The Secret Games Women Play - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt

Do women have an intolerance of sexy peers? Absolutely. Um, 100%. Uh, I, we say we don't. We say that we just love women and we promote women, but, um, we look, we love certain women and we promote certain women. So, uh, yeah, we're, we're not the angels that we purport we are to be. Um, I think we do a lot of impression management. Who are the women 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, then 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 change in zeitgeist where people, where women talk about how "the sisterhood 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 summarization of female friendships? Uh, and why is it not the case? Well, I think that it, it's funny 'cause it's kind of said, but it's not really said. So, have you seen the Barbie movie yet? No. Okay, you need to see it. It's really good. Okay, but anyhow, so it's funny because there's this 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 this like a little bit of a disconnect where we say it, but then we don't actually, um, live that ideal.

Um, now the reason I think it happens that we don't support each other as much as we should is because there's like a resource scarcity that affects women, I think, more than men. And I, or this perception of resource scarcity. And in some places in the world, there's absolutely resource scarcity, um, with women. You know, they're 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 going to sound sexist, but it's a robust finding. I did a study on this. So the idea that, um, historically, 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, you mean, we as women? We as women, then, then we don't hold that, we don't, the power of that resource is, um, is less. It's even non-existent. So it would behoove us to then punish those who give away sex too freely. So shame, um, debase women who are a threat to that power-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 intolerant of women who are sexy. And it's 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 attractive per se, although I think that if you get to the end of that spectrum on attractiveness, so like, you're incredibly attractive, I think that that would publicly unnerve some women because that person would be, um, would be revered by men, and that would then debase their own standing in terms of competition. But generally speaking, I mean, yeah, so the, the impression would be that you're sexually provocative or available.

What was the study that you did, or are there any that came along after yours and did it even better that you prefer? Well, I don't know if anybody's done it better because I think I did it the best. But because I thought about it forever and ever, it took like over a decade to for the study to come to fruition. So basically, what I saw 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 aggression. An indirect aggression, um, takes the form of gossiping, peer group exclusion, um, 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 she leaves the room, you laugh. Those sorts of things. So anyhow, I saw that over and over again. So I, um, designed a study with my post-doctoral student, Anel Sharma, where we had women come into the lab. They were part of this previous study where we were looking at their use of indirect aggression. Then we invited them into the lab to talk about female friendships, how they deal with conflict. Um, we randomized 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 dressed confederate or a conservatively dressed confederate. And the person was the exact, it was the same person, Lisa, gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. Anyhow, we standardized everything, right down to the number of steps she 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 walked right between the two women and mentioned to Anel in the back room that I needed to talk to her about something. And then she left with Anel, 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 had they been, they would have done something. And those that, when, um, Lisa interrupted them and she was just dressed conservatively, they didn't even pay attention. So the only thing that was different between the two conditions was her sexy outfit.

Wow. Okay, so what are the implications of this? What does it, what does it tell you about female psychology? It tells us 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, and especially in certain countries. But it also is policed by women, and women do to suppress other women's sexual expression.

So on average, would you say more shaming comes from men or from women? I think it depends on the country. It really does. There's 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 peers, more so than men.

Does it bother you to see a sexy woman? Me? No. But I, I would campaign for more if there was. Exactly. And would, would you be upset if women were more promiscuous? Yeah, precisely. I mean, this, this is from Roy Baumeister. I learned this from him that he was saying, it's very strange to lay at the feet of men a restriction in female sexual freedom, given the fact that almost every man, if given the opportunity, would campaign for that precise thing. Like, exactly. I, I haven't been to a parade downtown here in Austin, but if there was one for that, that would be up there with one of the, you know, for, for my other male brethren, I'm going to stand firm and I will help. I, you know, you will, you will finally be able to get your end away. So yeah, I, I, it makes complete sense to me. And I learned from Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max as well, this insight about the game theory of shaming, where if you think about sex as having a price, and if one woman is prepared to lower the price from three dates to one date, or from X amount of resources to, .5 X amount of resources, that lowers the market value of whatever that thing is overall. So you need, that's exactly what I showed. You, you need a price enforcement mechanism. It's a cartel. Yeah. And that's, and Baumeister's theory that, so he wrote a paper with Jean Twenge, 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, uh, intra-sexual competition is like one area that people study, but indirect aggression is very similar. It's like the behavior, the manifestation of intra-sexual competition. It's the enforcement mechanism of intra-sexual competition, and people hadn't really considered that. So I wrote a theory, was published in Trans B of the Royal Society, and it did very well. And, um, people have used it now to springboard other studies. But basically, I was arguing just that, that the form of intersexual competition, the form of in women is indirect aggression.

Interesting. I've got a quote from you here: "Sex is coveted by men. Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-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. Exactly.

It's interesting because after that study came out, I was in Florida at Disney with my daughter, who was eight, and I, we brought along her two girlfriends. And there was a woman who was dressed, um, in a very sexually provocative manner. She was probably in her mid-50s, um, tiny, tiny skirt, tiny, tiny shirt. Florida, baby, out. Florida. Look gorgeous. Look gorgeous. Anyhow, and, uh, I turned around and I saw these three eight-year-olds doing exactly what was done in my stu. So, so she was getting, she was getting the once-over by three mean eight-year-olds.

Well, what, I mean, that's fascinating. What, why would it be the case that 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 got an idea she might be too promiscuous and maybe she's going to take some future husband away from me? I don't know if it's at the brain stem, but it certainly, there's like a lot of socialization around this. Think about, um, school dress codes. 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 premise that it is sexist, which it is. Hang, but anyhow, hang on. A boy, do boys want to wear small clothes? Well, they wear tank tops. I think that's small clothing, right? Okay, so girls are, girls are allowed to wear things like skirts and vests. So we don't typically wear, um, so we don't wear uniforms in North American schools unless you go to a private school. Okay, but my point is, is that these, um, dress codes exist, and they've long existed, and just now in 2023 are we getting 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 does 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 a, in a paper, that 2013 paper, I talked about that theoretical paper. Um, I do think that there's an evolutionary significance to our behavior, but I also think that, um, you know, we're, society in general, across the world, um, is quite intolerant of this.

Why is it the case, if this is true, and I believe that it's true, and I've been singing this game theory of shaming song for at least a few years now, why is it the case that we are a sisterhood that is all together? These men need to stop controlling our sexuality. It's all girl power stuff. How is that meme remaining so sticky if the truth doesn't seem to actually match up to that sort of zeitgeist? 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 some, sometimes it does exist. Like we talked about, like, do you get upset by somebody dressing sexy? 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, and this is the book that I have coming out next year called "Mean" with Simon & Schuster, and it's basically just that, trying to reconcile that. So, you know, a good feminist doesn't say what I'm saying. Um, 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 oppressing women. And if we can acknowledge that, uh, we can manage it.

In direct competition, do men use that too? What's the, what's the ratio of indirect competition between the sexes? So proportionally speaking, and I'll talk about indirect aggression because indirect, um, competition, I'm not too sure what that means per se. So indirect aggression, um, is used by men for sure. Men talk about each other, they gossip, they give each other the silent treatment, that sort of thing, but not as often. Men use a mange of behaviors. So you guys are like straight in your face, um, you, uh, are physically aggressive, and you also use indirect aggression, indirectly aggressive tactics. Whereas women, proportionately speaking, only use this form of aggression. Of course, there are exceptions. There's 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 outlet in the world because we don't see them that often. So this is our exclusive way of dealing with each other when we're, um, being less than appropriate, being less than kind.

Interesting. Okay, so, and we're more affected by it. So if I rolled my eyes at you, it, it's not gonna cause much distress. If I did that to a woman, it would cause some problems. And there's quite a bit of study showing that we have a high physiological response to being, um, ostracized, rejected, um, all of the things that encompass indirect aggression. So women are more attuned to, more attuned to it, and we res, 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 set right so that you could win the war and kill the boar. But, um, for women, we also needed, um, alloparents, 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 on the other hand, there's not enough resources to go around. So there's also a zero-sum 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, um, Anne Campbell wrote this really great theory about this, and basically it was about, she called it "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 offspring did not survive. So historically, and in some places in the world, it still exists, um, infant survival is inextricably, um, linked to maternal survival. So we can't be fighting all over the place. I think 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 to grow up and make babies and cells. Okay? Whereas if the man was to die in some fistfight gone wrong, the kids are still probably going to survive. Mom's still around. Men also a little bit more physically robust, a bit more tolerant of being hit in the head. That's why you've got the brow ridge and the bigger hands and blah, blah, blah. Okay.

How, how effective is indirect aggression? And just before we say that, to get to that, um, before I answer that, the other thing too is that men don't always stick around. And yet we still, we still have managed it better if they did. Historically, they haven't always though, and they still don't really always stick around. I just needed to put that dig in. Okay. See, because I'm like, really good at indirect aggression. From that research, it is effective. It is effective. I felt it in my soul.

What is that? 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 men. So us using it against men doesn't have the same effect. But man, are we ever good at picking it up. Women, we see it in a nanosecond. I coach adolescent girls. I'm a high-performance soccer coach, and I tell them, I can hear them roll their eyes like a kilometer away. I know when it's going down. And we do. We, we notice that, um, there are memes. Like, you go on to any social media platform, and there's tons of memes of like, you know, a woman like opening the door real quickly because she heard somebody like roll their eyes or do a, you know, we come back in, we hear it, we know it. 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 opposite teams. Given that you've been doing your ethnographic, um, in-place research with your high-performance female soccer team, what have you observed about inter-team love and distaste and all that stuff? Oh, noticed so much. And in fact, I've studied a lot of the things that I've noticed. So one of the things 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 adolescent girls make a lot of social comparisons. Is she prettier than me? Is she better than me? Is she smarter than me? Is she more popular? Those social comparisons elicit jealousy. And the way that jealousy is managed is either it's turned inward, they become depressed, anxious, or they're like, "I'm not as good as so-and-so." Or they turn it outward, which is more common, and they tear down their rival. So the only reason that she's playing left fullback and I'm a left fullback is because her dad's the coach, or her mom's the coach, that sort of thing. So we showed that longitudinally, that's the pathway, and we showed it to be stronger in girls than in boys.

One thing I noticed all the time is that, like, when somebody's done you wrong on the field, you can't let it 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, it's done. Let's move on, right? Does that matter to whether it's your own team or the opposition? We can't let it 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, um, and for you to not get your hand shook by somebody who thinks you did them dirty on the field. Whereas men just shake hands and get on with it. And there was a study that looked at this across, I think it was 44 different countries, post-affiliative behavior after competitions. And it showed that women around the world just can't let it go. So like, if somebody's done us wrong, it's there. It's there for life. Like, if you did me wrong in grade five, and I ran into you just now, it's on. Okay. So anyhow, so I noticed that, and I don't notice that, and I've coached little boys too, and I've never noticed that. And then they talk about the girls, the other team, and the women on the other team, and what a, I can't believe she did this, this, and that. Like, they are personally offended by a slide tackle gone wrong, whereas, you know, men don't, don't really seem to care about that. And then the other thing I've noticed is that on a girl's team or a young women's team, the best player on the team is not necessarily the most popular player on the team. Whereas in 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 se, unless you get to like, the high, high, high end of, um, of elite women's sports. Um, that's not what makes you popular. And in fact, being the best might actually get you bullied on a girl's team or a women's team because, "How dare you think you're so good?" So there's this whole theory about "tripping the prom queen." I've written about it, 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're going to think too well of themselves, we'll put them back there real quick. Okay.

So status and competence are split apart in female hierarchies in a way that they are not in male hierarchies. 100%. And it's interesting because I read Carly Lloyd's autobiography, and she talked about how Lloyd is one of the most decorated women's, uh, football player in the world. She won the Ballon d'Or, um, for the, and also the best player for, uh, the FIFA World Cup when it was here in Canada in 2015. She, uh, in her autobiography, she talks about how when she joined the national team, that sometimes she felt that women weren't passing to her the ball even because she was seen as competition. And can you imagine, like, you know, if you're playing a sport, even if it's like a beer league, and you're not that good as a guy, you take yourself off and sit on the bench so that you guys can win the championship. Whereas I think, and it's been said by many of 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 going to have different parameters and different personality types. But you've got this a preference for egalitarianism, the, you have preference for knowing your place and staying in your place.

Yes. I, uh, I learned some interesting stuff to do with the behavior of male and female students as they walk out of exam halls and they talk to each other. And the guys will say, "Oh yeah, question three, absolutely smashed it. I revised that. Like, that was absolutely great." Whereas the girls would go, "Oh, you know, I was all really 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. Uh, again, also super interesting study where, um, girls will tend to downplay qualifications and accolades if they think that their responses are going to be seen by other people, as opposed to if they're being kept private. So there is this very below the surface, you know, undercurrent that's going on here with how women play with status, what they want other people to know about their accolades and their accomplishments. They do not want to enact the envy or the jealousy or the envy of any of the other girls specifically that are in their location. And I think that final bit is, they're probably at least partially aware that many of the accomplishments that they could be talking about probably don't impact their mate value all that much. So it's going to be a detriment to me to the females that are around me. And maybe not that, like, is the, is the guy around you going to be that much more attracted to you if you say that you smashed that exam than if you didn't? Like, is your socioeconomic competence going to be 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 brag, 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 lack 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 it, 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.

Amy Schumer has this 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 goodness, you know, if somebody says something nice about us, like, are you kidding me? I just found that in the garbage and put it on me." You know, whatever. You know, we go on and on and and make sure that, um, we don't think well of ourselves or give the impression that we think well of ourselves. So the skit goes on about women just putting themselves down all around. And then this one woman, somebody compliments her, and she just says, "Thanks." And all of their heads explode. "What do you mean, thanks? Like, we just said something nice about yourself. You're supposed to put yourself down. Those are the rules." So it, it's spot on what she did in this, in this skit.

Talk to me about how jealousy mediates this relationship then between, uh, attractiveness comparison and indirect aggression. It, it actually works just like that. It's, it's a mediator, right? So it explains the relationship. So if I am jealous, then, um, I need to remedy that icky 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 way it's managed is by attacking myself, or attacking the source of my comparison, the person that's making me feel jealous. And women are very good at attacking, um, other women whom they perceive to have more. But again, they justify it. So back to, remember we started off with impression management. So they use a variety of cognitive strategies to make their egregious acts more palatable. And, um, and one way they do it is they, they make it so that the, the person that's being targeted, um, had it coming to them. It was justified. So if she wasn't so arrogant, if she wasn't, um, you know, whatever it is, it's going to be, then I wouldn't have treated her poorly.

Interesting. Did you see, and by the way, like, I can predict what the reaction's going to be when this comes out, and when my book comes out too. The reaction is going to be that, you know, I have internalized the misogyny myself. That, you know, what? I'm your data, apparently. Pardon me? So is your data, apparently? 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. We, it comes out like in full force. So I don't know, like, maybe there is a bit of internalized misogyny. I'll own, I'll own some of the variance. But a lot of this is, uh, it persists because it works. It's very, very effective. Effective. You don't need to worry. We've had Tanya Reynolds and Joyce Benon, and, you know, there are, there are many female heads that have been chopped off by the internet before you've got here. I think everyone that's listening is fully aware of the fact that being a woman, being a female, and trying to navigate the delicate samurai blade that is the female status hierarchy is really, really tough. And it does not get any easier. It is not made, you're no more prepared by ignoring the sort of thermodynamics of how these interactions work. But I mean, how do you change it if you can't acknowledge it, right? Like, I, I'm prepared. I've, you know, I've dealt with it for many, many years. I know what's going to be said. And ironically, they use indirect aggression to make their point. And I just think, like, seriously, you don't see the irony and how you're behaving? Because certainly we should be tolerant of people holding different viewpoints. It's not like I'm exposing hate speech. But, um, Mr. Rogers, of all people, said that if it's mentionable, it's manageable. So how do then we change our behavior if we can't acknowledge it? And it causes a lot of harm. Like, I mean, we've, we've kind of been joking around here, but some young women take their lives over this. Some older women take their lives over this. Teenage girls take their lives over this. You know, the bullying, uh, that they injure is real. It's significant. It's linked to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, suicidality. So, I mean, this is an important, worthy area of study. We 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 the maligned or lower down group is, is always presumed, it's always castigated very quickly as being the thing which is at fault. And it's 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 back-loading 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 are very tough and can handle, uh, 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, then I, we'd probably be in a better position in terms of, uh, wielding power, holding power, progressing with power.

Did you see this, uh, hypothetical hairdressing client study that came out a little while ago? Okay, give me one more hint. I feel like I know this. Uh, "I explored how women sabotage hypothetical hairdressing clients through disingenuous beauty advice, which would detrimentally impact clients' physical attractiveness. In both studies, the more attractive the client, the more hair was recommended to be cut off. Lay women and female professional hairdressers cut most hair off women who were of the same attractiveness level as them. Women cutting the most hair off women they perceive to be about as attractive as themselves. They sabotaged women whose hair was in good condition and had requested a smaller amount cut off to a greater extent than women with hair 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 uncompetitive women, including hairdressers, cut off more hair, confirming competitor manipulation as intrasexual competitiveness strategy being employed." Yes, it, that study finds itself in the book. Amazing.

Um, it's interesting because I had this one, um, girlfriend in high school. We were in that popular group, and everybody was very attractive and had a lot of, um, assets and competencies that the peer group valued. But anytime she told me that I looked really good in an outfit, I automatically had to change it. Anything she said, like, I mean, I just like it was almost like a given that opposite day. "I look like crap, and this is why she's saying it." 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 mate value dating pool. That, you know, as you applaud women for being the size that they are, it makes a really good case that, well, yeah, you get all the points of being, you know, morally grandstanding, and I am empathy, and I care for the, the downtrodden group, and so on and so forth. But you are also doing something that benefits your own mate value, right? Which is moving more and more women away from wherever you are.

So are we that Machiavellian? I think that the underlying, uh, 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, I think that this would, you know, because that's some sneaky, that is some sneaky. But I don't think that it's, I don't think pretty much any woman is cognizant of this. This is again, it's a bit from Bill Burr that I was listening to, and as I was listening to, I was like, "Wow, this sounds like really comprehensive intersexual competition from women to push the women out of the mating pool." Hm, I wonder if that's 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 gonna, women are gonna have a reaction to everything I said. And now I'm having a reaction to this. So I'm gonna have to give this some thought because, like, I want to believe that we're not that Machiavellian. And I also want to believe that, um, we, I, I do know we have free will and we're conscious beings and conscientious individuals as well. So I don't know. I'm not, I'm not buying that one just yet. High hopes for humanity.

Okay, so one of the other things you mentioned it earlier on about, um, bullying, the sort of the effect of youth ostracization 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. 25% of children and adolescents reported that they had experienced significant depression incidents. And hospitalization rates for new-onset eating disorders increased by 60% during the pandemic. And rates for emergency department visits for attempted suicide have increased by 22% 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 15 years or so. So it has, it wasn't good before the pandemic, and it was worse during the pandemic, and it'll 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 that's particularly pronounced for adolescent girls and young women. And there's a bunch of reasons why this could be the case. Um, during the pandemic, I think that a lot of it had to do with, um, social isolation. There's a lot of evidence to support that. The need to belong is 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's survival. Um, so I think that challenged girls and women particularly during the pandemic. Um, but also too, we're, we're more, we're exposed to violence more than men. So we're more likely to be, um, victims of intimate partner violence, you know, uh, everything except for murder. Men get murdered more than women. Um, and then they're, uh, we're big on social comparisons. 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 Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's work, they lay an 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 there more going on? There's going to be more going on. It'll never be, you're never going to find one thing that causes everything. Um, but I do think it accounts for a lot of the variance. I really do. Um, we see this over and over again. Um, like, 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, it's something I saw a lot. Um, yeah, girls and women make a lot of comparisons. They spend a lot of time on social media. Um, and those social comparisons, I already told you, lead to jealousy, and that jealousy in turn leads to externalized or internalized behavior. 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 screen 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. Like, do it, even if I ask my husband, he'd be like, "What are you even talking about?" Yeah. Um, but certainly we do that all the time. And thank goodness that feature exists now because I used to have to take a picture of it and then I could zoom it. Um, anyhow, so, uh, yeah, it's not good. It's not good for the health of, uh, of females, and, and we need to get a grip on this and figure it out.

We did this study that's just under review. And, um, so one thing I notice that happens and hasn't been looked at, but it makes sense. So we're really interested in, um, threats to relationships, right? Like mate poaching and the like. And I know you know that literature very well. So I was really interested in female and friendship poaching, and what it looks like for girls, or sorry, for women versus men. So what we did was we looked, we developed a scale called a social media friendship, 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 friend's geolocator tells you that they're out with all their friends and you're not invited? Your friend, and it's like, just all these things that happen on social media. And we found that women were more affected than men by it across three studies. Very interesting. And then they became more depressed and anxious as well, as a consequence of that jealousy.

Wow. What's the underlying dynamic that social media is playing on, which is particularly, uh, effective at impacting girls' mental health? Like, what, what is it? The ostracization? Is it being felt like feeling like they're being left out? It's that, it's that FOMO, it's that fear of missing out. It really is significant for girls and women. And it comes back again to that need to belong. I'm not suggesting that you're all psychopaths, that men are psychopaths, and they don't need, uh, positive relationships and affiliation and the like. You certainly do. But we need it more. We absolutely do need it more. And so, um, you know, our value is, is not that it should be, but we place a lot of value on having friends and belonging, and being included. And when we're not, it hurts.

Give me the evolutionary explanation for why that's the case. Is it 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? You know, that's the "tend and befriend" hypothesis that we really do need. And there's tons of evolutionary scholars who've 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, um, 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 in how we use it. Like, you're all pretty crude when you use it, and we're not. We're like, "Block, Bel." It's a surgeon's scalpel rather than a big hammer. Totally. It's so funny how often I'll say to my husband, "Oh my goodness, did you notice what she did?" And like, he didn't even notice she was in the room. Like, how do you get through life like this? But then it's like, how do we get through life where we're like, so hypersensitive and attuned to every perception of slight?

Have you got any idea, this, uh, attenuation to what's going on in the room, is that on a sliding scale where certain women, obviously this is on average, there is a bell curve, blah, blah. Is there a particular personality trait which really tunes that up? Is it conscientiousness? Is it neuroticism? Is it, you know, is there something that you have found that can quite accurately predict the level of attenuation that a girl would have to her surroundings and the status in her group? I think it, it, it's not going to be any of the Big Five or if you look at the Hexaco, it's not going to be any of those per se. We looked at it, we found like conscientiousness was actually negatively related to it. Um, but it's going to be hyper-competitiveness. There's the competitiveness where you, um, just like personal development competitiveness that you use to better yourself, visa-vis yourself. And then there's the "I need to be better than everybody else" where like everything is a zero-sum 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, to hold grudges, to get others mad at them, to so to use indirect aggression. So hyper-competitive women are, um, they're difficult in a lot of ways, and they're not happy themselves, which is really interesting. Their mental health profiles are very problematic.

Wow. Talk to me about the relationship between bullying and social status. I had Tony Volk on the show a few months ago. I adored his work on bullying. I spent a lot of time being, uh, becoming more familiar with bullying than I would have liked while I was in school. So I was getting to learn an awful lot. What, what have you found about this? We've spoken a lot about social status so far, mostly for, for girls, but also for boys. What is this? How do these two things live in, in relationship to each other? So Tony's a really good friend of mine. He's fantastic. And, uh, so I, I told you about that study, the, um, 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'm like bragging about myself, um, is, um, basically, I, for my dissertation, my PhD, I looked at "Mean Girls," the phenomenon before it even came out as a movie. So I was really interested at the time. Scientists kept talking about about popular kids being really well-adjusted, good citizens in their schools, and that sort of thing. And I kept thinking, I'd go to these conferences and say, like, "What the heck are you talking about? That's not what popular kids are like." But I honestly think that there's probably an overrepresentation of nerds in academia who weren't in the popular group, so they really didn't know what it was about. But I was in that popular group, and we weren't all that nice, in a lot of ways. So I, for my dissertation, looked at, um, adolescents from grade six to 12, um, and whether or not they had assets and competencies that the peer group valued. So if 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. Then, then there's this other group of kids who bully others who have low power. Those are like the Nelsons from The Simpsons, right? So, um, that group kind of indiscriminately bullies everybody, but they're very marginalized. They're rejected. Um, you know, their future is pretty bleak. Um, but most kids who bully others are actually the elite of the school. So the reason that they're afforded power and they abuse their power is because they have things that the peer group values, right? So for girls, it's being attractive, and for boys, it's typically being athletic in North American culture, or probably even in Western culture. So every school's going to have a different culture. Um, you know, you could go to a performing arts 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 affords you power. That power then, in turn, typically gets, um, corrupted. And that's true of almost every human being on the planet. Power corrupts, and it, um, and it absolutely corrupts, right? So, um, so anyhow, so that's what my dissertation was about, and it's been robustly, uh, uh, replicated. You know, this is something we see over and over again. I went to Finland early in my career to give a talk on this, and they, I was h- hosted by, uh, Christina Sovvaly, and she's like, "I don't know if we'll find this in in Finland." And I was like, "Oh, I've been to your malls, you're going to find it." And they found it. It's been found everywhere, right? So, and it exists in colleges too, universities. So my daughter plays D1 soccer, it exists in D1 sports, it exists in sororities, that exists in university life.

And then we get out of it, what two questions? First off, what did the bullies 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 and I have published 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 and the norms of a school more. Uh, they get more resources. People give them, people look at them, people adore them. All those things are good, right? Like they're the silver boxes of their school. Um, and then nobody messes with them, which is also a good feeling. I, I don't understand, I don't understand how, uh, standing on the shoulders of lower status individuals gives the bully, it bestows that benefit on them. That's not who they bully. That group doesn't bully the the lowest lower standard. So they do a little bit, but no, it's not that unfair fight so much so.

Um, Bob Faris's work and others have shown that, um, high status bullies tend to bully those that are just at the next rung, the ones that are challenging their status, right? So those are the ones that are in trouble. Um, or anybody who threatens their catbird seat, in a sense. Is that because it's a signal of low status to seem like you're in competition with someone who's supposedly 10 rungs 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 a threat to you. That's all you're really paying attention to. So I don't know if it's that, um, they're that conscientious, where it's like such an unfair fight and you're a loser if you pick on somebody who's perceived as a loser, kind of thing. I don't think it's like that. I think it's about maintaining, um, so achieving and maintaining hegemony. 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.

There's a meme that very well may be in your book as well that says, uh, "Everything after high school is just high school." Uh, where it talks about, you know, the lunch table that you sit at and the cool kids and the games and so on and so forth. You've suggested there that once your D1 soccer career is over, you enter the real world, and these dynamics at least begin to dissipate. What, how much do they fall away? What's adult bullying look like? Is there even such a thing in the same context as childhood bullying? Adult bullying looks 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 workplace, people will pick on somebody who they perceive as a threat to them. The reason it dissipates is because our peer groups are more fluid. Um, they're not as stable. So I think the stability of high school peer groups is what contributes to it as well, because the hierarchy gets formed through stability, and that doesn't exist in adulthood as much, right? So like you have your hockey friends, and then you have, you know, your gym bros, and then you have, I'm just making, they're all gym bros. They're all gym bros. I only have one group of friends. And the old, but, but my point is, like, you know, and then you have the workplace, and you have an atypical job. So let's just say, like, mostly we go to the job, same job, where we see the same people over and over again. All of those things sort of happen, 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 kind of re-, you kind of, um, 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, there, that's where the high school hierarchy comes up again. It's honestly, it's high school all over again. There's a queen bee mom. 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. Um, 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 when, why that happens. So we kind of relive it again through our kids, right? So when these social groups aren't sufficiently, um, 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 en-, almost a purpose-built environment to precisely create this, uh, predictability of what's going to go on. We know where people have come before. Some on news come in, but they come in into an existing dynamic as opposed to just being part of this sort of swirling mess.

100%. 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 trying my best here. 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 grade 11, and all the girls are treating me poorly because I'm like the cute one on campus, that sort of thing, like how am I going to manage that? Have to change schools. And historically, that wasn't really allowed. Now we allow it more. Um, before the internet, you could kind of escape that. Now you can't escape it as much as you as you used to be able to. But anyhow, as adults, like, okay, so the moms are being mean 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 a-, nature, the fact that it's predictable, the fact that it's going to continue going into into the future. Yeah. So funny that, uh, you get school, and then you leave, and then you get dragged 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, and they do, and they don't. Like, so in some ways, like, like I see it replicate itself also in academia. Like, academia, oh man, there are a bunch of like bully bros. Like, but like we're like, you know, when, what's that, what's that, um, what's the saying? 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 hierarchy going, that hierarchy is going to organize in such a way, and the people at the top are typically going to 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 group values, and you, um, you elevate people, you treat them well. Most people are a mixture of nice and mean. Implicit and explicit power. Explicit power is the kind of power you get by, uh, you know, making people afraid, um, soliciting compliance, that sort of thing.

There was this, 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 stall and they know you're at Costco, do you have Costco where you live? You must have Costco. Yeah. I do. I also know, I also know the study. So to get me to predict it, you could, you can, yeah, ruin the game. So like the thing is, is that when somebody's waiting for your parking spot, you take longer than when somebody's not waiting for your parking spot. That's when you got to do all your safety checks, got to reapply your lip gloss, make sure everything's good, gotta answer that really urgent text. And then it's like, "Oh, you want this? You're gonna 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 a developing brain? Oh my goodness, it's enormous, and it persists across the lifespan. So we've done, I'd say, like, most of my research has been on the neurobiology of peer victimization, 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. Um, so you're going to have the mental health difficulties, the physical health difficulties, the memory issues, and the like. But, um, it impacts your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is your stress response system. So at the beginning, you get overly activated HPA axis because you're stressed out, and then eventually the body adapts, and then you have lower cortisol. Your HPA axis downgrades, and that in turn then causes an inflammation response. And then it affects your cortisol, H-, sorry, your testosterone levels. Um, it has an effect on your brain in terms of, um, places in your brain like areas that are really rich in glucocorticoid receptor sites. So those are the areas of your brain like your prefrontal cortex and your hippocampus 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, 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 a study that was published in 2011. It, um, has epigenetic processes too. So, you know, you can't change the gene code, but you can certainly change the expression of genes. And you see telomere erosion, that you have shorter telomeres, which is an indicator of, um, basically if you're going to do well, like in terms of health or die, kind of thing. So it's like a good, I guess, bioindicator of how much shit's 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 it be the case that our bodies would respond to childhood bullying by by making all of this stuff happen? Is this an adaptive response, or is it just a byproduct of some other? I think it's an adaptive response, which sounds a bit weird because again, back to this need to belong. So if we were all lone wolves and we weren't like taking care of each other and we didn't have this strong need for affiliation, 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 is 2% worldwide. You know, we can't tolerate more than 2% on on that on psychopathy. 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 then it motivates you to then do everything you can to belong. Um, and then there'd probably be some that would argue that it also weeds out the weak. But, you know, the kids, people who get bullied aren't often weak. Like, people are bullied for a right of reasons. And a lot of times, especially for adolescent girls, it's because they have, they're pretty, they're pretty good-looking and they have a lot of assets and competencies. Like you'd mentioned that you had a pretty rough go at this. What do you think? What would you attribute it to? Um, I struggled to relate to other kids. So I wasn't socially very attuned or adept. I think I was quite awkward. Uh, there was definitely a neediness around. So I was an only child going to school. I spoke differently. I don't have the accent from the place that I'm from. Um, I did cricket, which was, you know, seen as this sort of upper class sport in one of the most working class towns in all of the UK. And yeah, it was just ostracized. Um, and a combination of not being socially nimble and doing things that made you stand out, with probably being a, a, a physically unformidable child. I was a, like a skinny kid. Yeah. Yeah. Small, skinny kid. Um, and I mean, ended up growing, probably height-wise, at the same rate as everybody else. But there was lots, you, these dudes in school that just hit puberty at 10 and 10 and a half years old before you've even got into secondary school. These guys are massive. So yeah, I think that was that would have contributed a good bit.

So it's interesting. So we did a study and we found that like late developing boys were 22 times more likely to be bullied than on-time their on-time peers. So these like squirty little boys, especially in places that have a dog-eat-dog world like the UK and Canada and United States, they don't fare 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 it comes back all full circle to shaming. Wow. Okay. So early developing girls, if you have precocious puberty and you look more like a woman early on, you're going to be seen as more of a threat by the girls, and they're going to be picked on. Wow. Because you're going to get the attention of the boys in class. They're going to be looking at the girl who's got boobs at at 12 years old, and the girl that doesn't have boobs at 12 years old is going to be ignored. The only way that she can rebalance this disparity is to claw down the one that's developed. You got it. So you can come to your PhD with me now. I'm ready. Ready to go. I told you, I'm, I'm moving to Canada. Um, but yeah, I mean, the brain developing thing, just to kind of round that out, is the suggestion that if you, as a child, ancestrally grew up in an environment where there was a lot of, uh, peer group ostracization, an awful lot of pressure, perhaps you were left out, perhaps it was by design, or perhaps it was simply just as a byproduct of the climate or the period that you were living through, there is a likelihood down the line from that that the world is still quite an unsafe place to be. Therefore, you being more forthcoming, you being more needy, you being 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, uh, uh, evolution is 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's tons of heterogeneity, and we should expect it. Like, we, I mean, there's just, you know, there's people start in the, the same spot and end up in different spots, and people who end up in this at the end spots the same, but their beginnings are so different. So multifinality, equifinality, 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 Dr. Vul to Tony about this because, 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 adaptive?" 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 it made who they are. It's so interesting how often you hear about people being bullied and they're really prominent individuals. I just watched the Netflix series, uh, "Beckham." Have you watched it yet? I haven't. No. And both, um, they were both, you know, kids, isolated kids in a lot of ways. And, and it's interesting because then I hear this often by people who have achieved a lot, and they said they were bullied, and they think they're tough because of that. That experience is what made them. And I always think, okay, so if you're at a, on a scale of 1 to 10, and you're at an eight on excellence, and excellence is like world-class excellence, what if you were supposed to be a 10? 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 had opened up an awful lot about the way that he was treated as a kid, both at school and by his father. He had this tyrannical father that was very abusive. And I opened up about for the first time at the start of this year, properly, about sort of bullying 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 like, you know, what does it mean to be someone in the 30s 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 of seems like maybe you're giving power back to the. So there's, you know, the ping-pong game of why you should or shouldn't bring something up was kind of strong. And one of the things that I said was something along the lines of, "A lot of the things that you're most proud of in yourself, at the light side of something that you're probably pretty embarrassed about, right?" And it's exact, the classic narrative that you talk about this alchemy. I have taken something which should have been awful, and I turned it on its head. I got to, I took control, right? I used my agency and my sovereignty to kind of wrangle this reality into something which is good to me now. There's, I, I'm 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, son, and podcaster had I not been bullied." But belief in that is completely pointless. And the only way that I can ameliorate the fact that I did get mistreated in school is for me to say, "Actually, most of the things that I went through helped to not only not hold me back, but also forge me into the situation that I'm in." Because believing about the other universe, the second strand where you weren't, and thinking about just how much further ahead you could have got, is just a recipe for victimhood and misery. And it's, uh, yeah, literally true, functionally false.

Perhaps you know what's interesting too? It kind of highlights back to that heterogeneity point that I was making. So like, I do think that some individuals are bullied and they do okay. They fare better. And, and the reason why one person goes left and one person goes right is varied. Like, you know, the attributions that you're making are really important, and there's those are helpful. But there's also biological risk that we never talked about. So for example, and this has kind of been, this is a bit dated, but it gives you, it's a really simple way of 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, Caspi, Moffitt, and all, published a seminal paper in Science in 19, or sorry, 2003. And basically, they looked at 5HTT LPR, so it's the serotonin transporter gene, the polymorphism of it. So you can get, you get 50% of your genes from your mom, 50% from your dad. So you can have a long allele, um, like a long-long allele, a short-short allele, and a short-long allele. And having, um, the short allele is a risk factor for depression because it, it's 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 26, and whether or not it was moderated by their 5HTT LPR. And what they found was that if you were bullied, or sorry, maltreated in childhood, and you had the short-short allele, you were 65% - you had a 65% chance of being depressed in adulthood. If you had the same horrible experience and you had the protective long-long, then you were no more likely to be depressed than if you hadn't been abused.

Do you know what your 5HTT LPR polymorphism is? No, but I can ask someone because I've had a full, I've had a full gene scan done. So this is my point. Like, you don't, like, okay, so now we know. You could, 23andMe, we can have some idea. But it really is important for people to understand this because sometimes too, when people aren't resilient, we blame them again. So they get bullied, and then they're not resilient on, on being bullied, and we say, "Ah, you see, you know, look at, should have tried harder, should have done the one." Yeah, like Chris came out of it, and he's a better, he's a better person, he's done all of these things. You know, so if you could just, you know, be stronger. The biological risk is, I mean, this is the, it's the ultimately the brutal red pill of behavioral genetics, that the raw materials that everybody is starting with is not the same. And when you fold, when you fold that in with epigenetics and determinism, you have a, a pretty brutal soup for quite a nihilistic life, you know, if you don't believe that there's free will. And if you believe that the predisposition that you had was ordained before you were even born, and then if you learned that epigenetics, I thought epigenetics was total, and then I had Spolsky on, and he, he totally 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 to you. The behavior that your mother goes through when you're in utero will have huge changes, epigenetic changes that are locked in for the rest of the life. And not only that, it's now your kids, and your grandkids, and potentially grand-kids, because your grandmother made the ovum that became you, right? I mean, exactly. So these stressors play out into generations to come. My point in telling this is just, it's really important because, like, so there's 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 studies 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 bullied in the classroom. So then how do we reconcile that? And it makes sense because if I'm the only one being bullied, then it's something I've done, right? But if everybody's getting bullied, it's because there's some in our classroom that's just picking on everybody. So there's like, there's like a communism of bullying solution here, you know, there's like, misery loves company. So, so here we're trying to reduce bullying, and then we're, we're having this issue. The other thing that's really interesting about the intervention literature, and I'm given actually a talk to, um, the Montreal School Board tomorrow on this, is that studies have shown, so back to Christina Salma-Valy, I told you I went to Finland and I told them that, you know, I went to your mall, I know you're going to have 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-bullying program called the KiVa. Um, they found that the ones that were most impervious to their anti-bullying efforts were the highest status bullies. Why would you give up your, your power-holding position?

So, yeah, what, what about, so for the people that are listening who might be thinking, "Okay, well, I went through some bad times in school. Am I now locked into a life of suboptimal brain development? And my hippocampus and gray matter's smaller? I'm never going to be able to remember my 16-digit number across the front of my card." How possible is it to reverse the harm that's being created neurologically, biologically from bullying? So we don't know, but I think that it's going to be okay for a lot of people. And the reason I say that is that we're adaptive. 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 this damage for sure. But in the absence of knowing that, knowing that it causes us much harm, it behooves us to be better citizens. And we, we really need to be reducing this, right? We can't just be hoping that, well, you know, in the end, at the end of the day, we'll be able to fix this, pick up the pieces in your late 30s or something. Yeah. Well, and also the, just the lived experience. I again, like, I can fly the flag from my ethnographic research. It's just not enjoyable. Have this 4,000 weeks that you've got on this planet, and of them, however many is spent like, really just not enjoying your time, feeling bad about yourself. It's funny that you said that. Like, I'm giving, um, the keynote for UNICEF's violence, um, conference that's coming up. Pro-violence, presumably? Pardon me? Pro-violence, presumably? Yeah, yeah. You're pro-, you're pro-, you're going into violence symposium. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anti-, you mean anti-violence. Anyhow, um, 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 lived experience have told us over and over again how harmful this was, and being bullied, being treated poorly, um, even women being treated poorly by other women. And, and yet we needed to like, put 30 years worth of science to it to in a sense acknowledge their pain was real. Like, how, 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 harms.

Well, definitely. You know, speaking as a, a member, a proud member of the ex-bullied community, I guess one of the issues with at least being too forthcoming is what I said at the beginning. It's the reason I was reticent to bring it up in the first place on the show, that it's a signal of low 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 past into adulthood? Is this really something that plays on my mind? And even if it's something that doesn't play on your mind, and that you have got past, and you do feel like you've managed to get a balanced life, and you've got friends that you care about, and you think that you've repaired the damage that might have been done to your brain, and all the rest of the stuff, even the fact that you're able to acknowledge that it was a part of the story in the first place is also kind of still this signal of vulnerability. You don't want to give the people that mistreated you any more power, any more time, or any more thought than they already got out of you when it was happening at the time. So it's just a, you know, the real litany of reasons as to why people who have gone through bullying wouldn't want to bring it up, even in adulthood, 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. Remember I said, so if I was you, and I had the podcast, meaning like I was as popular as you, and I had the good lighting that you have on the back of me and stuff like that, I'd be naming names. I'd be like, "Here's the list of the people who, with me." I'd out them. But you're like a kinder person. It's interesting that you still say this, though, because, um, you're probably very familiar with the social pain research. No. What's up? Okay, so there, so about a maybe about 15 years ago, um, you know, with the advancements and fMRI 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 this mechanism, and we know what parts of the brain that are, um, activated when you physically hurt yourself. When you're ostracized, treated 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 neurostructures, physical and and social pain. And this has evolutionary significance again, because, um, it's a neural alarm that you're not belonging, so you 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-, or the, the physical pain metaphors are used to describe social pain around the world. "Broke my heart when I wasn't invited to that party." "I felt like he punched me in the stomach." When I think about it, right? So the thing about physical pain is that it's short-lived. So I had two daughters, and both times the epidural didn't take, which is complete BS, but I can tell you, and I don't have a visceral reaction. I don't. But if I think about the time when my daughter was in grade six and she wasn't invited to that party, I feel like I felt that day. And so social pain lasts a lifetime. And it's very, it's, it's very, um, socially motivating. But it's really hard to shake. So when you're 88 and you think about when you were eight, you'll feel the same thing. It's so salient. And that's been shown to be very robust. Um, so, you know, this is why it hurts. It hurts forever. It's, 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 vestiges of their bullying? No, but I mean, I would say that probably the better programs would be cognitive behavioral therapy. I think that that would be the way to deal with it because it's really about reframing that and being kind to yourself, like kind of the things that you've been saying. You know, that makes sense to me. And it, the reframing is really important. Um, you know, there's kids who get bullied, like where the peer group 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, um, they're being bullied, and the peer group doesn't say they're being bullied, and their mental health profiles look bad. Because at the end of the day, it's how you perceive the environment that matters, right? Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Your perception of the event, given that you're talking about this an awful lot, it's obviously a topic that you're passionate about. What are the interventions that look most promising for reducing the rates of bullying? So the most programs don't work very well. They work a tiny bit if they work at all. And then there was a, a paper that just came out of meta-analysis that involved over a hundred studies, and it 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 middle school because they're not very effective in high school. Um, they, um, involve the peers but are not peer-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 dichotomy I talked about, the low status bullies and the high status bullies. 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 girl clique. I think then we'd be in a better position if we, um, if we address that, that talk.

Your group, it's such a, kind of like not a game of Russian roulette, but a little bit of a catch-22 for parents and for the kid, you know, by bringing it up, there's a fear that more bullying is going to happen to you. The parent goes into school, that also lowers 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, even though it's no longer a developing brain, but a second order parent to the child that's being bullied, vigilance effect that's going on, you know, increased anxiety, all the rest of it. So they're now going to be asking their kid when they come home, "Did that girl speak to you today? Has anything changed?" And you're then kind of scared because, "Mom, I don't want to say if I tell you what's happened, then you're, I'm scared you're going to shout at me. I feel like I'm at fault." And you end up, as the child, I certainly did this with my parents, I ended up being like, being scared of telling my mom and dad that bad things had happened at 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 sort of neutron star that's just absorbing whatever, whatever is around it, a desperate attempt to try and just not make the situation any worse.

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. Out. So a lot of times what happens is 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, they're near death store, kind of thing. So that's really important that people understand they should be telling somebody. But oftentimes, parents' advocacy is, I understand why it happens, but it's maybe not the best advocacy. To your point, and it's because it's mirror neuron systems, right? So they're absolutely feeling what their kid is feeling, and they have an intolerance for their kids' discomfort, and they want it addressed immediately. So they come in, and they're probably not in a good position to advocate for their kid because they're 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, you'd get a little bit further, I think, with the schools. Um, the schools, 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 bullying. 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 bullied, that wasn't the case. Like, it was really like the Wild West in a lot of ways, right? And like teachers even bullied kids, and it was about like, it 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. Kids, parents need to advocate for their kids. They need to do it rationally. Kids need to understand that their parents aren't going to screw it up if they go in calm, and that the school will deal with it. It's not going to fix everything overnight, but it's 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 heard today, where should they go if they want to keep up to date with all your work? So, um, I'm on this platform called Twitter X, where you go to get bullied. So, 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, gotta keep my social comparisons low, so I, my mental health is good. Very nice. Tracy, I really appreciate you. Thank you. It was so nice chatting with you, Chris. I could do it all day long. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks, and don't forget to subscribe.