How bullying spreads — and how social bravery stops it | Amy Cuddy

Elise Hu (0:04)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. A quick heads up before we begin, this episode includes a frank discussion of bullying and of suicide. Please take care in deciding whether and when to listen.

More than a decade ago, social psychologist Amy Cuddy gave a TED Talk about body language and confidence that became one of the most watched of all time.

What came after, she says, nearly ended her life. She became the target of years of bullying, not from anonymous trolls, but from colleagues in her own field. She has spent the years since studying exactly what happened.

Amy Cuddy (0:44)

Bullying is not conflict, it's not a debate, it's not criticism. It is a deliberately targeted, serial-escalating pattern of attacks carried out by multiple people, and it's intended to destroy a person's reputation and their ability to contribute.

Elise Hu (1:08)

In this talk, Amy lays out how cruelty becomes collective, how it spreads, why bystanders go quiet, and how a whole group can turn on a single person.

But she's clear that this isn't a story of despair. It's a story about what she calls earned hope, because the same thing that gives bullying its power is the thing that can take it away.

Amy Cuddy (1:30)

The first thing to understand is that bullies need us.

Bullies need an audience. If we refuse our participation, a lone bully is impotent.

Elise Hu (1:45)

Amy shares what any one of us can do, small, concrete acts of what she calls social bravery, to stop these patterns before they harden, and why in the end, we'll never fix cruelty with more cruelty. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now, our TED Talk of the day.

Amy Cuddy (2:14)

My talk begins where my life nearly ended.

In 2012, I stood in the red circle, and I gave a TED Talk on social psychology. I was a junior professor at Harvard, and I spoke about feeling like an outsider. I spoke about how we lift our self-confidence, and how our bodies affect the way we feel.

The talk went viral online quickly and became one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. And that cracked my world open in some beautiful ways.

I saw the most luminous parts of myself and of people.

And then I saw the darkest parts, when I became the target of a sustained bullying campaign. Not by trolls on the internet. I learned to dismiss them quickly. But by colleagues. By tenured professors, department chairs and journal editors, who used their names, their real names, to attack me relentlessly for many years. They publicly declared that I had no serious conception of the term science. That what I'd proposed was stupid and unintuitive. That I'd abandoned academia for a lucrative career selling pseudoscience to a mostly women audience. They created a narrative about our work on power posing, that it had been debunked. But here's the thing. Our work on power posing hadn't been debunked. In fact, the central finding, the most important finding, was that our posture, how expansive or contractive it is, affects the way we feel. How powerful, confident we feel. It was replicated dozens of times in independent studies, by labs all over the world, using better methods than those that we used, and even by our skeptics. In multiple meta-analyses, including one with 88 studies and nearly 10,000 participants, they landed on the same conclusion. Expansive versus contractive posture affects how powerful or powerless we feel. The behaviors and the hormones were more complicated, and they were non-replications. In the science that I was trained in by my dear advisor, that would have led to constructive and friendly inquiries, collaborations to figure out what was different about these studies. Were there moderators that affected why you got this effect and we got this effect? Science should interrogate itself. That is how knowledge advances. That should happen. But that's not what happened in my case. Science didn't interrogate itself. It stopped itself. And it silenced a scientist, a junior scientist who also had a lot of other research on stereotyping and prejudice in intergroup relations. Two tenured Ivy League professors told a New York Times reporter that they would have defended me publicly had they not been afraid of becoming targets themselves. Friends wrote privately, I'm so sorry this is happening to you. These guys are horrible, but wouldn't look at me publicly.

I couldn't eat. I didn't sleep. I worked all the time defending myself from constantly incoming attacks, nonstop, relentless. It was very hard to be present for my son and my husband. I'm sorry.