and rates for emergency department visits for attempted suicide have increased by 22% in the past few years what is going on with young people's mental health so there's been a general decline in their Mental health for the past 15 years or so so it has it wasn't good before the pandemic and it was worse during the pandemic and it'll be inter to see what happens in the next few years so I've been studying um mental health and violence for years and not the violence like not the

mental health of violent people but what happens when people are exposed to violence and the mental health issues that ensue um so we have this crisis This Mental Health crisis that's particularly pronounced for adolescent girls and young women and there's a bunch of reasons why this could be the case um during the pandemic I think that a lot of it had to do with um social isolation there's a lot of evidence to support that the need to belong as a fundamental human motivator to all but it's particularly pronounced for women and we talked about this

already so staying alive so you know belonging Being in a group affiliating all of those things are really important for my survival and my Offspring survival um so I think that challenged girls and women particularly during the pandemic um but also too we're we're more we're exposed to violence more than men so we're more likely to be um victims of intimate partner violence um you know uh everything except for Murder Men get murdered more than women um and then they're uh we're big on social Comparisons and so social media has not been really good for

um adolescent girls and for women um I think all of those things contribute to poor for mental health well if you look at Greg lukanov and Jonathan Height's work they lay an awful lot of the changes at the feet of social media what's your what's your perspective on that do you think it is the patient zero of all of this or is there more going on there's going to be more going on it'll never be you're Never going to find one thing that causes everything um but I do think it counts for a lot of

the variants I really do um we see this over and over again um like don't do any clinical work anymore but certainly this was something that was when I worked in the mood disorders clinic when I was doing my internship it's something I saw a lot um yeah girls and women make a lot of comparisons they spend a lot of time on social media um and those social Comparisons I already told you lead to jealousy and that jealousy in turn leads to externalized or internalized behavior um I don't think men use social media the same

way we do I really don't um I don't I don't know how often you take your screen and zoom it to see um you know every wrinkle and every hair out of place do you ever do that I'm just curious no like do it even like if I ask my husband he'd be like what are you even talking about yeah um but certainly We do that all the time and thank goodness that feature exists now because I used to have to take a picture of it and then I could zoom it um anyhow so uh

yeah it's not good it's not good for the health of uh of females and and we need to get a grip on this and figure it out we did this study that's just under review and um so one thing I notice that happens and hasn't been looked at but it makes sense so we're really interested in um threats to relationships right so Like mate poaching and the like and I know you know that literature very well um so I was really interested in female and friendship poaching and what it looks like for girls or sorry

for women versus men so what we did was we looked we developed a scale called a social media friendship um jealousy scale and basically said like you know how affected are you if your friend posts something and you're not tagged in it or your friend's geolocator tells you that They're out with all their friends and you're not invited um your friend and it's like just all these things that happen on social media and we found that women were more affected than men by it across three studies very interesting and then they became more depressed and

anxious as well as a consequence of that jealousy wow what's the underlying Dynamic that social media is playing on which is particularly uh effective At impacting girls mental health like what what is it the ostracization is it being felt like feeling like they're being left out it's that it's that Fe it's that fomo it's that fear of missing out it really is significant for girls and women and it comes back again to that need to belong I'm not suggesting that you're all Psychopaths that men are psychopaths and they don't need uh positive relationships and affiliation

and the like you certainly do but we Need it more we absolutely do need it more and so um you know we our value is is not that it should be but we place a lot of value on having friends and belonging um and being in uded and when we're not it hurts give me the evolutionary explanation for why that's the case is it just that a woman on her own is fragile and potentially dead is dead she's so fragile she needs the resources of other women um you know that's that tailor tend and befriend

Hypothesis that we really do need and there's tons of evolutionary Scholars who've written about this that women have historically relied on other women to to stay alive and to keep their children alive and it still exists in some places in the world today so it's like a fine line again you need to belong um more so than men um but you also have to compete within this um nest of belonging and that's really challenging which is why I think we're So so good at indirect aggression we're so sophisticated in how we use it like you're

all pretty crude when you use it and we're not we're like block Bel it's a surgeon scalpel rather than a big hammer totally it's so funny how often I'll say to my husband oh my goodness did you notice what she did and like he didn't even notice she was in the room like how do you get through life like this but then it's like how do we get Through life where we're like so hyper sensitive and attune to every perception of slight have you got any idea this uh attenuation to what's going on in the

room is that on a sliding scale where certain women obviously this is on average there is a bell curve blah blah is there a particular personality trait which really tunes that up is it conscientiousness is it neuroticism is it you know is there something that you have found that can quite accurately Predict the level of attenuation that a girl would have to her surroundings and the status in her group I think it it it's not going to be any of the big five or if you look at the hexico it's not going to be any

of those per se we looked at it we found like conscientiousness was actually negatively related to it um but it's going to be hyper competitiveness so there's the competitiveness where you um just like personal development Competitiveness that you use to better yourself Visa yourself and then there's the I need to be better than everybody else where like everything is a zero sum game so women who are hyperco competitive are the ones that are more likely to be attuned to these things they're more likely to perceive SL light when things are ambiguous they're more likely to

cause harm to others who they perceive to have harmed them um to hold grudges to get others mad at them to so To use indirect aggression so hypercompetitive women are um they're difficult in a lot of ways and they're not happy themselves which is really interesting their mental health profiles are very problematic wow talk to me about the relationship between bullying and social status I had Tony vul on the show a few months ago I adored his work on bullying I spent a lot of time being uh becoming more familiar with bullying than I would

have liked while I was in School so I was getting to learn an awful lot what what have you found about this we've spoken a lot about social status so far mostly for for girls but also for boys what is this how do these two things live in in relationship to each other so Tony's a really good friend of mine um he's fantastic and uh so I I told you about that study the um shaming study the sexy confederate study so I think one of my other more famous studies if you can say that Without

getting knocked down because I'm like bragging about myself um is um basically I my for my dissertation my PhD I looked at Mean Girls the phenomenon before it even came out as a movie so I was really interested at the time scientists kept talking about about popular kids being really well adjusted good citizens in their schools and that sort of thing and I kept thinking I'd go to these conference and say like what the heck are you talking about that's Not what popular kids are like but I honestly think that there's probably an over representation

of nerds in Academia who weren't in the popular group so they really didn't know what it was about but I was in that popular group and we weren't all that nice in a lot of ways so I for my dissertation looked at um adolescence from grade six to 12 um and whether or not they had assets and competencies that the peer group valued so if they were attractive good athletes Rich funny tough all of those things and how that related to bullying and um other status indicators like popularity and power and what we found was

or what I found for my dissertation was that um most kids who bully others have a lot of power um then then there's this other group of kids who bully others who have low power those are like the Nelsons from The Simpsons right so um that group kind of indiscriminately bullies everybody but they're very marginalized They're rejected um you know their future is pretty bleak um but most kids who bully others are actually the elite of the school so the reason that they're afforded power and they abuse their power is because they have things that

the peer group values right so for girls it's being attractive and for boys it's typically being athletic in North American culture or probably even in Western culture so every school's going to have a different culture um you know You could go to a performing arts school and the most popular kids at that school will be maybe the best I don't know whatever guitar players or whatever so all this to say whatever the peer group values that affords you power that power then in turn typically gets um corrupted and that's true of almost every human being

on the planet power corrupts and it um and it and absolutely corrupts right so um so anyhow so that's what my dissertation was about and it's been Robustly uh uh replicated you know this is something we see over and over again I went to Finland early in my career to give a talk on this and they I was H hosted by uh Christina sov valy and she's like I don't know if we'll find this in in Finland and I was like oh I've been to your malls you're going to find it and they found it

it's been found everywhere right so and it exists in colleges too universities so my daughter plays D1 soccer it exists in D1 Sports it exists in sororities that exists in university life and then we get out of it what two questions first off what did the bullies get out of it what what is the benefit to them and secondly why do we then get out of it what is it about growing up they get resources right so we've shown and we've shown with Tony so Tony and and I have published a few studies on this

they get more sex which is awesome I guess and good stuff for for people um They get um uh better recognition they can influence the peer group and the Norms of a school more uh they get more resources people give them people look at them people adore them all those things are good right like they're the silver boxs of their school um and then Nobody messes with them which is also a good feeling I I don't understand I don't understand how uh standing on the shoulders of lower status individuals gives the bully it bestows that

benefit On them that's not who they bully that group doesn't bully the the lowest lower standard so they do a little bit but no it's not that unfair fight so much so um Bob faris's work and others have shown that um High status bullies tend to bully those that are just at the next rung the ones that are challenging their status right so those are the ones that are in trouble and um or anybody who threatens their cat bird seat in a sense is that Because it's a signal of low status to seem like you're

in competition with someone who's supposedly 10 rungs below you well they're not on your radar because you know the thing is the corrupting influence of power also makes you impervious to the plight of others so you're not paying attention to others unless you're paying attention to people that are a threat to you that's all you're really paying attention to so I don't know if it's that um they're that Conscientious where it's like such an unfair fight and you're a loser if you pick on somebody who's perceived as a loser kind of thing I don't think

it's like that I think it's about maintaining um so achieving and maintaining hemony I really think it's about trying to maintain power and uh and you maintain power by making sure those that are trying to threaten your power base don't get too close there's a meme that very well may be in your book As well that says uh everything After High School is just High School uh where it talks about you know the lunch table that you sit at and the cool kids and the games and so on and so forth you've suggested there that

once you're D1 soccer career is over you enter the real world and these Dynamics at least begin to dissipate what how much do they fall away what's adult bullying look like is there even such a thing in the same context as childhood bullying adult Bullying looks different from childhood bullying and that it's not as um status oriented like I just suggested these high status bullies it's more um I mean certainly it it exists like in the workplace people will pick on somebody who they perceive as a threat to them the reason it dissipates is because

our peer groups are more fluid um they're not as stable so I think the stability of high school peer groups is what contributes to it as well because the Hierarchy gets formed through stability and that doesn't exist in adulthood as much right so like you have your hockey friends and then you have you know your gim Bros and then you have I'm just making all of them are gim Bros they're all gim Bros I only have one group of friends and the old but but my point is like you know and then you have the

workplace and you have an atypical job so let's just say like mostly we go to the job same job where we see the same People over and over again all of those things sort of happen but we have all these different groups right so it's less likely to take hold unless there's more stability one place that does happen though that you kind of re you kind of um see High School happen over and over again is when your kids um when you have kids and then you become like a soccer mom soccer moms are scary

like there that's where the high school hierarchy comes up again it's honestly It's high school all over again there's a queen bee mom she usually is the manager of the soccer team she organizes everything in favor of her daughter or her son um she manipulates other moms uh you get you don't get included to go to the mall with them during tournaments and you know it's all high school all over again and it's really interesting when why that happens so we kind of relive it again through our kids right so when these social groups aren't

Sufficiently aifi and stable you don't have enough time for everything to lock in and for people to understand I am this with this group and this with another group School creates a purpose-built en almost a purpose-built environment to precisely create this uh predictability of what's going to go on we know where people have come before some on news come in but they come in into an existing dynamic as opposed to just being part of this sort of swirling Mess 100% so very well summarized I think I'm more wordy than you are but that's probably why

you're good at your job and I'm just like trying my best here but the other thing that happens that I think contributes to this is that we can get out of toxic relationships a lot easier than kids can so if I'm in grade 11 and all the girls are treating me poorly because I'm like the cute one on campus that sort of thing like how am I going to manage that so have to change Schools and historically that wasn't really allowed now we allow it more um before the internet um you could kind of Escape

that now you can't escape it as much as you as you used to be able to but anyhow as adults like okay so the moms are being mean to me on the soccer team we just move teams like it's it's easier than what it is in high school yeah so again it's that sort of aifi nature the fact that it's predictable the fact that it's going to continue Going into into the future yeah so funny that uh you get school and then you leave and then you get dragged back into school from your children and

then the Dynamics of school happen again even though you're no longer in school and yeah and and they do and they don't like so in some ways like like I see it replicate itself also in Academia like Academia oh man there are a bunch of like Bully BRS like but like we're like you know when what's that what's that um What's the saying you know like when the stakes are so low you have to fight fiercely and that's kind of what's happening but anyhow anytime you can get a hierarchy going that hierarchy is going to

organize in such a way and the people at the top are typically going to abuse their power with very few exceptions so there are very few people who are just pure implicit power and implicit power is the kind of power that you get by having assets and competency That the peer View group values and you um you elevate people you treat them well most people are a mixture of nice and mean implicit and explicit power explicit power is the kind of power you get by uh you know making people afraid um soliciting compliance that sort

of thing there was this my favorite study that's ever been done was a study on parking and um so what's your prediction if somebody is in the parking stall and they know you're at Costco do you Have Costco where you live you must have Costco yeah I do I also know I also know the study so if to get me to predict it you could you can yeah ruin the game so like the thing is is that when somebody's waiting for your parking spot you take longer than when somebody's not work waiting for your parking

spot that's when you got to do all your safety checks got to reapply your lip gloss make sure everything's good gotta answer that really urgent text and then It's like oh you want this you're gonna have to wait like that is the ultimate example of the corrupting influence of power so people in the right context tend to abuse their power what is the impact of bullying on a developing brain oh my goodness it's enormous and it persists across the lifespan so we've done I'd say like most of my research has been on the neurobiology of

peer victimization so how does it get under the skin to confer a risk for future Mental health difficulties and health difficulties so bullying affects all aspects of functioning not only in childhood and Adolescence but also in adulthood so it always hurts so um so you're going to have the mental health difficulties the physical health difficulties the memory issues and the like but um it impacts your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis which is your stress response system so at the beginning you get overly activated um HPA AIS because you're stressed out and then eventually the body adapts

and then you have lower cortisol your HPA AIS downgrades and that in turn then causes an inflammation response and then it affects your cortisol H sorry your testosterone levels um it has a an effect on your brain in terms of a um places in your brain like areas that are really rich in gluc cortico receptor sites so those are the areas of your brain like your prefrontal cortex and Your hippocampus that are really sensitive to the effect of cortisol so it affects your memory so people think that kids don't do well at school because they're

bullied um and that's just because they don't want to go to school they're not paying attention but it actually affects their memory I've shown that in a study that was published in 2011 um it um has epig genetic processes too so um you know it you can't change The gene code but you can certainly change the expression of genes and uh you see tiir erosion that you have shorter tiir which is an indicator of um basically if you're G to do well like in terms of health or die kind of thing so it's like a

good I guess bioindicator of how much shit's gone down in your life in a sense yes so it's terrible this is it's so bad for your health it's so bad for your brain it's so bad for everything in your body why would it be The case that our bodies would respond to Childhood bullying by by making all of this stuff happen is this an Adaptive response or is it just a byproduct of some other I think it's an Adaptive response which sounds a bit weird because again back to this need to belong so if we

were all lone wolves and we weren't like taking care of each other and we didn't have this strong need for affiliation we wouldn't be where we are as humans right um in every System like so when you look at the the prevalence of psychopathy is 2% worldwide you know we can't Toler rate more than 2% on on that on psychopathy it just creates Havoc so we need to get along we need to belong um and we need to feel pretty shitty when we don't belong because then it motivates you to then do everything you can

to belong um and then there'd probably be some that would argue that it also weeds out the week but you know the kids people who Get bullied aren't often weak like people are bullied for a right of reasons and a lot of times especially for adolescent girls it's because they have they're pretty they're pretty good-looking and they have a lot of assets and competencies like you'd mentioned that you had a puty rough go at this what do you think what would you attribute it to um I struggled to relate to other kids so I wasn't

socially very attuned or Adept I think I was quite Awkward uh there was definitely a neediness around so I was an only child going to school I spoke differently I don't have the accent from the place that I'm from uh I did cricket K which was you know seen as this sort of upper class sport in one of the most workingclass towns in all of the UK and yeah it was just ostracized and uh a combination of not being socially Nimble and doing things that made you stand out with probably being a a a physically

Unformidable child I was a like a skinny kid yeah yeah small skinny kid um and I mean ended up growing probably height-wise at the same rate as everybody else but there was lots you these dudes in school that just hit puberty at 10 and 10 and a half years old before you've even got into Secondary School these guys are massive so yeah I think that was that would have contributed a good bit so it's interesting so we did a study and we Found that like late developing boys were 22 times more likely to be bullied

than ontime their ontime peers so these like squirty little boys especially in places that have a doggy dog world like the UK and Canada and United States they don't Fair too well and then they then they go through puberty and then life gets a little bit better and it's interesting though what do you think for girls so it comes back all full circles to shaming wow okay so early Developing girls if you have precocious puberty and you look more like a woman early on you're going to be seen as more of a threat by the

girls and they're going to be picked on Wow because you're going to get the attention of the boys in class they're going to be looking at the girl who's got boobs at at 12 years old and the girl that doesn't have boobs at 12 years old is going to be ignored the only way that she can rebalance this disparity is to claw down the one that's Developed you got it so you can come to your PhD with me now I'm ready ready to go I told you I'm I'm moving to Canada uh but yeah I

mean the brain developing thing just to kind of round that out is the suggestion that if you was a child ancestrally grew up in an environment where there was a lot of uh peer group ostracization uh an awful lot of pressure perhaps you were left out Perhaps it was by Design or perhaps it was simply just as a byproduct of the climate or the period that you were living through there is a likelihood down the line from that that the world is still quite an unsafe place to be therefore you being more forthcoming you being

more needy you being more anxious and more attached to the people that are around you is going to be adaptive because I am living in a period that is Not particularly safe socially or from a kinship perspective is that kind of the sort of the narrative story that uh uh evolution is telling us I think it's one pathway and that's the whole thing I think we tend to want to tell a simple story but in truth there's tons of het heterogenity and we should expect it like we I mean there's just you know there's people

start in the the same spot and end up in different spots and people who end up in this at the end Spots the same but their Beginnings are so different so multifinality equifinality that sort of thing I think that um it's really hard when you think about the evolutionary significance of bullying and I know you spoke to to Dr vul to Tony about this because um like it's such a cruel experience and it's such a damaging experience that it's difficult to put an evolutionary lens on it and say how could this be adaptive like I

mean I think it's adaptive for The people who are perpetrating the violence but not for those that are receiving the violence I can't think of how it makes them better people in any way um people will say that they wouldn't want to trade their experience because they've achieved excellence and it made who they are it's so interesting how often you hear about people being bullied and they're really prominent individuals I just watched the Netflix series uh becum have you watched it yet I haven't no and both um they were both you know kids isolated kids

in a lot of ways and um and it's interesting because then I hear this often by people who have achieved a lot and they said they were bullied and they think they're tough because of that that experience is what made them and I always think okay so if you're at a on a scale of 1 to 10 and you're at an eight on excellence and Excellence is like worldclass Excellence what if you were supposed to be a 10 Like like you know we don't know what your top was supposed to be maybe you were supposed

to cure cancer well I said this too I said this to David gogins who had opened up an awful lot about the way that he was treated as a kid both at school and by his father he had this tyrannical father that was very abusive and I opened up about for the first time at the start of this year properly about sort of bullying in school I hadn't brought it up before because it just Seemed kind of lame to bring up the fact that I guess I was still ashamed and kind of guilty about the

fact that I had been mistreated as a kid and like you know what does it mean to be someone in the 30s still talking about this but then it's an important part of the origin story of view and it's been very formative so you should bring it up but then it's kind of seems like maybe you're giving power back to the so there's you know the pingpong game of Why you should or shouldn't bring something up was kind of strong and one of the things that I said was something along the lines of a lot

of the things that you're most proud of in yourself at the light side of something that you're probably pretty embarrassed about right and it's exact the classic narrative that you talk about this Alchemy I have taken something which should have been awful and I turned it on its head I got to I took control right I used my agency And my sovereignty to kind of wrangle this reality into something which is good to me now there's I I'm falling in love with this Frame at the moment things which are literally true but figuratively false and

things that are figuratively false but literally true um I think that I think that this is one of those things that may be literally true but figuratively false or or at least functionally false which Is I may have been a much better businessman son and podcaster had I not been bullied but belief in that is completely pointless and the only way that I can ameliorate the fact that I did get mistreated in school is for me to say actually most of the things that I went through helped to not only not hold me back but

also Forge me into the situation that I'm in because believing about the other Universe the second Strand where you weren't and thinking about just how much further ahead you could have got is just a recipe for victimhood and misery and it's uh yeah literally true functionally false perhaps you know what's interesting too it kind of highlights back to that heterogenity point that I was making so like I do think that some individuals are bullyed and they do okay they Faire better and um and the reason why one person goes left and one person goes Right

is is varied like you know the attributions that you're making are really important and there's those are helpful but there's also biological risk that we never talked about so for example and this has kind of been this is a bit dated but it gives you it's a really simple way of explaining it so I'll use it but just know that the genetics have caught up and that things are a little bit more complicated than this um so um caspy Moffet and all um Published a seminal paper in science in 19 or sorry 2003 and uh

basically they looked at 5htt LPR so it's the serotonin transporter Dre Gene the polymorphism of it so you can get you get 50% of your genes from your mom 50% from your dad so you can have a long Al um like a long long Al a short short Al and a short long Al and having um the short Al is a risk factor for depression because it it it's implicated in how serotonin is used by your body so Anyhow they looked at kids who were um maltreated in childhood and the likelihood of them becoming depressed

at age 26 and whether or not it was moderated by their 5hd LPR and what they found was that if you were bullied or sorry maltreated in childhood and you had the short shorter Le you were 65% you had a 65% chance of being depressed in adulthood if you had the same horrible experience and you had the protective Long long then you were no more likely to be depressed than if you hadn't been abused so do you know what your 5hd LPR polymorphism is no but I can ask someone because I've had a full I've

had a full Gene scan done so this is my point like you don't like okay so now we know you could you 23 and me we can have some idea but it really is important for people to understand this because sometimes too when people aren't resilient we blame them again so they Get bullied and then they're not resilient on their on being bullied and we say ah you see you know look at should have tried harder should have done the one yeah like Chris came out of it and he's a better he's a better person

he's done all of these things you know um so if you could just you know be stronger you iCal risk is I mean this is the it's the ultimately the brutal red pill of behavioral genetics right that the raw materials that everybody is Starting with is not the same and when you fold when you fold that in with epigenetics and determinism you have a a a pretty brutal soup for quite a nihilistic life you know if you don't believe that there's free will and if you believe that the predisposition that you had was ordained before

you were even born and then if you learned that epigene I thought epigenetics was total and then I had spolsky on and he he totally blew my mind and there are Things that can have happened to your parents' lives that aren't a part of their genetics which can influence the genetics that they will give to you the behavior that your mother goes through when you're in utero will have huge changes epigenetic changes that are locked in for the rest of the life and not only that it's now your kids and your grandkids are potenti grand

kids cuz your your grandmother made the ovam that became you right I mean exactly so These stressors play out into generations to come my point in telling this is just it's really important because like so there's like you know talking about genetic risk but there's also attribution risks so for example Studies have shown that we're really keen on reducing bullying and uh but Studies have shown that when you're the only kid in the class being bullied your mental health outcomes are worse than if there's multiple kids being bullied in The classroom so then how do

we reconcile that and it makes sense because if I'm the only one being bullied then it's something I've done right but if everybody's getting bullied it's because there's some in our classroom that's just picking on everybody so there's like there's like a communism of bullying solution here you know there's like misery loves company so so here we're trying to reduce bullying and then we're we're having This issue the other thing that's really interesting about the intervention literature and I'm given actually a talk to um the Montreal School Board tomorrow on this is that um studies

has shown so back to Christina Salma valy I told you I went to Finland and I told them that you know I went to your mall I know you're going to have popular bullies that have a lot of assets and competencies what they found they have like almost every kid in the country Involved in their studies and they have this big anti-bullying program called the Kea um they found that the ones that were most impervious to their anti-bullying um efforts were the highest status bullies why would you give up your your power holding position so

yeah what what about so for the people that are listening who might be thinking okay well I went through some bad times in school uh am I now locked into a life of suboptimal brain Development and my hippocampus and gry matters smaller I'm never going to be able to remember my 16 digigit number across the front of my card how possible is it to reverse the harm that's being created neurologically biologically from bul so we don't know but I think that it's going to be okay for a lot of people and the reason I say

that is that we're adaptive like so we have hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressure We are designed to survive we're designed to be resilient and so um we know that neuroplasticity exists across the lifespan so we you know we can I think reverse some of this damage for sure but in the absence of knowing that knowing that it causes us much harm it behooves us to be better citizens and we we really need to be reducing this right we can't just be hoping that well you know in the end at the end of

the day we'll Be able to fix this pick up the pieces in your late 30s or something yeah well and also the just the lived experience I again like I can fly the flag from my ethnographic research like it's just not enjoyable like have this 4,000 weeks that you've got on this planet and of them however many is spent like really just not enjoying your time feeling bad about yourself it's funny that you said that like I'm giving um a the keynote for unicef's violence um conference That's coming up Pro violence presumably Pardon Me pro

violence presumably yeah yeah you're Pro you're Pro you're going into violence Symposium yeah exactly yeah anti you mean anti violence anyhow um and so the abstruct that I wrote was just about what you said in a sense like that um it's interesting how people with live experience have told us over and over again how harmful this was and is being bullied being treated poorly um even Women being treated poorly by other women and um and yet we needed to like put 30 years worth of science to it to in a sense acknowledge their pain was

real like how like that's like we like why did we need to do this like we certainly needed to show it but why do we have to show it over and over again like we keep showing it without doing anything about it like we need to do something about it and stop documenting the harms well Definitely you know speaking as a a member a proud member of the ex bolied Community I guess one of the issues with at least being two forthcoming is what I said at the beginning it's the reason I was reticent to

bring it up in the first place on the show that it's a signal of those status you know you'd already had to battle with this before in the past is this not something that I should have already got passed into adulthood is this really something that plays on my Mind and even if it's something that doesn't play on your mind and that you have got passed and you do feel like you've managed to get a balanced life and you've got friends that you care about and you think that you've repaired the damage that might have

been done to your brain and all the rest of the stuff even the fact that you're able to acknowledge that it was a part of the story in the first place is also kind of still this signal of vulnerability you Don't want to give the people that mistreated you any more power any more time or any more thought than they already got out of you when it was happening at the time so it's just a you know the real Litany of reasons as to why people who have gone through bullying wouldn't want to bring it

up even in adulthood when it's no longer affecting them it's interesting because um women are more uh vengeful than men you may not think that but it's true um So we never forget somebody who's done us wrong remember I said so if I was you and I had the podcast like meaning like I was as popular as you and I had the good lighting that you have on the back of me and stuff like that I've been naming names I be like here's the list of the people who with me I'd out them but you're

like a Kinder person it's interesting that you still say this though because um you're Probably very familiar with the social pain research no what's up okay so there so um about a maybe about 15 years ago um you know with the the advancements and fmis and the like what they found was that the physical pain Network so you stub your toe your brain lights up it tells you you know this thing just happened you pull your foot away that sort of thing so there's this mechanism and we know what parts of the brain that are

um activated when you physically Hurt yourself when you're ozed treated poorly bullied you name it the same areas of your brain are activated it's called social pain the difference between social pain and physical pain so there's overlapping neuro structures physical and and social pain and this has evolutionary significance again because um it's a neural alarm that you're not belonging so you better be motivated to get back in there and belong right so it actually does hurt And it's interesting because like when you think about the physical pain met or the the the physical pain metaphors

are used to Des Des cribe social pain around the world broke my heart when I wasn't invited to that party I felt like he punched me in the stomach when I think about it right so the thing about physical pain is that it's short-lived so I had two daughters and both times the epidural didn't take which is complete BS but I can tell you and I Don't have a visceral reaction I don't but if I think about the time when my daughter was in grade six and she wasn't invited to that party I feel like

I felt that day and so social pain lasts a lifetime and it's very it's it's very um socially motivating but it's really hard to shake so when you're 88 and you think about when you were eight you'll feel the same thing it's so Salient and that's been shown to be very robust um so you know this is why it hurts it Hurts forever um it's it serves an evolutionary um function but it's kind of like an evolutionary function that took steroids and and kind of went off have you looked at interventions for people to grow

beyond the vestage of their bullying no but I mean I would say that probably the better programs would be cognitive behavioral therapy I think that that would be the way to deal with it because it's really about reframing that and and being kind to yourself like Kind of the things that you've been saying you know that makes sense to me and it the reframing is really important um you know there's kids who get bullied like where the peer group says they're being bullied and they say they're not bullied and their mental health profile looks good

and then there's kids who say they're um they're being bullied and the peer group doesn't say they're being bullied and their mental health profiles look bad because at the end of the day It's how you perceive the environment that matters right yeah yeah very interesting your perception of the event given that you're talking about this an awful lot it's obviously a topic that you're passionate about what are the interventions that look most promising for reducing the rates of bullying so the most programs don't work very well they work a tiny bit if they work at

all and then there was a a paper that just came out of metaanalysis that involved Over a 100 studies and it showed that the effects were pretty small again um better than they've been in the past but the programs that work tend to be Universal so they address all kids in the school um they do it before they head out of middle school because they're not very effective in high school um they um involve the peers but are not peer-led um they um include education of teachers um they have consistency so There's like some components

here and there but ultimately I think that the reason the programs don't work is because we don't have a good enough appreciation of that that dichotomy I talked about the low status bullies and the high status bullies and I think historically all of our programs have been devoted towards um the remediation of Nelson instead of the remediation of you know that mean girl cleck I think then we'd be in a better position if we Um if we address that that talk TI your group it's such a uh kind of like not a game of Russian

Roulette but a little bit of a catch 22 for parents and for the kid you know by bringing it up there's a fear that more bullying is going to happen to you the parent goes into school that also lowers the status of the kid presumably because they can't handle it on their own and then the parent now is super Vigilant I mean There must be something like uh even though it's no longer a developing brain but a second order parent to the child that's being bullied vigilance effect which is going on you know increased anxiety

all the rest of it so they're now going to be asking their kid when they come home did that girl speak to you today has anything changed and you're then kind of scared cuz M I don't want to say if I tell you what's happened then you're I'm scared you're Going to shout at me I feel like I'm at fault and you end up as the child I certainly did this with my parents I ended up being like being scared of telling my mom and dad that bad things had happened at school but I was

also having to absorb the bad things that were happening so you end up kind of like I don't know this sort of neutron star that's just absorbing whatever whatever is around it a desperate attempt to try and just not make the Situation any worse so I need everybody to understand that most studies show that when you tell somebody you're being bullied like a caran adult in your school that bullying stops and it tends to stop immediately so we have this misperception that it's not going to be dealt with if we actually say something out loud

out so a lot of times what happens is kids um finally tell somebody six months after the fact when it's been going on for far too long and now They're like they're near death store kind of thing so that's really important that people understand they should be telling somebody but oftentimes parents advocacy is I understand why it happens but it's maybe not the best advocacy to your point and it's because it's mere neuron systems right so they're absolutely feeling what their kid is feeling and they have an intolerance for their kids's discomfort and they want

it addressed immediately so they come in And they're probably not in a good position to advocate for their kid because they're too emotionally charged instead of coming in and rationally speaking about this it's hard to be rational when your baby's hurting I get that but if you did you'd get a little bit further I think with the schools um the schools most schools in the world have to deal with this even at a legal point so like for example in Ontario where I live it's in our education act That they have to address bullying so

they're motivated legally if not morally and they are morally motivated but if even if they weren't they would be legally motivated to do something so that's that's how it's done now when you were being bullied that wasn't the case like it was really like the Wild Wild West in a lot of ways right and like teachers even bullied kids and was about like it sorted itself out and that's just how it is you know it was darwinian Thinking on this which was problematic so yeah it's tough kids parents need to advocate for their kids they

need to do it rationally kids need to understand that their parents aren't going to screw it up if they go in calm and that the school will deal with it it's not going to fix everything overnight but it's certainly will fix a lot of things all right Tracy let's bring this one home I want to run this back again next year when your book comes out but for the People that have loved what they've heard today where should they go if they want to keep up to date with all your work so um I'm on

this platform called Twitter X where you go to get bullied um so so you can keep up with it with me there um it's really lovely I just just love my interactions there um I think that's probably the best place because I'm not on any other social media site so um gotta keep my social comparisons low so I my mental health is good very Nice Tracy I really appreciate you thank you it was so nice chatting with you Chris I could do it all day long if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a

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