Jennifer Hancock here this is Unit Two why bullies bully and what can be done about it? Now the the answer to the question was bullies bully is because it works. It works for them. It really it. And I say that kind of tongue in cheek but the reality is it doesn't really matter why they do it. What matters is how we get them to stop, alright, but it does matter why they do it for social workers.

But the victims and to the parents of the victims why someone is behaving inappropriately is completely irrelevant. What matters is they're behaving inappropriately, and they need to stop. Right? So for social workers, that's a really interesting question. Maybe the person is being bullied at home, maybe they're being abused at home, maybe there's something going on in their life and they feel lack of control. There's any number of reasons why someone might bully and the answer but the at the end of the day, they're bullying because it works in some way for them.

Maybe it's giving them control over situations that they don't have in other aspects of their life. Maybe it's giving them social status. That happens a lot. A lot of times the bullying is not actually about the victims, it's about other people and the bullies trying to put on a show for other people and the victim just happens to be convenient. So it's really not anything the victim is doing has everything to do with the bully, and their need for something that they're getting by bullying. Right.

And that's really important from a behavioral perspective, because in order to get it to stop, we have to remove the reward. So we do need to know how they're being rewarded for the behavior, but first, we have to acknowledge they're being rewarded for being bullies. All right. Yes, they might have mental health issues. But a surprising number of bullies actually bully adaptively, meaning they do it because it helps them with social status. It helps them with a sense of control.

It helps them with their peers. So yeah, they're being rewarded for it. And I don't want to get too much into the science here about this, but there, there has been research on bullying. And a lot of it is like, Oh, it's adaptive. And it's not because parents are bad. And it's not because the school system is failing them or anything like that.

It really is that kids who bully gets higher social status, even people in the workplace who bully they tend to, it tends to work for them. Yeah, there's a cost to pay for bullying people are afraid of you. And, you know, you can lose social status very, very quickly if you're bullying. But for a lot of them, the risks are outweighed by the rewards. And that's what we have to be aware of when we when we want to get things to stop. Right.

So if you're interested in the question of why evolutionary psychologists have looked into this, and yeah, it's adapted their bullying because it works. Alright, so what I want you to consider is it You know, different people have different temperaments, and some, some people are naturally more aggressive, some people are naturally more timid. And it's, you know, a kid can learn to be aggressive with their friends and they get what they want because their friends, kind of, you know, give them what they want when they're aggressive, and then they learn that this works, I can get what I want by being aggressive, right? That's all it takes. It's really not about bad parenting. It's not about any of the myths about like people bullying, it's literally as simple as they are aggressive.

And it works. They get their way they get something out of it. And that's why bullies bully. And that's important. As we get into the question of, well, how do we make some stuff all right, and we're going to use get them to stop using science in the next lesson.