We might as well discuss the shocking story du jour—that gang of girls in Florida who beat up another girl for YouTube fame.
First, allow me to say the obvious: Would the news media be all a-dither if the girls hadn’t been white cheerleaders with names like April, Brittany and Brittini? (Yeah, really.) I say no, but maybe I’m just cynical.
My developmental psychologist friend Lara, who studies popularity and aggression, has blogged on this issue with interesting new insights such as—“the combination of being popular and knowing that you’re popular predicts the very highest levels of physical and relational aggression in a given high school grade.”
You would think popular people would feel so secure they could afford to be nice, but I guess not. Actually, researchers find that being popular and being liked are two different things altogether.
I guess this isn’t surprising, when you think about it.
While popularity wasn’t a huge issue in my high school full of oddballs and artsy-fartsy people, it was big in junior high and I never felt that the really popular girls even liked each other all that much. Rather, they seemed connected in some sort of uneasy bond.
I was not popular in junior high school. The Dedes, Alisons and Amys made fun of me and singled me out for destruction in dodgeball. I wasn’t particularly crushed by this (although evidently, I’ve never forgotten) because I had my own friends outside of school. And that makes all the difference. I suppose not going to a neighborhood school (I was in a horrid private school at the time) helped, since I wasn’t always surrounded by people who didn’t like me. The popular girls lived on the Upper East Side, I lived on the Upper West Side. (Back in the day, this coded as “rich” vs. “not-rich.”) I had friends of my own who were grubby as I.
Among the things researchers know about bullying is that its negative consequences on the bullied are greatly mitigated if that poor soul has one friend. Just one is all it takes. Just one person to confirm that you are not actually the scum of the universe, the butt of all jokes, the whipping post for all. Just one to affirm your humanity.
In junior high, another oddball and I found each other and it then mattered even less that the other girls didn’t like us. Though Eve and I didn’t hang out together outside of school, we both discovered drugs around the same time and bonded over that, transforming ourselves from geeks to freaks and gaining grudging respect that way. (Again, the 1970s. Things were different then.)
Research into childhood abuse at the hands of adults similarly finds that abused children with one adult in their lives who can be trusted implicitly and who advocates for them, are more emotionally resilient than those who don’t.
Which brings me to an interesting op-ed in today’s Dallas Morning News that points out that the only people who can really save kids from kids is kids. Yelling and screaming at schools to end bullying is not productive. Rather, parents need to encourage compassion among their own children. (Unlike, say, the freakshow parents who joined in the MySpace torture of the girl who ultimately killed herself—what a chilling story that was.)
I remember sitting silently and pained a couple of times when school and camp oddballs were tormented—once overtly and once covertly—by the more fortunate. I still feel guilty. Speaking up is horribly difficult under those circumstances, especially for those of us who are not among the chosen.
It was easy in elementary school, when I was both liked and popular, to befriend the girl who was too shy to raise her hand in class and wet the floor instead. I had no fear then and could see past her oddness to her intelligence.
But when you’re unpopular and the attention is directed elsewhere, you learn to bite your tongue and be thankful that for the moment, you are safe.
But perhaps parents of outsider children can teach them of the power and safety of numbers—even if the number is just two.
The last line of Lara’s blog about the YouTube beeyotches is particularly disturbing to me. She writes, “Something tells me this story is being told and retold among their high school peers with a level of awe and respect that would make us cringe.”
Do you think this is true? Are kids this mean these days? And is this the kind of popularity to which outcasts secretly aspire?
If so, what are we doing wrong?
Showing posts with label bullies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bullies. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
who cares?
So, I’ve been thinking about bullies and narcissists a lot, as they’ve been a recurring theme the past few years in various contexts.
Lara raises an interesting conundrum in her recent blog post about social/relational aggression, which is behaviors—rumor spreading, exclusion—we typically attribute to teenaged girls. A school principal recently told Lara that she was seeing a sharp and surprising increase in social/relational aggression from boys.
So, Lara speculates, is it possible that zero-tolerance anti-bullying programs are not eliminating bullying but just pushing it underground, into the guerrilla bullying we usually associate with girls?
And I wonder: Is it possible that aggression—physical or relational--can’t be stopped because it contributes to our emotional and/or moral development? Does it teach us lessons about survival? After all, the world is full of people who suck. We need to know how to recognize aggression and protect ourselves from it.
That’s what people who are bullied learn—if they survive the bullying. I know not all do, or they are wounded. Here we are yet again, at my favorite words for living: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Because the first time you stand up to a bully and watch him or her shrink back, or the first time you realize you can deflect emotional blows with attitude alone, is a powerful moment.
But what of the bullies? If bullying itself is a developmental stage, what is it good for?
Some young bullies learn empathy, I’m sure. Based on nothing but what I would like to believe, I think some young bullies have epiphanies, a moment when they see something in the eyes of a target, or hear their words echoed back to them in a new way, or face a bully themselves and experience a compassionate awakening, when their hearts grow three sizes.
But some young bullies just grow up to be old bullies. These people, I think, are the narcissists. I don’t think all narcissists are bullies but I speculate that all bullies are narcissists because one of the hallmarks of narcissism is lack of empathy and one must be lacking in empathy to be intentionally cruel to another human being.
So thinking about all this got me thinking—can empathy be learned? Is an adult who lacks empathy capable of developing it? Is empathy a behavior, a thought or a feeling? (What is a feeling, anyway? Entire books
have been written about that.)
Meandering through these thoughts, I stumbled on this little article about mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action.
In other words, when we see someone else do some things, our brains light up as if we were doing that thing ourselves.
The main reason I have trouble watching violent movies is because I have sympathetic pain. If I see hurt, I hurt. Physically. I can’t even listen to people describe dental procedures. And as a child, I was big on sympathetic throwing up. If someone else hurled, I’d hurl in solidarity. Not all the time but it happened. Could that be overactive mirror neurons?
Research on mirror neurons started with monkeys and peanuts (doesn’t everything?) and is now to the point where researchers are looking at whether the neurons are triggered according to the intent of the action witnessed. For example, in one study, participants watched videos of a hand picking up a teacup.
In one video, the teacup sat on a table amid a pot of tea and plate of cookies--a signal that a tea party was under way and the hand was grasping the cup to take a sip. In the other video, the table was messy and scattered with crumbs--a sign that the party was over and the hand was clearing the table. In a third video the cup was alone, removed from any context. The researchers found that mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and other brain areas reacted more strongly to the actions embedded in the tea-party context than to the contextless scene.
Taking this research about a thousand stages from this, we could extrapolate that emotional empathy is also connected to mirror neurons—that thinking about the sadness or pain of someone else would fire up the mirror neurons so we feel the same in us. We would “feel their pain.”
Can this be learned? Now that brain science tells us that the brain is not a locked black box but can grow and change, I suppose this means it can, theoretically. I can’t think how, though. Nor would it would be easy—even if you could find an unempathetic person who believed it something worth learning. If you don’t care, you don’t care, right?
Lara raises an interesting conundrum in her recent blog post about social/relational aggression, which is behaviors—rumor spreading, exclusion—we typically attribute to teenaged girls. A school principal recently told Lara that she was seeing a sharp and surprising increase in social/relational aggression from boys.
So, Lara speculates, is it possible that zero-tolerance anti-bullying programs are not eliminating bullying but just pushing it underground, into the guerrilla bullying we usually associate with girls?
And I wonder: Is it possible that aggression—physical or relational--can’t be stopped because it contributes to our emotional and/or moral development? Does it teach us lessons about survival? After all, the world is full of people who suck. We need to know how to recognize aggression and protect ourselves from it.
That’s what people who are bullied learn—if they survive the bullying. I know not all do, or they are wounded. Here we are yet again, at my favorite words for living: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Because the first time you stand up to a bully and watch him or her shrink back, or the first time you realize you can deflect emotional blows with attitude alone, is a powerful moment.
But what of the bullies? If bullying itself is a developmental stage, what is it good for?
Some young bullies learn empathy, I’m sure. Based on nothing but what I would like to believe, I think some young bullies have epiphanies, a moment when they see something in the eyes of a target, or hear their words echoed back to them in a new way, or face a bully themselves and experience a compassionate awakening, when their hearts grow three sizes.
But some young bullies just grow up to be old bullies. These people, I think, are the narcissists. I don’t think all narcissists are bullies but I speculate that all bullies are narcissists because one of the hallmarks of narcissism is lack of empathy and one must be lacking in empathy to be intentionally cruel to another human being.
So thinking about all this got me thinking—can empathy be learned? Is an adult who lacks empathy capable of developing it? Is empathy a behavior, a thought or a feeling? (What is a feeling, anyway? Entire books
have been written about that.)Meandering through these thoughts, I stumbled on this little article about mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action.
In other words, when we see someone else do some things, our brains light up as if we were doing that thing ourselves.
The main reason I have trouble watching violent movies is because I have sympathetic pain. If I see hurt, I hurt. Physically. I can’t even listen to people describe dental procedures. And as a child, I was big on sympathetic throwing up. If someone else hurled, I’d hurl in solidarity. Not all the time but it happened. Could that be overactive mirror neurons?
Research on mirror neurons started with monkeys and peanuts (doesn’t everything?) and is now to the point where researchers are looking at whether the neurons are triggered according to the intent of the action witnessed. For example, in one study, participants watched videos of a hand picking up a teacup.
In one video, the teacup sat on a table amid a pot of tea and plate of cookies--a signal that a tea party was under way and the hand was grasping the cup to take a sip. In the other video, the table was messy and scattered with crumbs--a sign that the party was over and the hand was clearing the table. In a third video the cup was alone, removed from any context. The researchers found that mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and other brain areas reacted more strongly to the actions embedded in the tea-party context than to the contextless scene.
Taking this research about a thousand stages from this, we could extrapolate that emotional empathy is also connected to mirror neurons—that thinking about the sadness or pain of someone else would fire up the mirror neurons so we feel the same in us. We would “feel their pain.”
Can this be learned? Now that brain science tells us that the brain is not a locked black box but can grow and change, I suppose this means it can, theoretically. I can’t think how, though. Nor would it would be easy—even if you could find an unempathetic person who believed it something worth learning. If you don’t care, you don’t care, right?
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