The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - #902

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How did you get interested in studying bullying?

**Tracy Vaillancourt** (0:03)
I get asked that question all the time. People want to think that it was because either I was a bully or I was bullied. But the truth of the matter was, I was just really interested in popularity, and popularity led me to bullying. Because the kids at my high school were the ones who bullied the most. I went ahead and looked at that for my dissertation and found that they were four times more likely to bully others than those who didn't have power, who were not popular, and then it just snowballed from there.

**Chris Williamson** (0:36)
How much work is being done in the world of evidence-based bullying, intervention, stuff like that?

**Tracy Vaillancourt** (0:45)
The past 25 years, we've studied this in earnest. It's been primarily correlational. It's going to be hard to do experiments on bullying when you think about it. I mean, it's just not going to work, really. But we've looked at it primarily from a correlational point of view. The first thing was just to document the prevalence and the like. Then after that, then people looked at individual factors that were associated with it. Dan Oveis led the charge. He's a Swede who was living in Norway at the time, conducted the largest study at the time, the largest longitudinal study, but also intervention study, and then found a 50 percent reduction. But easy to do in Norway when you have everybody involved, it's a small country. Anyhow, he looked at what happens to kids who bully as they move forward. Identified boys in grade 9 found that a large percentage of them were involved in the criminal justice system by the time they were age 24 So that was kind of like the first, I think, well-conducted study in this area that was beyond just descriptives, although it is still descriptive to some extent. And then some people then focused on the broader context that it happens in, so not just at the individual level, but what do school-related factors look like? Kids are nested within schools, they're nested within their families. How do those interrelate? And then my focus was always on the neurobiology, the pathology of bullying. I was really interested in documenting how it hurt people, not just at that level where it could be easily dismissed, where people just say, you just need to be more resilient, suck it up, yeah, she's sad, but she'll get over it. I wanted to show that it affects them in a way that's profound and places them at risk for the rest of their lives. So that was kind of like my area of research, and since then, others have followed.
There's not enough of us, I think that we need to be looking at the neurobiology a little bit more carefully. It's a profound psychosocial stressor. So that's kind of like the evolution of bullying research. Then there's another side group that looks at it from an evolutionary perspective and I know you had Tony Volk on before, and I do that a little bit too with Tony and the like. So yeah, I think we're getting there.

**Chris Williamson** (3:14)
What's next? What would you want to look at next? Or what do you think the broader bullying research community needs to be focused on?

**Tracy Vaillancourt** (3:23)
Why interventions don't work? So when we look at the big meta-analyses, there was one that was just redone. So you think like when you redo the meta-analysis on bullying intervention efficacy, that we would have improvements over the course of a decade, and we don't. So we're still only seeing about at best a 20 percent reduction in bullying, and that I think obviously needs to improve because kids are so profoundly affected, and so are teens, and so are adults.
So why does this persist? Why can't we move it so that we have lower rates of bullying, and we're just not there? Like there was one, I think there's one promising area. They're looking at, again, power. I think that's really what you need to focus on, because bullying is a systematic abuse of power. But the kids who were most, and teens who were most impervious to bullying intervention programs, were the ones who were the most popular in the school, because they don't want to give up their power holding position.

**Chris Williamson** (4:37)
Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so, explain to me the motivations for why people bully. Like, what's the reason for doing it?

**Tracy Vaillancourt** (4:46)
I think there's a lot of different motivations, but I think primarily it's about the corrupting influence of power. So, our longitudinal studies show that, okay, so there's a certain percentage of kids, probably about 10% of kids. And when I say kids, I mean anybody under 18 So, there's a certain percentage of kids who just have sort of like emotional dysregulation. So, prefrontal dysfunction. So, ADHD, conduct disorder, that sort of thing. The Nelsons, Nelson from The Simpsons. So, that's a great representation of who I mean. Our past studies and our past intervention efforts have focused on Nelson or the Nelsons of the world. But they are so different and they don't really represent the true bully out there. So, when you look at it, what happens is that kids have assets and competencies that the peer group values. They're good looking, they're good athletes, they're whatever. Whatever the, every school has a different context or a different culture, I mean. And so, those kids then are afforded power. And then that power is then abused. So, then they use aggressive means to maintain hegemony but also to have achieved it. So, like, the beauty gets you there first and then it corrupts you and then it just escalates into you being a complete jerk and then ruling the school. And then, in a sense, like creating the norms of the school because these kids are so powerful and so salient that everybody pays attention to them and everybody emulates what they're doing. And then next thing you know, you have the entire environment has been corrupted, not just the individual.