And now, in news you can use, here’s the latest headline on the social sciences front:
Study links teenage bullying to social status
I’m glad we cleared that up. And in fairness, the article leads off with an admission that this study has merely “confirmed an axiom of teenage life.” What’s more, there was this interesting tidbit:
[Robert Faris] found that the teenagers’ propensity toward aggression rose along with their social status. Aggressive behavior peaked when students hit the 98th percentile for popularity, suggesting that they were working hard to claw their way to the very top. However, those who were in the top 2% of a school’s social hierarchy generally didn’t harass their fellow students. At that point, they may have had little left to gain by being mean, and picking on others only made them seem insecure, Faris said.
This also makes sense, and it’s slightly less obvious than the main result. However, it’s not clear that the causality is being properly placed here. It’s possible that making it into the top 2% finally makes you secure enough not to bully, but I think it’s more likely that it’s the other way around: only the fairly secure kids ever make it into the top 2% in the first place. Everybody picks up on insecurity, and insecure kids just don’t have the confident personalities that get you all the way to the top of the heap. More studies, please.
