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

0:00Amy Cuddy.

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. 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.

0:44Bullying 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. 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. The first thing to understand is that bullies need us.

1:37Bullies need an audience. If we refuse our participation, a lone bully is impotent. 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.

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4:08And now, our TED Talk of the day. 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

4:58in some beautiful ways.

5:08I saw the most luminous parts 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.

6:20But 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.

7:13The behaviors and the hormones were more complicated, and there 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 and intergroup relations.

8:15Two 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.

9:03And I chose to walk away from my job at Harvard a year before going up for tenure, not because I was forced to, but because I knew that staying meant certain death.

9:21And so, eventually, I tried to take my own life twice, because this kind of bullying is simultaneously this horrible public spectacle of shame where you're in a spotlight, and at the same time, it's a total erasure of who you are and what you've done. Many targets don't survive. And I do want to say, before I go forward to the targets,

10:06I understand. I see you. And I know that what seems incredible happened. But this is not a talk about despair. This is a talk about earned hope. I've been a social psychologist for 25 years studying the forces that affect how we treat each other and judge each other. But I've spent the last eight focused on how cruelty becomes collective, how truth becomes distorted, how people decide that one person should be pushed out of the group, but also, more importantly, what are the things that we can do to prevent those cultures from taking hold before they harden? And what I've learned is this. First, bullying is not conflict.

11:15It's not a debate. It's not criticism. It's not humor that you're too sensitive to take well. 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. It unfolds in predictable stages, and it usually ends with someone being completely silenced or disappearing completely. This is really important. Bullies are rare. They're rare. Most of us are not bullies. Bullies share one thing, a worldview. In their worldview, the world is hostile, people are fundamentally bad, everything of value is scarce, it's all zero-sum.

12:20Your achievement is their loss. They have an insatiable need for recognition and status and dominance, and they prove their dominance by publicly demonstrating that they can force a target, a valuable target, to fully submit. That's what bullying is. Bullying has been on the rise among adults for the last 15 years. digital platforms make bullying faster, easier, louder, and the bully's lies last forever now. So what do we do?

13:12The first thing to understand is that bullies need us. bullies need an audience they need people to carry out their agenda when we just watch and remain silent we're what I call passive bystanders when we join in and amplify and share and attack we're what I call accessory bullies but if we refuse our participation a lone bully is impotent without us a bully is impotent

13:57second we need to learn to spot the opening when we get in early we can totally derail this it starts with what I call a bully test the bully tests the audience to see if they can get away with bullying that person It might be a really inappropriate comment in a professional setting, or it might be an accusation against someone that's reputation-destroying but not backed by evidence. When we hear those things and we say, stay silent or we laugh, we're just saying to the bully, go forward. And that's when they launch their attack. We also need to practice social bravery, these small risks that we take to defend each other, to support each other interpersonally.

14:45And social bravery is risky. So we need to distribute the risk across people. We need to do it together. It is so much easier for two people to do it than for one person to do it. When one bystander steps in in a way that's noticeable, others step in. And we know from research on changing social conventions that when about 25 % of people step in, they can flip a social norm completely. Bullying is not a personal problem, it's a collective problem, and we can fix it. So after eight years of writing this book, I turned it in a few months ago. Right after that, I traveled to Greeley, Colorado, a small city in the high plains that was raw, politically divided, on edge.

15:39I could feel the vigilance in the air when I looked at them. I spoke about personal power and trust. And at the end, the moderator said, her last question to me was this, she said, is there one piece of leadership advice that you haven't really shared? And I said, yeah. will never win by bullying the bullies. We cannot validate their worldview. As soon as we tell them that the world has to be brutal, they say, see, that's why I have to behave this way. I told them, you don't have to show how much you can hate to prove how much you care or to prove that you belong. and I looked out and I saw their shoulders relax.

16:34I saw a flicker of hope in their faces. I felt them collectively exhale. And the next day, a woman wrote to me and she said, I was at your talk and I noticed something interesting as I left the venue. The crowd was unusually cheerful and courteous. Several drive aisles wove together toward the exits, and everyone was alternating and letting each other in. No one was saying with their actions that they were more important than another person. I just wanted to share the observation that you made an immediate, positive, and tangible difference.

17:25We want to be neighbors again. We want to go to our kids' friends' birthday parties and not worry about an explosion. We don't want to have to show how much we hate to prove how much we care. Bullies' power is borrowed power, and we can refuse to give it to them. We all have access to personal power, and with that personal power, we can commit small acts of social bravery, supporting each other, challenging bullies. So I invite you, please, to join me. Let's find that collective power and turn bullying around. And one more thing. Hey, y 'all, Elise here. I wanted to let you know that at this moment, right before the end of her talk, Amy puts her hands up and stands in the power pose.

18:27Thank you. Thank you so much.

18:37That was Amy Cuddy at TED 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sunglarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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