#711 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Ruthless Ways Women Compete With Each Other

30:36But I mean, how do you change it if you can't acknowledge it, right? So like, I'm prepared, you know, I 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 a spousing hate speech. But 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.

31:09Like, I mean, we've kind of been joking around here, but some young women take their lives over this. Some older women take their lives over at Teenage Girls, take their lives over this. You know, the bullying that the endure 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've 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 a fault.

31:55And 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 you're 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. I would love for women to be and some women are. I mean women in academia I find are very tough and can handle opinions being expressed directly and in contradiction to their own viewpoints. But I just wish just generally speaking I think if we were a little less sensitive a little bit more tolerant, a little bit more honest than we'd probably be in a better position in terms of wielding power, holding power, progressing with power.

32:52Did you see this hypothetical hairdressing client study that came out a little while ago? Okay, so give me one more hint. I feel like I know this. I explored how women sabotage hypothetical hairdressing clients through disingenuous beauty advice which would detrimentally impact client's physical attractiveness. In both studies, the more attractive the client, the more hair was recommended to be cut off. Both the laywomen and female professional hairdressers put most hair offwomen who were of the same attractiveness level as them with women cutting the most hair offwomen they perceived to be about as attractive as themselves.

33:27They 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 -maked value lay women to cut off less hair, suggesting the dominance incited by women wearing makeup resulted in reduced sabotage. More intracexually competitive women, including hairdressers, cut off more hair, confirming competitor manipulation as intracexual competitiveness strategy being employed. Yes, that study finds itself in the book. It's interesting because I had this one girlfriend in high school, we were in that popular group and everybody was very attractive and had a lot of assets and competencies that the peer group valued.

34:13But anytime she told me that I looked really good in an outfit, I automatically had to change it.

34:23I mean, I 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 make value dating pool. Don't 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 of the points of being, you know, morally grandstanding and I am empathy and I care for the downtrodden group and so on and so forth.

35:10But 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 macchi -ovalien? I think that the underlying 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 shit. That is some sneaky shit. 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 us, wow, this sounds like really comprehensive, intersectional competition from women to push at the women out of the mating pool.

35:57Hmm, I wonder if that's, so this is total bro signs here, right? And you know, it's interesting because I have a reaction to it because like here, I know people are going to, women are going to have a reaction to everything I said and now I'm having a reaction to this. So I'm going to 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 we, 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 buying that one just yet. Hi, hopes for humanity. Okay, so one of the other things you mentioned it earlier on about But bullying is sort of the effect of youth ostracization on especially young girls.

36:45Some 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 wasn't good before the pandemic and it was worse during the pandemic.

37:26It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. So I've been studying 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. 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. During the pandemic, I think that a lot of a hat to do with social isolation, there's a lot of evidence to support that the need to belong as a fundamental human motivator to all, but it's particularly pronounced for women and we talked about this already.

38:13So staying alive, so, you know, belonging, being in a group, affiliating, all of those things are really important for my survival and my offspring survival. So I think that challenged girls and women, particularly during the pandemic, but also two were more exposed to violence more than men. So we're more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence. You know, everything except for murder, men get murdered more than women. And then there were big on social comparisons and so social media has not been really good for adolescent girls and for women. I think all of those things contribute to poor mental health.

38:58Well, if you look at Greg Lukyanov and Jonathan Heitzwerk, they lay an awful lot of the changes at the feet of social media. 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. You're never going to find one thing that causes everything. But I do think it counts for a lot of the variants. I really do. We see this over and over again. Like I don't do any clinical work anymore, but certainly that's something that was when I worked in the Moot Disorders Clinic when I was doing my internship is something I saw a lot.

39:37Yeah, girls and women make a lot of comparisons. They spend a lot of time on social media. And those social comparisons 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. I don't know how often you take your screen and zoom it to see you know every wrinkle and every hair out of place. Do you ever do that? I'm just curious. No, it's like this is even like if I ask my husband maybe like what are you even talking about? 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.

40:22Anyhow, so yeah, it's not good. It's not good for the health of females and we need to get a grip on this and figure it out. We did this study that's just under review. And so one thing I noticed that happens and hasn't been looked at but it makes sense. So we're really interested in threats to relationships, right? So 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, I'm sorry for women versus men. So what we did was we developed a scale called a social media friendship jealousy scale.

41:03And basically, he said like, you know, how affected are you if your friend posts something and you're not tagged in it. Or your friends, 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. What's the underlying dynamic that social media is playing on, which is particularly effective at impacting girls' mental health?

41:49Is it the ostracization? Is it being felt, 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 positive relationships and affiliation and the like. You certainly do, but we need it more. We absolutely do need it more. And so, you know, our value 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.

42:29Give 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 that tailor -tenned and befriended 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 stay alive and to keep their children alive. life and it still exists in some places in the world today. So it's like a fine line again, you need to belong more so than men, but you also have to compete within this nest of belonging and that's really challenging, which is why I think we're so, so good at indirect aggression.

43:16We'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 locked. It's a it's a it's a surgeon scalpel rather than a big hammer. Totally. It's so funny how often I'll say to my husband, oh my kind of Stiggy knows what she did. And like he didn't even notice she was in the room. 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 attenuation to what's going on in the room? Is that on a sliding scale where, obviously, on average, there is a bell curve, blah, blah.

44:04Is there a particular personality trait which really tunes that up? Is it conscientiousness? Is it neuroticism? Is there something that you have found that can quite accurately predict the level of attenuation that a girl would have to to her surroundings and the status in her group. I think it's not gonna be any of the big five, or if you look at the hexa -coat, it's not gonna be any of those per se. When we looked at it, we found like conscientiousness was actually negative related to it, but it's gonna be hyper -competitiveness. So there's the competitiveness where you, just like personal development competitiveness that you use to better yourself, vis -a -vis yourself, and then there's the, I need to be better than everybody else, where everything is is there some gain.

44:48So 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, whole grudges to get others mad at them, so to use indirect aggression. So hyper competitive of women are, 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.

45:31I adored his work on bullying. I spent a lot of time 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 have you found about this? We've spoken a lot about social status so far, mostly for girls, but also for boys. What is this? How do these two things live in relationship to each other? So Tony's a really good friend of mine. He's fantastic. So I told you about that study, the slut -shaming study, the sexy Confederate study. So I think one of my other more famous studies, if you could say that, without getting knocked down because I'm like bragging about myself is basically I my for my dissertation my PhD I looked at Mean Girls the phenomenon before it even came out as a movie.

46:22So I was really interested at the time scientists kept talking 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 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 adolescence from grade 6 to grade 12 And whether or not they had assets and competencies at the peer group values so that they were attractive good athletes rich funny tough, all of those things, and how that related to bullying and other status indicators like popularity and power.

47:14And what we found was, or what I found for my dissertation was that most kids who bully others have a lot of power. Then there's this other group of kids who bully others who have low power. Those are like the Nelson's from the Simpsons, right? So that group kind of indistrimanately bullies everybody, but they're very marginalized, they're rejected, you know, their future is pretty bleak. 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.

48:03So every school is going to have a different culture. 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 corrupted and that's true of almost every human being on the planet, power corrupts and it and it and absolutely corrupts right. So, so anyhow, so that's what my dissertation was about and it's been robustly replicated. You know, this is something we see over and over again.

48:45I went to Finland early in my career to give a talk on this and I was hosted by Christina Samavali and she's like, I don't find this 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. It exists in university life. And then we get out of it. What two questions? First off, what do the bullies get out of it, what is the benefit to them? And secondly, why do we then get out of it? What is it about growing up?

49:28They get resources, right? So we've shown and we've shown with Tony, so Tony and I published a few studies on this. They get more sacks, which is awesome, I guess, and good stuff for for people. They get better recognition. They can influence the peer group and the norms of a school more, they get more resources, people give them shit, people look at them, people adore them, all of those things are good, right? Like they're the silverbacks of their school. And then nobody messes with them, which is also a good feeling. I don't understand how standing on the shoulders of lower status individuals gives the bully, It bestows that benefit.

50:16That's not who they bully that group doesn't bully they the lowest lower standard So they do a little bit, but no it's not that unfair fight so much so Bob Verris's work and others have shown that high status bullies tend to bully those that are just at the next wrong the ones that are challenging their status right so those are the ones that are in trouble and And or anybody who threatens their catboard seat in the 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.

51:04So you're not paying attention to others unless you're paying attention to people that are threat to you. That's all you're really paying attention to. So I don't know if it's that, 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, so achieving and maintaining a gemini. I really think it's about trying to maintain power 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 everything after high school is just high school 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 did they fall away what adult bullying look like?

52:08Is there even such a thing in the same context as childhood bullying? Adult bullying looked different from childhood bullying and that it's not as status oriented, like I just suggested, these high status bullies. It's more, I mean certainly 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, they're not as stable. So I 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?

52:46So like you have your hockey friends and then you have, you know, your gym bros and then you have, I'm just making all of them a gym bros. I only have one group of friends and that all of them are bros. But my point is like, you know, and then you have a 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 reach, you kind of see high school happen over and over again is when you're kids, when you have kids and then you become like a soccer soccer mom, soccer moms are scary.

53:29Like, that's where the high school higher key comes up again. It's honestly, it's high school all over again. There's a queen B mom. She usually is the manager of the soccer team. She organizes everything in favor of her daughter or her son. She manipulates other moms. You don't get included to go to the mall with them during tournaments. It's all high school all over again. and it's really interesting why that happens. So we kind of relive it again through our kids. Right. So when the social groups aren't sufficiently ossified and 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.

54:13School creates a purpose built in almost a purpose built environment to precisely create this predictability of what's going to go on. we know where people have come before. Someone news come in, but they come 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.

54:54Like, how am I going to manage that? So I have to change schools and historically that wasn't really allowed. Now we allow it more before the internet. You could kind of escape that. Now you can't escape it as much as you used to be able to. But anyhow, it's adults. Like, okay, so the moms are being named to me on the soccer team. We just move teams. Like, it's easier than what it is in high school. Yeah, so again, it's that sort of ossified nature, the fact that it's predictable, the fact that it's going to continue going into the future. So funny that 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.

55:41And yeah, and they do and they don't. So in some ways, He's like, I see it replicate itself also in academia. Like academia, oh man, there are a bunch of like bully brats. Like, it's like, you know, when the, what's that, what's that, 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 use their power with very few exceptions. So there are very few people who are just pure implicit power.

56:19And implicit power is the kind of power that you get by having assets and competency that the peer review group values. And 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 making people afraid, sitting compliance, that sort of thing. My favorite study that's ever been done was a study on parking. And so what's your prediction? If somebody is in the parking stall and they know you're at Costco, do you have Costco real -lived? You must have Costco. Yeah, I do. I also know the study. So if you I was trying to get me to predict it.

57:06Yeah, I've ruined the game. So the thing is, 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. Got to answer that really urgent text. And then it's like, oh, you want this? You're going to have to wait. 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 the developing brain? Oh my goodness. It's enormous and it persists across the lifespan.

57:44So 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. So you're going to have the mental health difficulties, the physical health difficulties, the memory issues and the like. But it impacts your hypothelamic pituitary adrenal access, which is your stress response system. So at the beginning, you get overly activated HPA access because you're stressed out and then eventually the body adapts and then you have lower cortisol, your HPA access downgrades and that in turn then causes an inflammation response and then it affects your cortisol, your testosterone levels.

58:37It has an effect on your brain in terms of places in your brain like areas that are really rich in glucocortico 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 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 wanna 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 has epigenetic processes too. So, you know, you can't change the gene code, but you can certainly change the expression of genes.

59:20And you see telomere erosion that you have shorter telemirs, which is an indicator of basically if you're gonna do well like in terms of health or die kind of thing. So it's like a good I guess bio indicator of How much shit's gone down in your life in a sense? Yes. Well, 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 making all of this stuff happen? Is this an adaptive response or is it just a byproduct of some other fuckery? I think it's an adaptive response, it sounds a bit weird, because again, back to this need to belong.

1:00:09So 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, and we wouldn't be where we are as humans, right? And every system, like, so when you look at the prevalence of psychopathy is 2 % worldwide. You know, we can't tolerate more than 2 % on that, on psychopathy. It just creates havoc. So we need to get along, we need to belong 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. And then there'd probably be some that would argue that it also weeds out the weak.

1:00:48But 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 mentioned that you had a pretty rough go at this. What do you think? What would you attribute it to? I struggled to relate to other kids so I wasn't socially very attuned or adept. I think I was quite awkward. There was definitely a neediness around. So I was an only child going to school. I spoke differently.

1:01:22I don't have the accent from the place that I'm from. I did cricket, which was 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 and a combination of not being socially nimble and doing things that made you stand out with probably being a physically unfermitable child. I was like a skinny kid. Yeah, yeah, small skinny kid. and I mean, it ended up growing probably heightwise at the same rate as everybody else, but there was lots of, you know, these dudes in school that just hit puberty at 10 and a half years old before you've even got into secondary school, and these guys are massive.

1:02:06So yeah, I think 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, they're 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 the 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 to all full circles of slut shaming. Wow. Okay, so early developing girls, if you have precocious puberty and you look more like 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.

1:02:52Wow. 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 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. Fuck you. So you can come to your PhD with me now. I'm ready. You're ready to go. I'm ready. I'm moving to Canada. 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 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.

1:03:53Therefore, 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 narrative story that our evolution's 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. I mean, there's just, you know, there's people who start in the same spot and end up on different spots and people who end up in the end spots the same, but their beginnings are so different.

1:04:31So, multi -finality, equifinality, that sort of thing. I think that it's really hard when you think about the evolutionary significance of bullying And I know you spoke to Dr. Volk, to Tony about this, because 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? 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. People will say that they wouldn't want to trade their experience because they've achieved excellence and it made who they are.

1:05:15It's so interesting how often you hear about people being bullied and they're really prominent individuals. I just watched the Netflix series Backcom have you watched it yet? I haven't known. They were both, you know, isolated kids in a lot of ways. 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 experiences what made them. And I always think, okay, so if you're at a scale of one to 10, you're at an eight on excellence and excellence is like world class excellence, what if you were supposed to be a 10?

1:05:55Like, you know, we don't know what your top was supposed to be. maybe you were supposed to cure cancer. Well, I said this to David Goggins, who opened up an awful lot about the way that he was treated as a kid, both at school and by his father, 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 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.

1:06:43And 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 are the light side of something that you're probably pretty embarrassed about. Yeah. And it's exactly 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. I used my agency and my sovereignty to kind of wrangle this reality into something which is good to me. Now, there's, I'm falling in love with this frame at the moment, things which are literally true but figuratively false and things that a figuratively false but literally true.

1:07:24I think that this is one of those things that may be literally true but figuratively false or at least functionally false, which is, I may have been a much better businessman, son and podcaster had I have 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 want and thinking about just how much further ahead you could have got is just a recipe for victimhood and misery.

1:08:11And it's a yeah literally true functionally false perhaps. You know, it's interesting too. It kind of highlights back to that heterogeneity point that it was making. So like, I do think that some individuals are bullied and they do okay. They fare better. 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 those are helpful. But there's also biological risk that we never talked about. So for example, and this has kind of been, And 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.

1:08:56So Caspi Moffitt and all published a seminal paper in science in 19, or sorry, 2003. And basically they looked at 5 -HTT LPR, so it's the serotonin transporter gene, the polymorphism of it so you can get 50 % of your genes from your mom, 50 % from your dad, so you can have a long allele, like a long, long allele, short, short allele, and a short, long allele. And having the short allele is a risk factor for depression because it's implicated in how serotonin is used by your body. So anyhow, they looked at kids who were maltreated in childhood and the likelihood of them becoming depressed at age 26.

1:09:45And whether or not it was moderated by their 5 -HDTLPR. And what they found was that if you were bullied or sorry, maltreated in childhood and you had the short, shorter, leal, 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 are no more likely to be depressed than if you hadn't been abused. So do you know what your 5 HDT LPR polymorphism is? No, but I can ask someone because I've had a full gene scandal. So this is my point. You don't... Okay, so now we know you give you 23 and me.

1:10:26We 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 their on being bullied and we say ah you see you know look at Should it try harder should it on the way? 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 What their biological risk is I mean this is the it's the ultimately the brutal red pill of behavioral genetics right that But the raw materials that everybody is starting with is not the same.

1:11:07And when you fold that in with epigenetics and determinism, you have a pretty brutal soup 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 epigenetic, I thought epigenetics was total bullshit and then I had Sapolsky on and 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.

1:11:49And not only that, it's now your kids and your grandkids potentially. Grandkids, 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 people kids being bullied in the classroom.

1:12:27So 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 asshole in our classroom that's just picking on everybody. So there's like a communism of bullying. Yeah. You know, there's like, misery loves companies. So here we're trying to reduce bullying and then we're having this issue. The other thing that's really interesting about the intervention literature, And I'm given actually a talk to the Montreal School Board tomorrow on this is that Studies is shown so back to Christina Salma Valley.

1:13:02I told you I went to Finland and I told them that you know I went to your mall. I know you're gonna 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 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 powerholding position? So what about, so for the people that are listening who might be thinking, okay, well, I went through some bad times in school.

1:13:35Am I now locked into a life of suboptimal brain development and my hippocampus and gray matter smaller? I'm never going to be able to remember my 16 -digit number across the front of my card. But 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 we know that neuroplasticity exists across the lifespan.

1:14:19So 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 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 they just a lived experience again like you can fly the flag from my ethnographic research like it's just not enjoyable like you have this 4 ,000 weeks that you've got on this planet and of them however many hundred is spent like really just not enjoying your time feeling bad about yourself.

1:14:59It's funny that you said that like I'm giving the keynote for UNICEF's violence conference that's coming up. Pro violence, presumably. Per me? Pro violence, presumably. Yeah, yeah. Pro you're going into. No, there are violence. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, anti -humane. 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 live experience have told us over and over again, and how harmful this was and is being bullied, being treated poorly, even women being treated poorly by other women. And yet we needed to put 30 years worth of science to it to, in a sense, acknowledge their pain was real.

1:15:46Like that's bullshit. Like why did we need to do this? 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 docking into the harms. Well, definitely speaking as a member, a proud member of the Expo -Lied 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 those status. You'd already had to battle with this before in the past.

1:16:23Is this not something that I should have already got passed into adulthood? hood 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 this 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 unribility. 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.

1:16:56So 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 women are more vengeful than men. You may not think that, but it's true. So we never forget somebody who's done us wrong, remember? I said, so if I was you and I had the podcast like meaning like I was as popular as you and I had the good lighting that you have in the back of me and stuff like that, I'd be naming names. I mean like here's the list of people who fucked with me and I'd out them, but you're like a kind of person.

1:17:42It's interesting that you still say this though because you're probably very familiar with the social pain research. No, what's up? Okay, so there, so about, maybe about 15 years ago, you know, with the, the advancements and FMRIs 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 activated when you physically hurt yourself. When your osteosys treated poorly, bullied, you name it, the same areas of your brain are activated.

1:18:26It's called social pain. The difference between social pain and physical pain, so there's overlapping neuro structures, physical and social pain. And this has evolutionary significance again because it's a neural alarm that you're not belonging. So you right? So it actually does hurt and it's interesting because like when you think about the physical pain, are the 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 you punched me in the stomach when I think about it, right? So the thing about physical pain is that it's short -lived.

1:19:06So I had two daughters and both times the epidural didn't take which is complete BS. But I 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 very 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 So you know this is why it hurts it hurts forever It serves an evolutionary function But it's kind of like an evolutionary function that took steroids and and kind of went off Have you looked at interventions for people to grow beyond the vestige of their bullying?

1:20:10No, 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 things that you've been saying, you know, that makes sense to me and the reframing is really important. 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 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?

1:20:49Very interesting Given that you're talking about this in 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 paper that just came out of meta -analysis that involved over 100 studies. And it showed that the effects were pretty small again. 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. They do it before they head out of middle school, because they're not very effective in high school.

1:21:32They involve the peers, but are not pure lead. They include education of teachers. 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 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 the remediation of Nelson instead of the remediation of, you know, that mean girl clique. I think that we'd be in a better position if we, if we address that, that talk to your group.

1:22:16It's such a kind of like not a game of Russian relat, 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, which is going on, you know, increased anxiety, all the rest of it.

1:22:57So 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 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 is around it, the desperate attempt to try and just not make the situation any worse.

1:23:37So I need everybody to understand that most studies show that when you tell somebody you're being bullied like a Karen 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. So a lot of times what happens is kids 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.

1:24:20And 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 to address 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. The schools, most schools in the world have to deal with this, even at a legal point.

1:24:56So 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 even if they weren't, they would be legally motivated to do something. So that's how it's done. Now, when you were being bullied, that wasn't the case. Like, it was really like the Wild 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.

1:25:34kids, 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 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 to want to keep up today with all your work. So I'm on this platform called Twitter X where you go to get bullied.

1:26:10So you can keep up with it with me there. It's really lovely. I just love my interactions there. I think that's probably the best place because I'm not on any other social media site. So I got to keep my social comparisons low. so my mental health is good. Very nice. Tracy, I really appreciate you. I was so nice chatting with you, Chris. I could do it all day long.