Do teens use bullying as a way to get popular?

NC Life Study - Visit www.nclifestudy.com to learn more!

Dr. Robert Faris: Thanks to the CONTEXT study, it's helped overturn some narrow thinking in the field of bullying, which had been sort of dominated by this perspective that it was pathological behavior that was a reaction to problematic home lives or psychological problems. The CONTEXT study helped show that actually there's perhaps a more common pattern that is where bullying is completely normal and not deviant behavior, but is instrumental and effective for helping some adolescents achieve the goal of social status. So adolescents used it as a way to become more popular in school. So for the longest time psychologists really have this very narrow view of what bullying was and why it occurred, which really centered around problematic home lives and home environments and psychological deficiencies of various sorts, empathy deficits, impulse and reactivity issues. That's all true but that isn't one source of or set of causes of bullying. Thanks to the CONTEXT data, which was the first study to tell us not just who was a bully, who was a victim, but specifically who was bullying whom and who they were bullying with. Because it was an ongoing study that had multiple waves, we could find out what happened after. So what happened to the two people who were implicated in a bullying situation and what we found is that the the bullies, depending on who they targeted, gained in social status and the victims lost it. We also showed that the kids who care more about being popular were more likely to engage in bullying. If they had friends, even if they didn't care about being popular, if they even had friends who cared a lot about being popular, they were more likely to get involved in bullying. It's deeply implicated in the status arrangements in schools. The kids' aggression and victimization tend to escalate as kids become more central in the social life of their school.