@still_vicious said:
@Byshop: wait, did you read the same thing I did?
"Researchers at Simon Fraser University found that bullies at school were the least likely to be depressed, got more sex, and had the highest self-esteem in their group.
Pupils bully each other simply to get ahead – so being a bully is a measure of social success, the researchers suggest.
A separate Brock University study suggested that bullies also tend to be more sexually successful than their victims."
Yes... but realizing that the column you linked obviously wasn't the whole story I looked for the study itself (which the column didn't even bother to name). The name of the study is "Survival of the Fittest and the Sexiest: Evolutionary Origins of Adolescent Bullying" and it was published in the "Journal of Interpersonal Violence". You can't read the full text without a paid Sage Publishing account, but the SFU paper published an article on the study that goes into a lot more detail than the little blurb in the column you linked.
Yes, the study says that bullies are more socially successful and the other study says they are more sexually successful. I don't know about you, but I didn't need a college funded research project to tell me that the kids who beat up other kids are more popular and get laid more than the kids who got beat up.
The other stuff you said about them being generally more successful in life and making more money isn't mentioned anywhere in the column or the SFU article. That's just an inference you made based on a second hand blurb by a columnist on Metro. The study was done on 133 Vancouver kids in 2015. With the exception of which of those kids were seniors last year, the kids in that study are -still- high school students so it's a bit early to say how successful they are in life in general and ignores a ton of other factors like academic prowess that factor heavily into the kind of college or career you can get into after high school.
https://www.sfu.ca/criminology/newsandevents/criminology-news/sfu-study-finds-biological-explanation-for-youth-bullying.html
From the article:
"A study from SFU researchers provides new evidence for why the widespread problem of bullying continues to persist. The study finds that youth bullying may be derived from evolutionary development, providing implications for approaching anti-bullying strategies in schools.
Supporters of evolutionary process theory (EPT) argue that there is a biological explanation for bullying – it may be an adaptive behavior that provides individuals with higher status. The results of this study show that bullies do gain specific benefits from their aggression.
“The results do not, by any means, suggest that bullying is ‘ok’ because it may have genetic explanations. Research consistently demonstrates negative implications of bullying in both the short- and long-term, and it should not be acceptable in our schools,” says SFU criminologist Jennifer Wong, lead researcher on the study. “However, this information is useful because it provides us with new options for addressing bullying behaviour.”"
"“We advocate re-directing bullying tendencies to more productive and constructive channels, including supervised competitive activities. This would allow youths to demonstrate their prowess and establish rank in a safer environment without victims,” says Wong."
-Byshop
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