Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces incidence in primary schools

I’ve been thinking a little about this subject lately. It seems like bullying is a thing that serves the function of exacting the repressed violent desires of the social body. Who is selected for bullying is determined not primarily by the bully, but by the social group as a whole. To me this helps explain why it’s such a ubiquitous behavior; it’s a mechanism for a social group to act outside of its norms in the enforcement of its norms. To be clear, I think it’s terrible, just interesting to think about this way.

Bullies lower the fitness of targets to elevate their own standing. It's neanderthal-level social darwinism.

I love that you point out that bullying is social and its relation to the ordinary enforcement of social norms. And I think this points more broadly to the function of social violence as a whole: much of it is regulatory and follows from repressive logics that exist in less overt forms. In other words can't have a notion like that of sex without also having sexism and gendered violence.

Neanderthal aren't around anymore, so I'd say it's Sapien-level social darwinism.

Interesting. You've almost framed it in Gerardian terms:

Students all want the same thing: status, popularity, etc. Not everyone can these things though. Their scarcity is their value. The competition over this finite resource creates conflict and hostility. This pent up hostility has to be channeled to avoid chaos. A scapegoat is informally agreed upon: the oddball, the misfit, the outcast. These people are all the more obvious due to the extreme herding that happens in schools. The bully acts as the "executioner" of this "sacrifice". The boundaries of group unity are enforced, the shared complicity enforcing cohesion, and group identity and control are upheld.

I remember from my school days how much hostility was directed toward people who wouldn't or couldn't "fit in". I even internalized those feelings. "Why won't he/she just act normal?"

I'm not fully sold on Gerard, but his theories are kind of mesmerizing in their pat explanation of group dynamics.

Everyone except africans has some non-trivial amount of Neanderthal DNA in them.

According to popular science that is.

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an...).

> Who is selected for bullying is determined not primarily by the bully, but by the social group as a whole.

I disagree. I think that the person who is bullied is primarily selected by the bully, and the only influence that others have is that the bullied person doesn't have enough (or large enough) others around them in order to defend them. Others may then pile in once the target has been selected, but it's not in any way a collective decision.

You could just as well say that society chooses the people who get mugged, or the people whose houses are burglarized, or the people who are raped or murdered. I'm sure you could come up with some neo-Freudian way to convince somebody that makes sense, but it doesn't make sense. It's generalization to the point of uselessness if not complete absurdity.

I was bullied as a child. I was picked because I was an easy, bookish target without many friends, and definitely without tough friends. The bullying ended when I hurt a bully in a way that everyone found out about, and that state was maintained when I made a group of friends who would have defended me if a bully had approached me. The cause of all of this was obvious, not subtle or mysterious.

Game theory of bullying. Which works right up until you realize a lot of bullies have mental health issues and are probably not going to produce identical "rationalized" results to someone who isn't.

The social group’s norms are those the bully aims to appeal to, either because they directly believe in them or because they want others’ approval. The person who’s easy to target is often easy to target precisely because they’re excluded from friendships that would protect them. The group has no mind; it can’t explicitly decide something. The decision is structurally embedded in the group, and goes beyond any individual, including the bully that takes the action.

> influence that others have is that the bullied person doesn't have enough (or large enough) others around them in order to defend them

Yes, this is how the crowd selects the target. It's implicit in the fact that the crowd has indicated they won't defend the target

"Having no friends" is a signal that the herd isn't going to do anything to help you

What I said doesn’t assume the bully is some kind of rational actor playing a game. They’re more like an organ in the social body.

A social body relies on signals. If the signals are not predictable then you're facing the exact same problem. You've also opened the door on a single bad signal infecting the social body and pushing towards outcomes that would not occur if that single influence was not otherwise present.

If you're going to rely on this dynamic, then you're going to have this consideration.

> a mechanism for a social group to act outside of its norms in the enforcement of its norms

There are internal and external norms and even norms within each category have different levels of importance.

External norms are typically of the nature of "no fighting" and are enforced without looking at the circumstances. Their goal is for somebody perceived as an authority to keep the group pacified and minimize visible conflict. They are typically not interested in invisible conflict because by its nature, the external power can't see it.

The goal is not justice, it's peace.

Internal norms are fuzzy because they're usually not codified and might not even be agreed upon by the members of the group because their goal is maintaining a social hierarchy within the group.

The hierarchy's goal is neither peace nor justice, it doesn't even have a goal, it's just a compromise between people with differing goals - some entirely uninterested in the hierarchy, some obsessed with climbing the social ladder.

I’m sorry but I genuinely don’t understand your critique. Is there a simpler way you could phrase it?

> Students all want the same thing: status, popularity, etc.

fake news

I don’t really know if there’s a hard cutoff there. What separates a norm imposed by the parent then internalized by the child from a norm the child imposes independently? Regardless. I think focus on norms might be a distraction. I should’ve avoided that terminology. We could instead frame it as a desire for bad outcomes for some minority by the majority that gets taken up by the bully. The reason that the majority doesn’t act on its own to realize these desires is what leads me to suppose there’s norms against, for example, violence or harm of the weak, which is why the violence needs to be displaced to dark places the crowd doesn’t see. It could be, though, that this internal external norm divide is important to the process. I.e. the majority is kept from its violence by externally imposed norms, so bullying is the consequence of friction between external norms (no fighting) and internal norms (hierarchy organization). Bullying then serves as a pressure release valve for these externally repressed desires.

I like that more than mine maybe. It’s a really elegant explanation.

I agree norms are a distraction. It's about incentives. Every group/organization has an incentive to look strong to outsiders. It therefore minimizes internal conflict because that makes it weak. It most importantly minimizes visible conflict because it makes it _look_ weak.

However, every group/organization is just a collection of its members who each have different incentives. For some of those, it's gaining status/power. Status/power is mostly a zero-sum game, therefore gaining it requires attacking others (causing conflict). But causing visible conflict is damaging to the group so other members are likely to punish such behavior. As a result, the optimal strategy is to cause conduct conflict invisibly.

Bullying is nothing more than such a parasitic individual trying to achieve status/power or in some cases simply satisfaction.