 Well, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whenever you're listening. This is Davis Phil on KDR TLP 95.7 FM in Davis, California We live at KDRT.org online. I'm Bill Buchanan, and I thank you for tuning in today You've probably heard a lot about bullying the last several years, but today we have new information about the subject The University of California Davis recently reported that most teen bullying occurs among peers climbing the social ladder And the highest rates of bullying occur between friends between friends of friends As if junior high weren't difficult enough here today to help us understand this research is Bob Ferris a professor in the university's Department of Sociology and expert on the subject and The author and researcher of the information that we are talking about today We're also talk about what to do with this information Professor. Thank you for talking with us today. Sure thing. Happy to be here So in lay person's language, what have you discovered? Well, we have long suspected that a lot of bullying behavior is Not kind of a pathological reaction to you know emotional trauma or problematic home environments So although of course some of it is but that a lot of it is actually You know instrumental behavior intended for social climbing. So kids are being aggressive towards their rivals So if that is true We started to suspect, you know, the next question is well, who are their rivals? Who are they targeting and we came to the conclusion that if if this is to the extent that this is instrumental behavior They should really be targeting their own friends because our friends are also our rivals when we're talking about questions of popularity they're the ones That adolescents compete with for valued social positions and relationships with higher status peers So that was the hypothesis we tested and we examined rates of aggression between Friends and friends of friends and compare those to rates of aggression between other Schoolmates who weren't either friends or friends of friends and what we found is that is a really strong relationship The highest rates of aggression were between friends Friends are between three and four times more likely to bully each other than non-friends and Friends of friends are twice as likely to bully each other as non-friends I've read some of your research to prepare for this and I have to say I was very sad to learn this bullying anyone is bad But you know, I'd like to think that friends don't abuse each other Yeah, I would like to think that too and I like to think that that as adults Maybe they'll forge stronger friendships that don't involve those kinds of betrayals, but yeah Unfortunately during adolescence, there's a lot of churn and kids are figuring out social status and they're competing for it and It you know involves some collateral damage along the way and friends of course have lots of ammo ammunition You know, they know things about each other. They know they're each other's weak spots and secrets So there's a lot of potential for damage and social media is a factor in this too, right? If I understand correctly the kind of behavior describing it has always existed, but that social media Makes it more prevalent more pervasive in a student's life. Yeah, I think it amplifies these dynamics in several ways One is that it just blows up the audience potential audience for someone's humiliation You know in the past the worst case worst thing that could have happened would be like say to get tripped in the in the cafeteria You know what the scene we always see in movies your schoolmates see that and laugh But on social media, it's not just your school that could has potential to be seen by thousands and thousands of people And also it's never forgotten It's it's always there to go back to and to circulate and so you can never move path It's the repute your reputation becomes even stickier. These things follow you in a way. They didn't before It amplifies it another way and that it sort of extends the school day So, you know used to be that a kid would come home and you know I used to get bullied when I was young and I you know like the trip home was very treacherous But at least when I got home, you know, it was safe, right? but now kids come home to get right on to their various social media platforms and They you know a lot of them are experiencing some awful things and so it there's no break from it and the third way it kind of Distorts amplifies and distorts things is that it sort of really strongly rewards and Re-orient kids toward social status and maintaining and curating an image For which they have a scoreboard. I mean they have likes that can count. There's a lot of these things are countable and so they can They can kind of keep track of each other that way and and that and they become more and more oriented towards Towards their social standing at the expense of I think their relationships are the The students who are doing the bullying are they aware that they're doing this? I mean, are they doing that consciously deliberately? I Think most of the time they are, you know kids are you know, they speak They speak a different language and they they see things like I look at some kids when I was really investigating the social media Aspect of this, you know, we've talked to kids and we look at I would look at their social media profiles They gave us access to them and I Wouldn't see anything But then the kids will explain they give you a kind of an insider's view of what's going on in this picture Well, I didn't get tagged or so-and-so didn't get tagged in this photo was left out of that and that's a slight or you know, like This in this photo this kid learns that her two best friends went to go prom dress shopping without her and didn't tell her so there's a lot of subtleties to it and I I tend to think that most of the times of course some of it's going to be inadvertent, but most of the time kids know what they're doing Maybe they don't know how much is going to hurt But most of the time they most kids Have some sense of what the application is going to be for the for the person left out and the The recipients of this bullying they're they're aware Oh, yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's it's painful and they you know, even They tend to interpret it as intentional Even if it were inadvertent, so it has it has the effect of you know, regardless of what the bully or the perpetrator had in mind the You know victims in these scenarios View it as intentional and so the experience is you know for them is is more or less indistinguishable So, you know, you were talking as we were getting ready for this that you have a different view of bullying as a term Because I mean one one way to you know, as you say students don't call it bullying, you know, maybe they call it drama So I guess that creates a question back for you as a researcher as well If they don't consider bullying is it really but but I think your point was that Bullying is one way of talking about what is really abusive behavior. Do I have this right? Yeah, for a long time the the field of The field that has both sociologists and psychologists and people in education We're all studying bullying The kind of consensus definition of Of a scholarly definition of bullying was that it was intentional harm doing perpetrated by someone with more power over someone who was defenseless and that it was repeated over time and That to me I have several problems that definition But one of the biggest ones is that requirement that it be repeated. I'm aware of lots of, you know, I'm aware of several More than one suicide that was instigated by, you know, a single rumor a single thing that event Of course, there's always precursors to, you know, suicide is not a Never has a single cause, but you know, the apparent inspiration for it for at least several suicides It was a single incident not some ongoing bullying relationship So for a while, you know, I tried to back away and didn't try and resist I've called what I was studying. I called it aggression, right? You know, I use different terms But that doesn't really capture, you know Being a victim of aggression doesn't really capture the experience very well and the term bullying is so powerful That I've gone back to using it and I'm just trying to redefine it because I think When kids experience the kind of cruelty At the hands of their peers that that fits the profile and I'm less interested of whether it It fits in that existing box or not, but to me it seems like bullying and it has comparable amounts of damage for the victim You know, you read the last few years about anxiety levels among teenagers young teenagers, perhaps particularly, although Other ages as well increasing and as I listen to you, I'm thinking well, this sort of gets at the heart of that Doesn't it? I mean you're talking about people very focused on their peers very focused on status Broadcast as far as they're concerned of the entire world, which is to say that the people that they know That's a hard area to navigate I guess this has this has always happened or at least it's happened for quite a while But really it's social media that amplifies it like we were talking a while ago Yeah, I think it amplifies it and it extends it to a 24-hour period But the underlying dynamics, I think are the same most you know, what we found was that the vast majority of Cyberbullying events were between kids who knew each other in real life and it continued and and It wasn't just happening online. It was also happening at school So I think it amplifies and extends rather than you know being some completely different You know qualitatively different Dynamic, you know in a moment we'll we'll talk about What maybe we can do is parents friends teachers to Combat this and I know some of your research has been that the current Antibullying efforts don't really work and you have some thoughts on Why that is and what to do about it? I do want to talk a bit more about the research The the results that you've found do they apply regardless of gender or affluence or or race? Yeah, we tested to see whether these Fundamental processes whether the higher rates of aggression between friends are you know differ by race gender and other demographic characteristics And we pretty much find that they don't with one exception if you think about You know these kids were asked They were only given two options in terms of gender and it and that's a shortcoming of the study It was originally collected a long time ago in the early 2000s But what we found if we look if you kind of array the four gender options Diatically what we found is that the highest rates of aggression were from girl to girl followed by boy to boy And then boys pick on girls much more often than girls pick on boys And so the upshot is that you know what we find because we have a very broad understanding of bullying We find that boys and girls are equally likely to be perpetrators to be bullies But they're both disproportionately targeting girls And so girls are much more likely than boys to be the victims of these things and I dug into that a little bit further and found that It's not just all girls. It's actually really concentrated among girls who have started to date And I think it's a reflection of both You know the competitive dynamics of the romantic you know the dating of dating life among adolescents and the kind of drama that can arise From that but also it's also a reflection of the sexual double standard that the girls face in most American contexts To hear that your heart just has to go out to any girl that age nearly I mean to to live with that Is just sounds grim It is it is very tough A couple things. So this study has been going on for a while, right? It goes back. I think you said 20 years nearly. Yeah, so These kids when we started this study, this is a large community based study that was conducted in North Carolina Three different counties. So every kid who was in public school In those three counties and at the beginning six seventh and eighth grade Were eligible to participate and they were followed For four and a half years. So all the way into and through high school But that's when we the data collection stopped when they graduated. So We don't know where they are now. They are now in their early thirties And so my hope is that we'll at some point be able to put together funding to try and collect the new wave of data collection of data from them to see how they're How they're doing and how their adolescent experiences are Have may have affected their adult lives Boy, that sounds like that would be pretty valuable If this is a group that were really studied when they were younger You would have a lot of data you could build on because that was one of my questions, too Is do you get a sense that these students? Particularly the ones doing the bullying Do they regret it later on do they grow out of it? I would like to find that out. I know anecdotally. I'm aware of a lot of um, you know, there's some I saw our article just yesterday about a person who was a victim of bullying In her younger years and went back and interviewed All over tried to interview all of her classmates including the bullies And they expressed really profound Profound remorse like it clearly they were carrying a huge burden of guilt My dad became friends with this guy who went to his high school They didn't become friends until after high school But when this guy was in high school he was he was a bully and By the time their 20th reunion came around he said he couldn't go he he was just too Ashamed he couldn't face the people he had tormented So yeah, it creates it creates off it scars the victims and it creates burdens of guilt or at least it should Create burdens of guilt among the bullies and it's all driven by the Pursuit of something that is so ephemeral, you know popularity in high school high school is going to end So fast, but yeah, of course When you're in high school, I mean you might know that intellectually, but maybe you don't feel it emotionally Yeah, and it's the only thing that matters is is where you know is fitting in and and rising above We are talking with bob ferris a professor in the university of california davis department of sociology and an expert on Bullying and we're talking about his latest research on this subject I'm bill view cannon and this is davisville on k d r t in davis, california Well, bob, let's talk a little bit about what we can do with this information you're finding out One of the things that you say is that Current anti bullying efforts don't work all that well And i'm wondering what it is about them that doesn't work That's a good question. We don't really know the answer to that. There's probably A hundred different or more different programs that have been implemented in in various school districts around the country And many more of course in europe and and elsewhere Very few of them have been rigorously tested, you know assigned to a randomized controlled trial And evaluated and of the few, you know, I think it's safe to assume that the ones that have submitted to that kind of evaluation Are probably among the stronger types of programs, but Of the few that have been evaluated We find the majority do not work Some even make things worse So they actually have higher rates of bullying than the control schools that had no programming at all And of those of the the minority that do work most of them work, you know, very modestly There are some exceptions. There are some programs like the program that came out of finland that is Actually probably the most successful program. It's, you know, it reduces bullying on average between 40 and 50 percent But one what's interesting is that You know, and I think what's going on the reason why these programs are not successful is that because bullies are rewarded So they they're gaining Or they can gain status and prestige For their behaviors And that's it's really hard for a school assembly to compete with that The programs that we're talking about have tactics like like school assemblies or Bystander programs, right to try to get students to Step in and stop bullying when they see it or things like that Are those the tactics that aren't working? Well, it's it's hard to say whether it's the you know, I think there's nothing wrong with these approaches You know, it does seem to me, you know, somebody's familiar with the literature on bystander interventions It's very difficult to get adults to intervene in situations that are not threatening And so these programs are pinning a lot on asking Teenagers to get to intervene in situations that are threatening potentially dangerous for them So it's great if they they're able to do that I just feel like that's asking a lot of kids You know, a lot of the programs are, you know, work on empathy training Kind of solidarity exercises, you know identifying bullying. There's like teacher components to it There's a kind of a whole school climate, you know, there's restorative justice type programs and these are all these are all good and worthy things It's not clear whether the you know, the program It's the it's what they're doing Or that's not working or it's That they're not doing it long enough or extensively enough, you know Getting fidelity to the program and and and implementing it throughout not just for a week bullying week or whatever But implementing it through the course of a school year There's often a there's often a lot of mismatch between what they say they're going to do and what actually ends up happening Like sometimes it turns into just bullying week, which doesn't really generally have much effect So that that's the old dilemma of if you want to change things you actually have to change it You have to integrate Something you not just talk about it for a week or two and then move on to the next subject Yeah, and frankly, I'm just not surprised that that they're as ineffectual as they are I mean because kids are you know, what can you know, how can adults of anti-bullying program compete with the allure of status It's if kids so long as kids are getting rewarded for these behaviors by their peers I think they're going to engage them In fact, you know, this program I mentioned, you know, this kiba program It's the most successful program But they have figured out that there's a group of kids who are effectively immune to all of their everything They're doing which are the popular bullies who are the kids who have benefited from these behaviors Sure, I mean at some level in an amoral sense, they're making a decision right they're saying bullying works for me And they don't think of it as bullying and that's you know, you get back circle back to the term They they they don't think of themselves as bullies. They don't think what they're doing is bullying Part of what these programs are trying to do is like actually Help kids to see what it is and to identify this as bullying. So, how do you disrupt that? How do you make it so it doesn't work? I think you've talked about friends quality of friendship is a factor here Yeah, so some of my other work So it so the big the big problem is that bullying programs anti-bullying programs are not working because kids are being rewarded for it So how do you disrupt that and I think the implications of our research point to in two different possible directions the first direction is to sort of You can call this kind of a realistic view where you accept that kids are always going to have social hierarchies they're going to be some kids who are more have higher status and others and that's just sort of The way it works, but what you could do is try to redirect those hierarchies toward more pro-social in more pro-social directions That's the approach being taken by There's a israel's largest anti-bullying NGOs name. It's called matz mahim And their approach is to bring in sort of young college age people trainers who come into the schools and they do a lot of exercises that Sort of drive a little bit of a wedge between the idea of being popular and the idea of being liked And because what we find is that a lot of kids who are particularly bullies Are popular everybody recognizes that they are popular but also privately most kids don't like them But a lot of times they don't really realize the emperor has no clothes and so they don't realize how widely disliked those those popular bullies are and and so there's some highlighting of that without calling anybody out individually But mostly what they try to do is is really showcase and elevate the kids who make other kids feel supported and and helped and You know help help these other kids develop and grow And so they they try and really boost those kids profiles And so that's so they're trying to you know just redirect The status hierarchies in ways that favor kindness rather than cruelty The second approach is based in and i'm not i don't know which one works and you know potentially both could be We're not mutually exclusive, but the second approach would be you know to ironically You know ironically given that friends are we find that friends are more likely to bully each other than non-friends But really what i'm also finding is that friendships are also the they're both the problem and the solution and what do i mean by that is that What we find in our research is that is a kid adolescents typically have really low quality friendships. They're very unbalanced So if you ask a kid to name their five best friends on average Only two of those nominations are going to be reciprocated So that's a sign of unbalanced friendships, but we also find That these friendships turn over very rapidly. So six months. They have a whole new six months later They have a whole new set of of so-called best friends And we see this also even on two-week intervals So there's a lot of churn in their social relationships But what we have found is what I have found is that kids there are a small subset of kids Who do maintain stable friendships over time and these kids are better off On everything you can that we have data for they're less likely to engage in dating violence less likely to be delinquent less likely to drink do drugs Less likely to experience anxiety depression. They do better in school They're just better off on every single measure and importantly for our purposes They are less likely to engage in bullying and what's interesting about it is that these Their values are different. So they're less likely to engage in bullying because they're less likely to care about popularity And and what we see is that the longer that they maintain a stable friendship The importance for them of popularity goes down and the importance of having close friends goes up And those two different value orientations Reinforce those friendships. So they have a tendency, you know The more they care about having close friends and the less they care about popularity The more likely they are to maintain those friendships over time So it's a really a positive cycle reinforcing cycle of where their their relationships are reinforcing their values They those kids are are are out of the fray Yeah, so as parents as teachers as friends, we should be encouraging Solid friendships among our children Absolutely and and they're important, you know kids need to learn What to expect from our friendship and how to be a good friend and I don't think they get nobody teaches them that stuff Is that something you can learn from the parents? I mean, I'm aware of the age differences, you know When someone's 13 or 14 Your parents can seem pretty out of it pretty old school even if they're not Yeah, I mean, I think we have to try but we also I think schools can do more to I mean schools You know in america the traditional high school unfortunately reinforces these hierarchies Stereotypically they celebrate, you know football and cheerleading, you know, those are the or You know substitute men's backs of all or whatever, you know, some schools have strengths in different areas but there's there's typically One activity that gets a lot of the school's attention and resources And it usually is some boys sport and then you know followed by cheerleading And so schools do, you know, they they reinforce these pyramids Whittingly or unwittingly and I think they could do more to flatten that that landscape and provide You know, they this the Create more opportunities for kids to make make these kind of friendships that are interest based, you know Well, and those pyramids become more of a problem if Students have shallow friendships, right? I mean, I suppose if you had a Bunch of students that had really solid friendships then that Status would recede in importance, right because the students Yeah, I don't really care. I'm not on the football team. I've got my good friends absolutely so that that's kind of a way to to look for some kind of a Way to improve this I guess but Anything else that just comes to mind that a parent or a teacher someone can be doing if if they've got a kid Who's in that age group and it's probably suffering from this at some level it sounds like Yeah, I mean, I think it's really difficult I mean we want parents want to Want to be able to do something And help their kids and some it's it's very tough I do think one thing that I would suggest based on this research That parents do is help their kid Forge friendships that are outside of their school because when when things turn sour at school They'll have a somebody to turn to They get back to that idea some place that it's not to say it'll be off social media, but at least it'll be a different sphere It won't be the school. Yeah. Well. Thank you, Bob This has been really an interesting half hour to talk about this and boy the work's important You have a website right robert ferris.org Yeah That's right And you've got more research there and things like that that people can go to and read more about this That links to all my papers as well as some media coverage of them, which does not include any equations All right. Well, Bob. Thank you for talking with us today. I really appreciate this Thank you for having me We've been talking with Bob ferris a Sociology professor at uc davis and an expert on bullying about his latest research on that subject I am bill Buchanan. This is davis phill on k d r t in davis california. Thank you for listening