Bullying is good for bullies

Post Reply New Topic

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... s-science/

yep. I've also seen but can't cite a study that said that abusers get positive effects from abuse - i.e. lowered heart rate, I assume lower stress hormone levels.

Of course it is!! !

I've said it before, I will say it again: HUMAN BEINGS SUCK. Bullies don't grow out of it-- they just get older, smarter, and more subtle. And kicking someone else-- having power over them, putting them down, getting your way, and reminding them that you're up here and they're down there still releases happy chemicals and does something good for the organism.

People suck. Human nature isn't good. Bullying is a (highly successful) attempt by the most aggressive normals to remove outliers from the gene pool.

Hell, my FIL loved his grandkids (though I note he preferred his popular, athletic children from his first marriage to the nerdy soccer-playing son from his second wife that I married). You know what he called them?? Pups.

I asked him why. Despite the fact that I'd been subservient to him for the last seven years of his life, the answer was, "Because they came out of a f*****g b***h."

You're the bottom. They're the top. It's going to kill you, and they will benefit.

Bullying is an adaptive part of human nature. Get used to it.

A person who doesn't care about the well-being and concerns of those around them(i.e. a bully) is obviously a good candidate for someone with low-stress levels.

That article sounded like it was saying bullying others is healthy, you know making an excuse for bullies to bully and justifying it.

Sorry. I guess the syntax sucks.

My FIL married one woman, and had three kids with her. They were all popular and athletic, and he liked them better.

She left him, and he married another woman. They had one kid. He was a soccer-playing nerd. His father (my FIL) didn't like him until he finished engineering school and started making a lot of money.

I married that kid, thus making his father my father-in-law.

The story is only relevant at all because my FIL was a dyed-in-the-wool bully, who seemed to get some kind of neurochemical high out of kicking my husband (at least until he "proved up") and then me.

"It's time to eat kids." "It's time to eat, kids." GRAMMAR IS IMPORTANT!! !!

Psychologists divide mental disorders into "externalizing" and "internalizing" types, where externalizing includes things like antisocial personality disorder, and internalizing includes anxiety and depression. That article only refers to the internalizing issues as problems, and seemed to ignore externalizing disorders as a possible consequence of bullying (for the bully). It makes sense that the externalizing approach is beneficial and protective for the individual, but just like the internalizing approaches, if you take it too far, you become unable to function in this society. Whereas with anxiety and depression, people can wind up locked in their houses; people who go too far with their externalizing can wind up locked in jail.

I do think it's useful to understand the positive effects of the behavior, even if we want to eradicate it; just like we should want to understand reward pathways for drugs as we're trying to treat or reduce drug use. Unfortunately, the person who wrote that blog-post gave a very simplistic overview of the topic that can easily be misinterpreted as "bullying is beneficial".

...nevermind what I was confused about makes more sense now.

This is one of the most disturbing studies I've ever seen. Biology is so cruel.

We homeschool middle school. My son heard about that bullying/health study on the news. His reaction, "So, Mom, you still want to send me to a high school?" Grrrrrr.