#711 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Ruthless Ways Women Compete With Each Other
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Hello, everybody, welcome back to the show. My guess today is doctor Tracy vying call. She's a professor at the university of ottawa, researcher and an author with a focus on the link between violence and mental health.

Intros sexual competition is present in all animals. However, the sophistication of this rivalry amongst human females is unbelievably impressive. The ferrell x wheeled their competition in some very weird, wonderful and ruthless ways. Expect to learn why women use indirect aggression as a competition strategy, how resource scarcity influences their competition, whether children actually developed just fine with no consequences during the pandemic, the relationship between bullying and social status, the impact of bullying on the developing brain and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome doctor Tracy vine cle.

Do women have an intolerance of sexy peers?

Absolutely hundred percent. Uh we say we don't we say that we just love women and we promote women, but um we we love certain women and we promote certain women. So uh yeah where we're not the Angels that we properly are to be, I think we do a lot of impression .

management who are the women that we do support .

and love um IT depends like obviously we're going to have um different qualities that we admire in a person. And so if they have those, and I think that that's who we're going to promote, we're pretty good at um tolerating our friends and promoting our friends um but I don't think we're univerSally kind to all women. And it's interesting because I think that there's been this like changes. I guys where people, where women talk about how the sister hood has never been stronger, and we support each other unconditionally, and yet we really don't.

Why, why? Why do you think that that's the current pop culture summarizing of female friendships? And why is IT not the case?

Well, I think that it's funny because it's kino said, but it's not really sad.

So have you seen the Barbie movie yet? No, okay, you need to see this is really good o but anyhow, so it's funny because there's a big speech where SHE talks about like all the pressures that women are under and everything that we have to manage and you know and then there's also this like thread about women supporting women and yet there's like plenty of examples of women not supporting women in that movie, right? So I think that there's just like a little bit of a disconnect where we say up then we don't actually live that ideal. Um now the reason I think that happens that we don't support each other as much as we should is because there's like risk or security that affects women, I think more than men and I or this perception of resource ity and in some places in the world there's absolutely resort security um with women you know that not they don't have as many privileges, they don't make as much money, those sorts of things um and when things don't seem fair it's hard to be uh generous.

right? So what's the sexy bit of the sexy peers? Why be particularly intolerant of the sexy ones?

So so that would be um the idea that it's gonna sound sexy, but it's a robust finding. I did a study on this, so the idea that um history ally, we've sort of maintained uh control over what the opposite sex wanted and so if we um you know are .

giving away .

sex freely, then we don't hold that. We don't the power of that resource is um is less. It's even nonexistent. So IT would behove us to then punish those who give away sex too freely. So slight shame um debates women who are a threat to that powers holding position. And so this is a study that I did that showed that exact phenomenon IT has since been replicated around the world. And basically um women are intolerant of certain types of women, but in particularly they're particularly a woman who are sexy and is a universal phenomenon.

right? So sexy is a very specific word to use here. This isn't necessarily just attractive. I it's like presumably sexually provocative.

exactly. It's not a proactive percy. Although I think that if you get to the end of that spectrum on attractiveness, so like you're incredibly attractive, I think that thought would probably unnerve some women because that person would be um would be revered by men and that would then debate their own standing in terms of competition. But generally speaking in I mean, yeah so the the impression would be that you're sexually provocative or available.

What was the study that you did or there any that came along after yours and did IT even Better than you prefer?

Well, I don't know if anybody started Better, because I think I did IT the vast, but because I thought about IT forever and ever IT took, like over a decade take for the study to come true. So basically what I saw all the time was that when a woman violated norms, so the norm of, you know, you could be sexy, but not too sexy um then women would mock them. They would use indirect agression.

An indirect russian takes the form of gossiping, peer group exclusion, but also more non verbal things like, you know, the once over where you start at the top you look down, you look up but you don't smile to convey disgust or you stare at each other and then when he leaves the room you laugh those sorts of think so anyhow, I saw that over and over again. So I um designed to study with my post doctoral student onshore sharma, where we had women come into the lab. They were part of this previous study where we are looking at their use of interact gration, that we invited them into the law to talk about female friendships, how they deal with conflict.

Um we analyzed them into one of four conditions with their friend, with a stranger and whether or not they were going to be interrupted in their conversation by a very sexy dress confederate or a conservatively dress confederate. And the person was the exact that was the same person. Lisa, gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.

Any out, we standardize everything right down to the number of steps you took. Everything was scripted. So they came through. They didn't know that we were recording them right from the get go SHE came through and walk right between the two women and mentioned to antro in the backroom that I needed to talk to her about something and then SHE left with Angel and we recorded what they did and everybody in the sexy condition treated her poorly with two exceptions um and I think they were just not paying attention because I had had they be been they would have done something and those that when um lisa interrupt the dum and he was just dress conservatively, they didn't even pay attention so the only thing that was a different between the two conditions was her sexy outfit wow .

okay so what are the implications of this? What does he what does that tell you about female psychology?

IT tells that like I mean a lot of times people think that the suppression of women's sexuality is done by men and IT is done by men um for sure that exists in especially in certain countries. But IT also is polite by women. And women do suppress other women sexual expression.

So on average, what do you say most lit champ comes from men off from women?

I think IT depends on the country. IT really does serves a cultural component to that. But let's just talk about western cultures um I think that uh that women are particularly intolerant of sexy peer is more so than men. Does he bother you to see a sexy woman?

Me, no. I I would campaign for more .

if something. And would would you be upset if women more, more promiscuous?

Yeah, precisely. I mean, this this is from my boo. My story land is from him that he was saying, IT. It's very strange to lay at the feet of men a restriction in a female sexual freedom, given the fact that almost every man is, given the opportunity, would campaign for that precise thing.

I haven't been to a parade downtown here in Austin, but if there was one for that, no, that would be up there with one of the, you know, for my other male brethren. And i'm going to stand firm, and I will help know you. You will finally be able to get your underway. So yeah, IT makes complete sense to me. And I learned from Jeffery Miller and took a max as well. This insight about the game theory of slott naming, where if you think about sex is having a Price, and if one woman is prepared to lower the Price from three dates to one date, or from x amount resources to point five x amount of resources, that low is the market value of whatever that thing is. Overall.

that's exact. That's exactly what I showed.

Need a Price enforcement mechanism. exactly. It's a carl yeah .

and that's about master's theory that so he wrote a paper with gene twin je where they talk about this and this is what I used as the theoretical basis for the study along with what I knew about, uh, indirect aggression. So it's interesting because h introspection ual competition is like one area that people studied, but indirect aggression is very similar. It's like the behavior, the manifestation of inta sexual competition.

It's enforcement mechanism competition.

People haven't really considered that. So I wrote a theory was published in transit of the world else royal society and IT did very well and um people have used IT now to spring board other studies. But basically I was arguing just at that the form of into sexual competition, the former takes in women, is indirect aggression.

Interesting i've got to quote from you here, sexes coveted by men. Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who makes sex too readily available compromise the powers holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be promiscuous. And it's the seem to be bit, I think, which is particularly .

interesting that exactly, it's interesting because after that study came out, I was in florida at disney with my daughter, who was eight, and we brought along her two girlfriends. And there was a woman who was dressed um in a very sexually provocative manner, shoes polyana ID fifties, a tiny, tiny shirt, tiny toy .

show floria baby out for a .

look gorgeous, look gorgeous anyhow. And I turned around and I saw these three, eight roles doing exactly what was done in my study. So SHE was getting, SHE was getting the once over by three million eight year olds.

But what, I mean, not fascinating. what? Why would you be the case? The animals who aren't even sexually active, who don't understand what sex is, how deeply wired is this at the base of the brain stem, that even they have gotten no idea he might be too promiscuous and maybe she's going to take some future husband away from me.

I don't know it's at the brain stamp, but it's certainly there's like a lot of socialization around this. Think about school dress coats so we've had tons of pressure in canada. A lot of schools have had to revoke their school dress codes because they're sexist where they punish girls for dressing um in small clothes but not boys and so they've gotten rid of them. And under that the problem of that is success, what that is.

But anyhow, a the boys want to wear small clothes.

Well, they wear tank tops. I think that's a small clothing.

right? okay. So goals girls are allowed to wear things like skirts and invests.

So we don't typically wear um so we don't wear uniforms in north american schools and less go to private school o but my point is is that these dress codes exist and theyve long existed in just now in twenty twenty three year, we get in rid of them. And um little girls know about them and little boys know about them and they know about why they know that they're unfair or they feel that they're unfair. They are unfair.

Um so where's that come from? So it's like really hard to separate um the evolutionary significance of this from the the mass of socialization pressure that they're under. So I do think that it's rooted in our evolutionary history.

I wrote that in in a paper to twenty thirteen paper. I talked about that theoretical paper. I do think that there is an evolutionary significance to our behavior but I also think that um you know we are society in general across the world is quite intolerant of this.

Why is IT the case if this is true, and I believe that it's true, not been singing this game theory of slut shaming song for at least a few years now, why is that the case that we are a sister hood that is altogether, these men need to stop controlling our sexuality is all girl power stuff. How is that mean remaining so sticky if the truth doesn't seem to actually match up to the that sort of that gust?

I think it's easy for us to blame you and not look at ourselves, right? And I do think that there's truth that sometimes that does ist like we talked about. Like, do you get upset by somebody dressing sexy? I absolutely not but some men do for sure and in some cultural groups they really do right.

Um we know that that's the case um but that said, I just think that this is the book that I have coming out next year called mean with Simon and duster and it's basically just thought trying to reconcile that. So you know a good feminist doesn't say what i'm saying. So a good feminist supports women no matter what.

And yet a good feminist actually doesn't support all women. Like if you really look at the behavior of women, you see that um you know we say that it's men oppressing women, but it's also women impressed in women. And if we can acknowledge that a we can manage .

IT indirect competition. Do men use that to what's the what's the ratio of indirect competition between the sexes?

Proportionally speaking, an autogas directed russian because indirect um competition are not too sure what that means per say. So indirect aggression um is used by men for sure. Men talk about each other.

They got they give each other of the silent treatment, that sort of thing, but not as often. So men use a millions of behavior, so you guys are like straight out in your face. Um you are are physically aggressive and you will also use indirect aggression, uh, indirectly aggressive tactics, whether women, proportionally speaking, only use this form of aggression.

Of course there are exceptions. Are some women are really violent, but they are rare and they're so salient when we see these women, they make the front page of every news outlets in the world because we don't see them that often. So this is our exclusive way of dealing with each other when we are um being less than appropriate, being less than kind.

interesting.

okay. So we're more affected by IT. So if I rolled my eyes that you it's nack in a cause much distress. If I did that to a woman, IT would cause some problems.

And there is quite a bit of study showing that we have a heightened physiological response to being um austerities rejected um all of the things that encompass indirect aggression. So women are more more tune to IT and we respond to IT more. And that has an evolutionary significance because belonging was far more important to women than to men.

Not to suggest that you didn't need to belong, you needed to get your coalitions SAT right so that you could win the war and kill the ball. But i'm for women. We also needed a all parents.

We needed support from other women. And so it's a really interesting um issue because on the one hand, you need the support of women, but in another hand, there's not enough resources to go around. So there's also a zero some game in a sense attached to that. So it's trying to reconcile that. So then the way to do IT then is to be strategic is to um appear to be on your side but not really be on your side.

Why is IT so important to not be directly aggressive as a woman?

So i'm an cambell wrote this really great theory about this. And basically IT was about SHE called that staying alive. And so if women historically um got into a physical battle, a fight and they died or were injured and not able to take care of their offspring, those osprey did not survive.

So historically and in some places in the world that still exists, um infant survival is inexorably um linked to maternal survival. So we can't be fighting all over the place. I think that it's not good for our health and wellness and it's certainly not good for our offspring. So how do you get your genes into the next generation? They got ta grow up and make babies and cells.

okay? Whether if the man was to die in some fish fight gone wrong, the kids are still probably going to survive. Mum, still around men also, a little bit more physically robust, bit more tolerant of being hit in the head. That's what i've got, the bowl ridge in the bigger hands and the blob OK. How effective is indirect aggression?

And just before we say that to get to that um before I answer that, the other thing choose that man dono was stick around and yet we still we still have managed it'd be Better. They did historically. They have and always though, and they still don't really always stick around. I just needed to put that day in. Okay, see, cause I am like really good at indirect aggress and research.

Effective IT is effective. I felt that in my soul.

what is that research research so um it's incredibly effective IT really is. And again, because women are so attuned to IT, so IT doesn't have the same hit on man. So are using IT against men doesn't have the same effect. But men, are we ever good at picking IT up women? We see IT in the nanosecond I coach adolescent girls and a high performance soccer coach, and I tell them, I can hear them roll their eyes like a kilometre away. I know when it's going down, and we do we we notice that um there are means like you go on to any social media platform and there are tons of means of like you know a woman like opening the door real quickly because he heard somebody like brother eyes is her do IT you know we come back and we hear that we know .

there's a number of interesting studies going on at the moment to do with female sports. I think tennis players and basketball players on the opposite teams, given that you've been doing your ethnographic in place research with high performance female soccer team, what have you observed about international team love in this taste or that stuff?

H, notice so much in, in fact, of study, a lot of the things that y've noticed. So one of the things that i've noticed, and then we actually have a study that showed this to be true more so for adolescent girls than for adolescent boys. But our lesson girls make a lot of social comparison's is SHE pretious than me, is SHE Better than me.

If SHE smarter than me, SHE more popular. Those social comparison on's illicit jealousy. And the way that jealousy is managed desire, it's turned in word. They become depressed, anxious of the leg. I'm not as good as so and so, or they turn IT outward, which is more common, and they tear down the rival.

So the only reason that she's playing left, full back and i'm a left for back is because her dad of the coach or her mom the coach, that sort of thing. So we we showed that launch totally the pathway we shouted to be stronger and girls than in boys. One thing I notice all the time is that um like when somebody's done, you're wrong on the field.

You can't let a go if you're a girl or a woman, but men just go out for a beer right after the game. They don't give a shit. It's done with let's move on, right?

Does that matter whether it's your own team or the opposition?

We can't let a go from the opposition. So i'll get to this. So what happens is um it's very common to do a handshake after the game in north amErica and and for you to not get your hand shook by somebody who thinks you'd did them dirty on the field.

Where's man just shapes and get on with IT. And there is a study that looked at this across IT was forty four different countries is positive way of behavior after competitions and IT showed that women around the world just can't let a go. So like if somebody y's done us wrong, it's there.

It's there for life like if you did me wrong and bread five and I ran you just now, it's on, okay, so anyhow, I notice that and I don't notice. And I coach little boys too, and I ve never noticed that. And then they talk about the girls on the other team and the women on the other team. And what a bitch I can't believe SHE did. This is not like they're personally offended by a slight tackle gone wrong, whether, you know, men don't don't really seem to care about that.

And then the other thing i've noticed that is that on a girls team or a Young women's team, the best player on the team is not necessarily the most popular player on the team, wherein boys teams and men's teams, the best player on the team is almost invariably always the most popular person on that team is always the leader so we don't care if you're the best per say unless you get to like the high, high, high end of of eut women sports um that's not what makes you popular. And in fact, being the best might actually make get you bullied on a girls team or a women's team because how dairy you think you're so good. So there's this whole this theory about tripping the prom queen of written about IT um knocking down the tall poppy. And we're pretty good at making sure women stay in their place. And if they're not going to stay in their place and they are going to think too well of themselves, we ll put him back their own quake.

okay? So status and competence are split apart in female hierarch kies in a way that they are not in male high rockies hundred percent.

And it's interesting because I read carly loyd autobiography and he talked about how carly loyd is one of the most decorated women's a football player in the world. SHE won the balloon dog um for the uh that and also the best player for the fever world cup when I was here in canada and twenty and fifteen. SHE ordered her and her autobiography.

He talks about how when he joined the national team that sometimes SHE felt that women, we're passing to her the ball event because SHE was seen as competition. And you imagine like, you know, if you're playing a sport, even if it's like a beer league and you're or not that good as a guy, you take yourself off and sit on the bench so that you guys can win the championship. Whether I think, and it's been said by many in my colleagues, in some ways, women and girls would rather lose the game and have everybody play than win. Now of course i'm not talking about at the elite elite level because that's gona have different parameters and different .

personality types. Um but you've got this a preference for egalitarian .

m we have preference for knowing your place and stain in your plates.

Yeah, I learned some interesting stuff to do with the behavior of male and female students as they walk out of exam holes and they talk to each other and the guys will say, oh yeah, question three, absolutely smashed IT. I revised that like that was up to great worth of goals ago. Oh, you know, I was already high, probably failed.

It's not so good. And the guys will also say that too. But IT seems like the guys have less of an issue. Proclaiming their successes are again, also super interesting study, where girls will tend to downplay qualifications and accolades if they think that their responses are going to be seen by other people, as opposed with that being kept private.

So there is this very below the surface, you know, and see current that's going on here with how women play with status ah what they want other people to know about their accusations and their accomplishments. They do not want to enact the ire or the jealousy or the nv of any of the other goals specifically that are in their location. And I think that a final bit is that probably at least partially aware that many of the accomplishments that they could be talking about probably don't impact and make value all that much. So it's going to be a detriment to me, to the females that around me and maybe not that like is the is the guy around you're going to be that much more attracted to you if you say that you smash that exam, then if you didn't like, is economic experience a big part of IT?

He's not going to be turned off by IT, that's for sure. But what's going to happen is like the reason why women, they make themselves smaller, not because of men, they make themselves smaller so that they don't get they don't attract the negative attention of women. We can't break we can't say what we're good at because then you think you're special and you'll get torn down and then and then we wonder why we like confidence, right?

Like it's it's just really interesting. A lot of times people will talk about how women dress for other women and there's some truth to that, right? Like we really are trying to um please other women and um and minimize the discomfort that could come um from not pleasing them.

Um any humor has a really funny skit and you should try and find IT after where it's like women basically use we use a lot of self deprecating humor so we put ourselves down all the time like, oh my, you know somebody says something nice about us. Like, are you kidding me? I just found that in the garbage and put IT on me like whatever you know, we go on and on and and make sure that we don't think well of ourselves, or give the impression that we think well of self.

So the skit goes on about women just putting themselves down all around. And then this one woman, somebody compliments her, and he just says, thanks and all of their heads explode. Moto, me, thanks.

lake. We just sit something and nice about yourself. You're supposed to put yourself down.

Those are the rules. So is spot on. What he did in this, in this get talk to .

me about how jealousy mediates this relationship then between attractiveness comparison and indirect aggression.

So IT IT actually works just like that if it's a mediator, right? So IT explains the relationship. So if I am jealous, then um I need to remedy that eeky feeling that's not a good feeling.

And so I have a couple of different ways I could do IT or more than a couple. I have a few different ways I can manage IT, but the more often the more common weight managed is by attacking myself or attacking the source of my comparison. The person that's making me feel so jealous and women are very good at attacking um other women whom they proceed to have more but again they justify IT. So back to member, we started off with impression management um so they use a variety of cognitive strategies to make their region acts more palatable and um and one way they do IT as they they make IT so that the the person that's been targeted um how IT coming to them IT was justified so SHE wasn't so arrogant. If he wasn't um you know whatever IT is it's gonna be then I wouldn't have treated her poorly.

interesting.

And by the way, like I can predict what the reactions gonna when this comes out and when my book comes out to the reaction is gonna be that um you know I have internalized the the sergey myself that data apparently .

for me so your data appa yeah exactly like .

I obviously don't like women and I don't like women because i've believed what men have said about women um and yet, you know we do these really sneaky studies and in the right context we see IT done with IT comes out like info for so I don't know like maybe there is a bit of internalized method y our own some of the variants, but a lot of this is IT persists because that works is very, very effective. You don't .

need to worry. We've had tony ranald and joy baLance and there there are many female heads that have been chopped off by the internet before you've got here. I think everyone that's listening fully aware of the fact that being a woman, being a female and trying to navigate the delicate summary blade that is the female status iraqi is really, really tough and IT does not get any easier. IT is not made. You're Normal prepared by ignoring the sort of thermal dynamics of how these interactions work.

But I mean, how do you change IT if you can acknowledge IT? right? So like I unprepared, I know dealt with IT for many, many years. I know what's gonna said. And ironically, they use indirect russian to make their point.

And I just think like seriously, you don't see the irony on and how you're behaving because certainly we should be tolerant of people holding different viewpoints. It's not like i'm as posing hate speech but um mister Rogers, of all people said that if it's mentioned able, it's manageable. So how do then we change our behavior if we can acknowledge IT and IT causes a lot of harm? Like I mean, we've have kind of been joking around here, but some Young women take their lives over this.

Some older women take their lives over, teenage girls take their lives over this. Um you know the bullying, uh, that the injure is real is significant. It's link to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, suicidal. So I mean, this is an important worthy area of study. We ve got to get this right.

The issue that you come up against is anything which is seen as not being upfront, very, very positive for whichever ver the and or lower down groupers is always presumed is always castigated very quickly as being the thing which is a fault and IT the child wants to eat ice cream every night that is what the child wants and would be enjoyable but is ultimately not good for IT in the long run. So your front loading compassion but backloaded all of the issues that come from not actually understanding what .

the problem is in the first place exactly um I I would love for women to be and some women are I mean women in academia I find our very tough and and can handle the opinions being um expressed directly and in contradiction to their own viewpoints. But I just wish just generally speaking, I think if we were a little less um sensitive, a little bit more tolerant, um a little bit more honest than I would probably be in a Better position in terms of wheeling power, holding power and progressing with power.

Did you see this a hypothetical head dressing client study? They came out a little while ago.

Okay, so give me and one more hint. I feel like I know this. Um I explored .

how women sabotage hypothetical headdresses clients through distance january beauty advice, which would detrimentally impact clients physical tractive veness. In both studies, the more attractive the client, the more hair was recommended to be cut off. Both late women and female professional headdresses cut most hair off women who are of the same attractiveness level as them.

With women cutting the most hair of women, they have to be about his attractively themselves. They sabotage women whose how was in good condition and had requested a smaller amount, cut off to a greater extent than women with her in poor condition. Client makeup caused lower mate value, lay women to cut off less hair, suggesting the dominance incited by women wearing makeup resulted in reduced sabotage. More interest sexy, competitive women, including headdresses cut off more hair, confirming competitor manipulation as introspection ual competitive in the strategy being employed.

Yes, that study finds .

itself in the book.

It's interesting because I had this one um gro friend in high school. We were in that popular group and everybody was very attractive and had a lot of um assets and competence cities that the peer group valued. But any time he told me that I looked really good in an outfit, I automatically had to change IT that like I mean, I just like IT was almost like a given that .

fucking opposite day.

I look like crap. And this is why SHE saying that.

wow.

that is so good. And that's not my reaction to all women, right? But like, experience tells you what's going on.

Bill burr has this amazing bit about the body positivity movement. He thinks basically that the body positivity movement is women encouraging other women to push themselves further and further out of the appropriate make value dating pull. As you applied women for being the size that they are, IT makes a really good case. That wall, yeah, you get all of the points of being, you know, morally grandstanding and I am empathy and I care for the the downturn group and soon and so but you are also doing something that benefits you are on mate value, right, which is moving more and more women away from wherever you are.

So are we that vacuum?

I think that the underlying a turbulence that happens below the surface is so effective. IT doesn't matter whether you are or whether you aren't, the net result is what works. And ultimately be I think that this would you know because .

that some sneaky shit that is some sneaky shit.

But I don't think that I don't think pretty much any woman is cognition. This is again, it's a bit from bill burr that I was listening to IT. And as I was listened to ask, wow, this sounds like really comprehensive control x ual competition from women to push you, the woman out of the mating pool HMM. I wonder if that. And so this is total bro science here, right?

And you know, it's interesting because I have a reaction to IT, because like here, I know people are going to we are going to have a reaction to everything I said and now having a reaction to this. So I will have to give this some thought because like I want to believe that we're not that mackie alien and I also want to to believe that um we we I do know we have free will and we're conscience conscious beans and conscious ous individuals as well so I don't know I am not buying that one just yet.

High hopes for humanity. okay. So one of the other things you mentioned that earlier on about. A bullying, the sort of the effect youth austria ization on, especially Young girls, some of the stuff that I learned from your work. One in four children report that they have experienced clinically elevated rates of depression. Twenty five percent of children and adolescence reported that they'd experienced significant depression incidents, and hot hospitalization rates for new unset eating disorders increased by sixty percent during the pandemic, and rates for emergency department visits for attempted suicide have increased by twenty two percent in the past few years. What is going on with Young people's mental health.

So there's been a general decline in their mental health for the past fifteen years or so. So IT has IT wasn't good before the pandemic and IT was worse during the pandemic. Will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.

So i've been studying um mental health and violence for years and not the violence like not the mental health of violent people, but what happens when people are exposed to violence and the mental health issues that ensue. Um so we have this crisis. This mental health crisis is particularly pronounced for adolescent girls and Young women, and there's a bunch of reasons why this could be the case during the pandemic.

I think that a lot of IT had to do with social isolation. There is a lot of evidence to support that the need to belong as a fundamental human motivator to all, but it's particularly pronounced for women. And we talked about this already. So staying alive, so you know belonging, being in a group affiliating, all of those things are really important for my survival and my offspring survival um so I think that chAllenged girls and women, particularly during the pandemic um but also two were were more we're exposed to violence more than men, so we're more likely to be um victims of intimate partner violence. You know a everything except for murdered men get murdered more than women um and then there were big on social persons and so social media has not been really good for um adolescent girls and for women um I think all of those things contribute to poor mental health.

Well if you look at greg looky on of JoNathan hyde work, they lay in awful lot of the changes at the feet of social media. What's your what's your perspective on that? Do you think IT? Is the patient zero of all of this? Or is the more going on there's .

going to be more going on? You'll never be we you're never gna find one thing that causes everything, but I do think that counts for a lot of the variants. I really do um we see this over and over again. Um like I don't do any clinical work anymore. But certainly this was something that was when I worked in the mood disorders clinic when I was doing my internship, is something I saw a lot um yeah girls and women make a lot of comparison and they spend a lot of time on social media um and those social comparisons already told you lead to jealousy and that jealousy intern leads to externalize or internalize behavior um I don't think men use social media the same way we do. I really don't um I don't I don't know how often you take your spring and zoom IT to see um you know every wrinkle and every hair out of place do you ever do that?

I'm just curious no that is even like if I asked my husband, like would you even talked about um but certainly we do that all the time and kindness that feature exists now because I used have to take a picture of that and then I could zoom IT um anyhow so yeah it's not good it's not good for the health of of fealty in and we need to get a grip on this and figure IT out. We did this study that just under review and um so one thing I noticed that happens and hasn't been looked at, but IT makes sense. So we're really interested in threats to relationships, right? So like meat poaching and the like.

And I know you know that literature of very well. So I was really interested in female in friendship poaching and what that looks like for girls are sorry for women versus men. So what we did was we look we developed a scale called the social media friendships um jealousy scale and basically said, like you know, how affected are you if your friend posts something and you're not tagged in IT or your friends geo locator tells you that they're out with all their friends and you're not invited um your friend and it's like just all these things that happened on social media and we found that women more more affected than men by IT across three studies .

and then they became .

more depressed and anxious as well, is a consequence of .

that jealousy? Ww, what's the underlying dynamic that social media is playing on, which is particularly effective at in contacting ghost mental health？ What is IT the austria ization? Is that being felt? Feeling like they're .

being left out? Is that is that feet? Is that focal? Is that fear of missing out? IT really is significant for girls and women. And IT comes back again to that need to belong.

Am not suggesting that you're all psychopath, that men psychopaths 那种。 你 positive relationships and affiliation on the light， you certainly do, but we need IT more. We absolutely do need IT more. And so um you know we are value is is not that IT should be but we place a lot of value on having friends and belonging um and being included and when were not IT hurts give me the evolutionary .

explanation for why that's the case is just that a woman on her own is fragile and potentially dead is dead she's .

so fragile SHE needs the resources of other women um you know that that Taylor attend and befriend hypotheses that we really do need and there's tones of evolutionary scholars who have written about this that women have historically relied on other women to to stay alive and to keep their children alive.

And IT still exists in some places in the world today so it's like a fine line again, you need to belong um more so than men um but you also have to compete within this nest of belonging. And that's really chAllenging, which is why I think we're so, so good at indirect aggression. We're so sophisticated and how we use IT like you're all pretty crude when you use IT and were not are like out it's .

a certain skull rather than a big hammer totally.

It's so funny how often i'll say to my husband on my and what you do and like he didn't even notice he was in the room like how do you get your live like this but then it's like, how do we get through life for work? Like so high percent sit in a tune to every perception of slight.

Have you got any idea this? A attenuation to whats going on in the room? Is that on a sliding scale with certain, when obviously this is on average, there is a belk blab a is the particular personality trait which really tunes that up, is a conscientious ously, is a neuroticism is IT know, is there something that you have found that can quite accurately predict the level of attention that a goal would have to her surroundings and the status in her group?

I think if it's not onna be any of the big five or if you look at the hex ico, it's not gonna be any of those persae. When we looked at that, we found like conscious ness was actually negative related to IT um but it's gonna be hyper competitiveness.

So there's the competitiveness where you um just like personal development competitiveness that you use to Better to yourself, visible y yourself and then there's the I need to be Better than everybody else where like everything is there are some game. So women who are hyper competitive are the ones that are more likely to be attuned to these things. They're more likely to perceive slight when things are ambiguous.

They're more likely to cause harm to others who they perceive to have harmed them. Um hold bridges to get others mad at them so to use indirect aggression. So hyper competitive women are um they are difficult in a lot of ways and they're not happy themselves which is really interesting in their mental health profiles are very problematic.

Wow, talk to me about the relationship between bullies and social status. I had a tony volk on the show a few months ago. I adored his work on bully ying. I spent a lot of time being a becoming more familiar with bullying than I would have liked while I was in school.

So I was getting to learn and off a lot, what what have you found about this? We've spoken about about social status so far, most of for girls, but also of the boys. What is this ah? How do these two things live in in relationship to each other?

So tony are really good friend of mine um he's fantastic. And uh so I I told you about that study the um slut shaming study, the sexy confederate study. So I think one of my other more famous studies, if you can say that without getting knocked down because I like bragin about myself, um is um basically I my for my dissertation, my PHD.

I looked at ming girls, the phenomenon before I even came out as a movie. So I was really interested at the time, scientists kept talking about popular kids being really well adjusted good citizens in their schools and that sort of thing. And I had thinking, i'd go to this conference and say, like that, how can you talking? Well, that's not what popular kids are like. But I honestly think that there's, Polly, an over representation of nerds in academy who weren't in the popular group. So they really didn't know what I was about, but I was in that popular group and we were all that nice in a lot of ways.

So I for my dissertation looked at adolescence from great six to great twelve um and whether or not they had asset and confidences of the peer group values so that they were attractive, good athletes, rich, funny, tough all of those things and how that related to bullying and um other status indicators like popularity and power and what we found was or what I found for my dissertation was that um most kids who bully others have a lot of power. Um then then there's this other group of kids who bully others who have low power. Those are like the Nelsons from the summer, right?

So um that group kind of in discriminately bullies everybody, but they're very marginal. The rejected um you know their futures pretty bleak um but most kids who bully others are actually the elite of the school. So the reason that they are afforded power and the abuse their power is because they have things that the peer group values, right?

So our girls is being attractive and for boys it's typically being athletic in north american culture or probably even in western culture. So every schools going to have a different culture um you know you could go to a performing art school and the most popular kids at that school will be. Maybe the best, I don't know whatever guitar players or whatever.

So all this to say whatever the peer group values that of four power. That power then in turn typically gets i'm corrupted and that's true of almost every human being on the planet. Power corrupts in a um in an absolutely corrupts, right so um so anyhow so that's what my dissertation was about and it's been robustly uh, replicated.

You know this is something we see over and over again. I can went to finland early in my career to give a talk on this and then I was hosted by Christ sama valley, just like I don't know for fine this and in fin land and as like go, i've been to your mas, you're going to find IT and they found IT. It's been found everywhere, right? So and IT existing colleges to universities.

So my daughter plays d one soccer. IT exists in d one for its IT exists severity that exists in the university life. And then we get out of IT.

What of two questions? First off, what did the bully get out of IT? what? What is the benefit to them? And secondly, why do we then get out of IT?

What is IT about growing up? They get resources, right? So we've shown, and we've shown with tony, so tony and I publish a few studies on this, they get more sex, which is awesome, I guess, and good stuff for for people um they get um uh Better recognition.

They can influence the peer group in the norms of a school more uh they get more resources. People give them shit. People look at them. People adore them. All of those things are good, right like there are the silver backs of their school um and then nobody messes with them, which is also a good feeling.

I don't understand I don't understand how standing on the shoulders of lower status individuals gives the bully stores that the .

body that group doesn't believe the the lowest lowest standard so they do a little bit but no, it's not that unfair fight so much so um bob viruses work and others have shown that um high status bullies tend to bully those that are just at the next wrong, the ones that are chAllenging their status, right? So those are the ones that are in trouble. And or anybody who threatens their catch bird seat in the sense.

is that because it's a signal of low status to seem like you're in competition with someone who supposedly ten runs below you.

well, they're not on your radar because, you know, the thing is the corrupting influence of power also makes you impervious to the plight of others. So you're not paying attention to others unless you're paying attention to people that are threat to you. That's all you're really paying attention to.

So I don't know if it's that there that conscientious ous where it's like such an unfair fight and you're a loser if you pick on somebody whose perceived as a loser kind of thing. Ah I don't think it's like that. I think it's about maintaining um so achieving and maintaining her germany. I really think it's about trying to maintain power and and you maintain power by making sure those that are trying to threaten your power base don't get too close.

Doesn't mean that very well. Maybe in your book as well that says, uh everything after high school is just high school IT talks about, you know, the lunch table that you set out and the cool kids and the games and so and so what you've suggested that that once you a dewan soccer career is over, you enter the real world in these dynamics, at least begin to dissipate how much do they fall away? What adult bullying look like either even such a thing in the same context as childhood bullying.

Adult bullying looks a different from childhood bullying and that it's not as um status oriented like I just suggested these high status bullies. It's more um I mean certainly IT IT exists like in the worlds place, people will pick on somebody who they perceive as a threat to them. The reason that dissipates is because our peer groups are more fluid um they're not a stable. So I think the stability of high school peer groups is what contributes to IT as well because the higher key gets formed through stability and that doesn't exist in adult hood as much, right? So like you have your hockey friends and then you have, you know your gym brows and then you have i'm .

just making all of them and I only have one group of friends and all but .

but my point is like, you know and then you have a workplace and you have an any difficult job. So let's just say, like mostly we go to the job, the same job where we see the same people over and over again, all of those things sort of that happened, but we have all these different groups, right? So it's less likely to take hold unless there's more stability.

One place that does happen though, that you of risk, you kind of see high school happen over and over again is when your kids um when you have kids and then you become like a soccer mom. Soccer moms are scary like that's where the high school higher key comes up again. It's honestly its high school all over again.

There is a queen b on SHE usually is the manager of the soccer team SHE organizes everything in favor of her daughter or her son um SHE manipulates other moms. Uh, you get you don't get included to go to the mall with them during tournaments. And you know it's all high school all over again, and it's really interesting why that happens. So we kind of relive IT again through our kids.

right? So when the social groups aren't t sufficiently assist ed and stable, you don't have enough time for everything to lock in and for people to understand. I am this with this group and this with another group. School creates a purpose built in almost a purpose built environment to precise create this predictability of what's going to go on. We know where people have come before someone, news come in, but they come in to an existing dynamic is opposed to just being part of this sort of swirling mess hundred percent.

So very well summarized. I think i'm more wordy than you are, but that's probably why you're good at your job. And i'm just like try my best year. But the other thing that happens that I think contributes to this is that we can get out of toxic relationships a lot easier than kids can.

So if i'm in great love and and all the girls who treated me poorly because I like the cute one on campus, that sort of thing, like how am I going to manage that so I have to change schools and historical that wasn't really allowed not we allow IT more um before the internet um you could kind of escape that now you can escape but as much as you as you used to be able to but anyhow was adults like, okay. So the moms are being named to me on the soccer team. We just move teams like it's it's easier than what IT is in high school.

Yeah so again, it's that sort of osio ed nature. The fact that is predictable, the fact that is going to continue going into the future.

Yeah so funny .

that are you get school and then you leave and then you get drag back into school from your children and then the dynamics of school happen again even though you're no longer in school and .

yeah and they do and they don't like so in some ways, like like, I see IT replicate itself also an academia. Like academia, oh, man, there are a bunch of like, bully broads. Like, it's like, we're like, you know when the what's what's the same?

You know, like when the stakes are so low, you have to fight fiercely, and that's kind of what's happening. But anyhow, anytime you can get a higher chy going, that higher chy is going to organize in such a way. And the people at the top are typically can abuse their power with very few exceptions.

So there are very few people who are just pure implicit power. And implicit power is the kind of power that you get by having assets and competency that the peer of you group values. And you um you elevate people, you treat them well.

Most people are a mixture of nicer mean, implicit and explicit power. Explicit powers, the kind of power you get by you know making people afraid and compliance, that sort of thing. There was my favorite study that's ever been done was a study on parking. And um so what's your prediction if somebody is in the parking install and they know you're at costco, do have costco, really have you must have costco?

Yeah I do. I also I also know the study. So if you get me so like the thing that when .

somebody is in for parking spot, you take longer than when somebody's not work waiting for your parking spot, that's when you've got to do all your safety checks gotto, reapply your lip loss, make sure of things good, got to answer that really urgent text and then it's like, oh, you want this, you're gona have to wait. Like that is the ultimate example of the corrupting influence of power. So people in the right context tend to abuse their power.

What is the impact of bullying on the developing brain?

Oh my god, it's enormous. And IT persists across the ice band. So we've done, I said, like most of my research has been on the biology of privatization. So how does IT get under the skin to confer a risk for future mental health difficulties and health difficulties? So bullying affects all aspects of functioning, not only in childhood and adolescence, but also in adulthood.

So IT always hurts so um so you're gonna the mental health difficulties of physical health difficulties, the memory issues in the light, but IT impacts your hypothermic peut aria general access which is your stress response system. So at the beginning you get overly activated um H P A access because you're stressed out and then eventually the body adapts and then you have lower cortisol, your h pa access downgrades and that in turn then causes an inflation tion response. And then IT affects your corzo or your testosterone levels.

Um IT has a an effect on your brain in terms of that um places in your brain, like areas that are really rich in global cord court receptor site. So those are the areas of you bring like your prefrontal cortex and your hip of campus that are really sensitive to the effect of cortisol. So IT affects your memory.

So people think that kids don't do well at school because they're bullied um and that's just because they don't want to go to school. They're not paying attention. But IT actually affects their memory. I've shown that in the study that was published in twenty eleven.

Um IT um has APP genetic processes too, so um you know if you can change the gene code, but you can certainly change the expression of genes and uh you see telemeter rose that you have shorter telemeter, which is an indicator of um basically if you are going to. Do well like in terms of health or die kind of thing. So it's like a good, I guess, bio indicator of how much shit gone down in your life in a sense.

yes. So it's terrible. This is it's so bad for your health. It's so bad for your brain. It's so bad for everything in your body.

Why would you be the case that our bodies would respond to childhood bullies by making all of this stuff happen? Is this an adaptive response? Or is this just a by product of some other fucker? Y.

I think it's an adapter response that sounds of that weird because I get back to this need to belong. So if we were all long wolves and we weren't like taking care of each other and we didn't have this strong need for a filling ation, we wouldn't be where we are as humans right um in every system like so when you look at the the prevalence of psychopathy two percent worldwide, we can't tolerate more than two percent on on that on psychology IT just creates havoc.

So we need to get along, we need to belong um and we need to feel pretty shitty when we don't belong because and that motivates you to then do everything you can to belong. Um and then they're probably be some that would argue that IT also reads out the week. But you know the kids people who get bullied aren't often weak, like people are bully for right reasons on a lot of times, especially for athletic girls.

It's because they have they're pretty they're pretty good looking and they have a lot of assets and competencies. But you've mentioned that you had a puri rough go at this. What do you think what would you attribute to?

Um I struggled to relate to all the kids, so I wasn't socially very attuned or a debt. I think I was quite awkward. There is definitely a needed ss around.

I was an only child going to school. I spoke differently. I don't have the accident from the place that i'm from. I did cricket IT, which was you seen as this sort of upper class sport in one of the most working class towns in all of the U. K.

And yeah, it's just astros' ed and uh accommodation of not being socially nimble and doing things that made you stand out with probably being A I A physically and formidable child. I was uh like a skinny kid yeah yeah small skinny kid um and I mean ended up growing probably hide wise at the same right as everybody else. But there was lots into the these dudes in school that is hit puberty at ten, ten and a half year as old before you've even got into secondary school. These guys are massive. So yeah I think that was that would contributed a good bit.

So interesting, we did a study and we found that I late developing boys were twenty two times more likely to be bullied than on time their on time peers. So these like orty little boys, especially in places that have a dog, I dog world, like the U. K, and canada, united states, they don't far too well.

And then they, then they go through puberty and then life gets a little bit Better. And it's interesting though, what do you think for girls? So comes back all full circles to slight shame. wow. okay.

So early developing goals. If you have precaution's puberty and you look more like a woman early on, you are going to be seen as more of a threat by the girls.

and they're going .

to be picked on well, because you are going to get the attention of the boys in class. They are going to be looking at the girl who's got boobs at at twelve years old. And the girl that doesn't have boobs at twelve years old is going to be ignored. The only way that he can rebaLance this disparity is to claw down the one that developed.

You got IT so you can come to your P H D with me now ready .

to go to um but yeah I mean that the brain developing thing just a kind of around that out is the suggestion that. If he was a child, necessarily grew up in an environment where there was a lot of a peer group, austria izzi an awful lot of pressure perhaps you were left out to. Perhaps IT was by a design, or perhaps IT was simply just as a by product of the climate or the period that you are living through.

There is a likelihood down the line from that, that the world is still quite unsafe place to be. Therefore, you being more forthcoming, you've been more needy, you've been more anxious and more attached to the people that are around you. Is going to be adaptive because I am living in a period that is not particularly safe socially or from a kinship perspective. Is that kind of the sort of the narrative story that um uh evolution telling us?

I think it's one pathway and that's the whole thing. I think we tend to want to tell a simple story. But in truth, there is tons of horigan, and we should expect IT.

Like we mean, there's just the there's people who started in the same spot and end up in different spots and people who end up in at the end spots the same, but their beginnings are so different. So multiverse equipping ality that sort of thing. I think that um it's really hard when you think about the evolutionary significance of bullying.

And I know you spoke to to darker volt to tony about this because um like it's such a cruel experience and it's such a damaging experience that it's difficult to put an evolutionary lens on IT and say how could this be adoptive like I mean, I think it's adaptive for the people who are perpetrating the violence, but not for those that are receiving the violence. I can't think of how IT makes them Better people in any way. Um people will say that they wouldn't want to trade their experience because they've achieved excEllence and that made who they are.

It's so interesting how often you hear about people being bullied and their really prominent individuals. I just watched the netflix series a backup. Have you .

watched IT yet? I haven't know .

and both they were both you know kids isolated kids on a lot ways and um and it's interesting because then I hear this often by people who have achieved a lot and they said they were bullet and they think they're tough because of that that experiences what made them and I always think, okay. So if you're at a on a scale of one to ten, you're at an eight on excEllence and excEllences like world class excEllence. What if you supposed to be a ten like, you know, we don't know what your top was supposed to be. Maybe you were supposed to cure cancer.

Well, I said this too. I said this to David goggins, who were opened up enough a lot about the way that he was treated as a kid, but at school, and by his father, at this tyrannical father, that was very abusive. And I opened up about the first time at the start of this year, properly, about sort of bullied in school.

I hadn't brought IT up before because IT just seemed kind of lame to bring up the fact that I guess I was still ashamed and kind of guilty about the fact that I had been mistreated as a kid. And I know, what does that mean to be someone in the thirty still talking about this, but then it's an important part of the origin story of you, and it's been very formative. So you should bring IT up.

But then it's kind seems like maybe you giving power back to this. So know the pingpong g game of why you shored. I shouldn't bring something up as kind of strong.

I wanted the things that I said was something on the lines of a lot of the things that are most proud of in yourself for the light side of something that you're probably pretty embarrassed about there. And it's exactly the classic narrative that you talk about this alchemy. I have taken something which should have been, or I turned IT on its head.

I got to, I took control. Yes, I use my agency, my sovereignty, to kind of wrangle this reality into something which is good to me. Now this I am falling in love with this frame at the moment, things which are literally true but figuratively false and things that are figuratively false but literally true. Um I think that I think that this is one of those things that may be literally true but figuratively false or or at least functionally false which is I may have been a much Better businessman, sun and pod caster, had I have not been bullied but believe in that is completely pointless. And the only way that I can immediate the fact that I did get mistreated in school is for me to say, actually, most of the things that I went through help to not only not hold me back, but also forge me the situation that, I mean, because believing about the other universe, the second strand where you went, and thinking about just how much further ahead you could have got is just a recipe for victim hood misery. And it's a yeah, literally true, functionally false perhaps.

You know, it's interesting to a kind of highlights back to that head or gently point that I was making. So like, I do think that some individuals are bullied and they do OK they far Better. And the reason why one person goes left and one person goes right is is very like, you know, the attributions that you're making are really important.

There is those are helpful, but there's also biological risk that we never talked about. So for example, and this is kind of been this is a bit dated, but IT gives you A A really simple wave explaining IT. So i'll use IT but just know that the genetics have caught up and that things are a little bit more complicated than this. Um so um cosby moved in all um published seminal paper in science in nineteen or three two thousand and three and h basically they looked at five H T T LPR. So it's the seaton and transporter room gene, the polymorphism of IT.

So you can get you get fifty percent of genes from your mom, fifty percent from your dad, so you can have a long a little um like a long, longer little short short leo and a short long leo and having on the short little is a respect or for depression because is implicated in how serotonin is used by your body. So anyhow, they looked at kids who were um maltreated in childhood and the likelihood of them becoming depressed at age twenty six and whether or not IT was moderated by their five hg t LPR. And what they found was that if you were blid or a so maltreated in childhood, and you have the short, shorter leal, you are sixty five percent, yet had a sixty five percent chance of being depressed in adulthood.

If you have the same horrible experience and you have the protective of long, long, then you were no more likely to be depressed than if you have been abused. So do you know what your five hd t LPR polymorphism is? No.

but I can ask someone because i've had a full, i've had a full gene scandal.

This is my point. Like you don't like, okay, so now we know you give you twenty three and me we can have some idea. But IT really is important for people to understand this because sometimes to when people aren't resilient, we blame them again. So they get bullied and then they're not resilient on their on being bullied.

And we say, uh, you see you know .

look first came out and is a Better he's a Better person. He's done all of these things, you know um so if you .

could just .

be stronger.

it's the ultimately the brutal red pill of behavioral genetics, right, that the raw materials that everybody is starting with is not the same. And what you fold when you fold that in with epi genetics and determinism, you have A A pretty brutal soup I quite a nale tic life.

You know if you don't believe that this very well, and if you believe that the previous position that you had was ordained before you were even born, and then if you learned the epic T, I thought epigenetics was told the bush IT I had to supports skill on. And he taught, you blew my mind. And there are things that can have happened to your parents lives that aren't a part of their genetics, which can influence the genetics that they will give you. The behavior that your mother goes through when you're in utero will have huge changes, genetic changes that are locked in for the rest of a lot. And not only that, it's now your kids and your grandkids.

And is because your grandmother made the oval that became you, right? I mean, exactly. So these stressors play out into generations to come. My point in talent, this is just it's really important because like so there is like you know talking about genetic risk, but there's also attribution risks.

So for example, studies have shown that we're really keen on reducing bullying and but states have shown that when you're the only kid in the class being bullied, your mental health outcomes are worse than if there's multiple kids being bully in the classroom. So then how do we reconcile that? And that makes sense because if i'm the only one being bullied, then it's something i've done right. But if everybody's getting bully is because there are some assets in our classroom that's just picking on everybody.

So there like like a communism .

of bullying. You know there's like misery loves company so so here trying to reduce bullying and then where we're having this issue. The other thing that's really interesting about the intervention literature, and i'm given actually a talk to the montreal schoolboy tomorrow on this, is that studies as strong to the back to Christinia sam of valley, I told you went to finland, and I told them that I went to a mall.

I know you're gonna popular bullies that have a lot of assets and competencies what they found they have like almost every kid in the country involved in their studies and they have this big anti body program called the key. Um they found that the ones they were most in previous to their anti bullying um efforts were the highest status bullies。 Why would you give up in your powers holding position?

So ah what what about? So for the people that listening who might be thinking, okay, well, I went through some bad times in school. I am I now locked into a life of so optimal brain development and my hip campus and gray matters smaller and never going to be able to remember my sixteen digit number across the front of my card. How possible is IT to reverse the harm that's being created neurologically biologically from bullies?

So we don't know, but I think that it's gonna OK for a lot of people in the reason I say that is that we're adaptive. Like so we have hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressure. We are designed to survive.

We're designed to be resilient. And so um we know that neuroplasticity exists across the lifespan. So we, you know, we can, I think, reverse some of the damage for sure, but in the absence of knowing that, knowing that IT causes as much harm, IT bees us to be Better citizens. And we really need to be reducing this, right? We can't just be hoping in that well, you know in the end, at the end of the day, we will be able .

to pick up the pieces in your late thirties or something yeah also just the lived experience again, like I can fly the flag from my ethnographic research like it's just not enjoyable like to have this four thousand weeks that you ve got on this planet and of them however many hundred spent like really just not enjoying your time, feeling bad about yourself.

It's funny that you said that I am giving um a the keynote for units violence conference that's .

coming up prevalence pro presumedly. yes. You going into .

the violence exactly yeah anti you mean to violence any help? And so the abstract that I wrote was just about what you said in a sense like that um it's interesting how people with live experience have told us over and over again how harmful this was and is being bully, being treated poorly um even women be intreated ported by other women and um and yet we needed to like put thirty years worth of science to IT to in a sense acknowledge their pain was real like how like that bulls shit like like why did we need to do this? Like we certainly needed to show IT, but why do we have to show IT over and over again? Like we keep showing IT without doing anything about IT like we need to do something about IT and stop documenting the arms .

will definitely know. Speaking as a uh a member, a proud member of the explode community, I guess one of the issues were at least being too forthcoming is what I said at the beginning is the reason I was reticent to bring IT up in the first place on the show. But it's a signal of status. You know, you'd already had to battle with this before in the past.

Is this not something that I should have already got passed into adult hood? Is this really something that plays on my mind? And even if it's something that doesn't play on your mind and you have got passed, you do feel like you've managed to get a baLance, clive, and you ve got friends that you care about and you think that you repair the damage that might have been done to your brain and all the rest, this stuff, even the fact that you're able to acknowledge that IT was a part of the story in the first places also kind of still a signal vna ability. You wanna give the people that must treated you any more power, any more time or any more thought than they already got out of you when I was happening at the time. So it's just, you know, the real littery of reasons as to why people who have gone through bullying wouldn't want to bring IT up even in adult hood when it's no longer affecting them.

It's interesting because um women are more uh vengeful than men. You may not think that, but it's true um so we never forget somebody who's done us wrong. Member, I said so if I was you and I had the podcast like meaning up, like I was as popular as you and I had a good lighting that you have in the back of me and stuff like that, i'd be naming naming, maybe be like, here's a list of the people who fuck with me.

I'd out them but you're like a kinder person. It's interesting that you still say this though, because you are probably very familiar social pain research. No what's up? okay. So there so um about a meter fifteen years ago um you know what the the advancements in FM ize and the like, what they found was that the physical pain network, so you stub your toe, your brain lights up IT tells you you know this thing just happened, you pull your foot away that sort of thing.

So there's a mechanism and we know what parts of the brain that are um activated when you physically hurt yourself, when your oxides treat a poorly bullied, you name IT the same areas of your brain are activated. It's called social pain, the difference between social pain and physical pain. So there's overlapping neurosurgical res physical and social pain.

And this has evolutionary significance again, because it's a neural alarm that you're not belonging, so you'd Better be motivated to get back in there and belong, right? So IT actually does hurt. And it's interesting because like when you think about the physical pain met are the the the physical pain metaphors are used to describe social pain around the world.

Broke my heart when I was an invited to that party. Felt like he punched me the stomach when I think about IT, right? So the thing about physical pain is that is short lit.

So I had two daughters, and both times is the epidermal take, which is complete bs. But I can tell you, and I don't have a visual reaction, I don't. But if I think about the time when my daughter was in great six and SHE wasn't invited to that party, I feel like I felt that day.

And so social pain last a life time and it's very it's very um socially motivating, but it's really hard to shake. So when you're eighty eight and you think about when you were eight, you'll feel the same thing. It's so silent and that's been shown to be very robust.

Um so you know this is why IT hurts. I hurts forever. Um IT serves an evolutionary um function, but it's kind of like an evolutionary function that took steroids and kind of went off.

Have you looked at interventions for people to grow beyond the vestige of the bullies? no.

But I mean, I would say that probably the Better programs would be cognitive behavioral therapy. I think that thought would be the way to deal with IT because it's really about refrain that and and being kind to yourself, what kind of things that you've been saying, you know that makes sense to me and the reframe is really important. Um you know there's kids who get bullied, like where the peer groups says they're being bullied and they say they're not bullied and their mental health profile looks good. And then there's kids who say they're they're being bullied in the peer group, doesn't say they're being bullied and there are mental health profiles of bad because at the end of the day, it's how you perceive your environment .

that patters right.

Well, you are perception of the given .

that you're talking about this an ac, it's obviously a topic passionate about what are the interventions that look most promising for reducing the rate of bulley.

So the most programs don't work very well. They work a tiny bit if they work at all. And then there was a paper that just came out of met analysis that involved over one hundred studies and then that showed that the effects were pretty small, again um Better than they've been in the past.

But the programs that work tend to be universal. So they address all kids in the school. Um they do IT before they head out of medical school because they are not very effective in high school.

Um they um involve the peers but are not pure LED. Um they um include education of teachers. Um they have consistency. So there's like some components here and there.

But ultimately, I think that the reason the programs don't work is because we don't have a good enough appreciation of that that decodeme. I talked about the low status bullies and the high status bully. And I think historically, all of our programs have been devoted towards um the remediation of Nelson instead of the remediation of you know that mean grow click. I think that we'd be in a Better position if we if we address that, that talk teer group.

It's such a kind of like not game of russian relate but a little bit of a catch twenty two for parents and for the kid you know, by bringing IT up, uh, there's a fear that more bullying is going to happen to you. The parent goes into school that also lose the status of the kid, presumably because they can't handle IT on their own. And then the parent now is super vigilant.

I mean, there must be something like, uh, even though it's no longer developing brain, but a second order parent to the child, that being bullied, vigiLance effect, which is going on increased anxiety, all the rest is, are there now going to be asking that kid when they come home? Did that go speak you today? Has anything changed? And you're then kind of cake because I don't anna say, if I tell you what's happened then you i'm schedule onna shout at me.

I feel like I thought and you end up as a child I certainly did this with my parents. I ended up being like being scared of telling my mom and dad the bad things that happened to school. But I was also having to absorb the bad things that were happening. So you end up kind of like, I don't know this, a neutron star that's just absorb bing, whatever whatever is around IT desperate attempt to try and just not make the situation I was.

So I need everybody to understand that most studies show that when you tell somebody you're being bullied like a caring adult in your school, that bullying stops and IT tends to stop immediately. So we have this misperception that it's not going to be dealt with if we actually say something out loud.

So sometimes what happens as kids um finally tell somebody six months after the fact when it's been going on for far too long and now they're like the near death store kind of thing. So that's really important that people understand they should be telling somebody. But often times parents advocacy is I understand why IT happens, but but it's maybe not the best advocacy to your point and it's because it's miral neurotic systems, right?

So they're absolutely feeling what their kid is feeling and they have an intolerance for their kids discomfort and they wanted addressed immediately. So they come in and they're probably not in a good position to advocate for their kid because they are too emotionally charged instead of coming in and rationally speaking about this, it's hard to be rational when your baby's hurting. I get that, but if you did, I get a little bit further.

I think with the schools um the schools the most schools in the world have to deal with this even at a legal point. So like for example, in ontario where I live, it's in our education act that they have to address playing. So they're motivated legally if not morally, and they are morally motivated.

But if even if they weren't, they would be legally motivated to do something. So that's that's how it's done. Now when you were being bullet, that wasn't the case.

Like IT was really like the wild, wild west N A lot of ways, right? And like teachers even bully kids. And IT was about like it's sorted itself out and that's just how IT is.

You know, IT was Darwinian thinking on this, which was problematic. So yeah, it's tough. The parents need to advocate for their kids. They d need to do IT rationally.

Kids need to understand that their parents aren't gonna screw IT up if they go in come and that the school will deal with IT. It's not going to fix everything over, but IT certainly will fix a lot of things. All right, Tracy.

let's bring this one home. I want to run this back again next year when your book comes out. But for the people that have loved what they've had today.

where should they go if going to keep up to date with all your work? So i'm on this platform called twitter x where you go to get bullied um so you can keep up with IT with me there um it's really lovely. I just just love my interactions there.

Um I think that's probably the best place because i'm not on any other social media site. So um got to keep my social comparison's law. So I my mental health is good.

Very nice try. See, I really appreciate you.

I was so nice chatting in the U. K. I could do this all day long.