In-group out-group dynamics have been common throughout human history. It's a default. What's supposed to happen is that adults should correct such behavior, parents, teachers, and other responsible adults.
That they don't is the reason for the prevalence of the behavior in American public schools. That the faculty are often restricted from doing so due to ideological, legal, and political reasons is another reason for the proliferation.
> What's supposed to happen is that adults should correct such behavior, parents, teachers, and other responsible adults.
Not only would I be deathly afraid of being the one doing the bullying, but also if I saw some bullying happening from others... knowing what we know with school shootings... why wouldn't peers stop at nothing to squash bullying ASAP?
Children usually don't think of consequences. It's why they're bad at decision making and need an education. It's why we don't let them vote (or don't seriously talk about it).
Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are still children. They're just less bad at decision making than, say, 5-year-olds. But their brains still don't work like someone over the age of 25.
Lest anyone think this is limited to the Democrats or the US, there has been serious talk of similar changes in other countries as well, though I cannot find a source at the moment. Then there is this gem of a justification:
As if the quantity of votes were the sole measure of the health of a democracy, and not how informed and mature they are. How many of us think a person makes better decisions at 16, vs. at 18 or 21? Yes there is a tradeoff between the average maturity of voters, and people having a say in how they are governed. But to think that tradeoff is optimal at 16, when even 18 is low..
I'm curious why you trailed off at the end. You seem to be hinting that there is a balance between decision making ability and voter turnout, and that younger voters have worse decision making abilities, but then stop short of saying how they ought to be balanced or where the optimal balance is.
There's a lot of interesting directions to take this. How do you get out of the trap of thinking that people who vote in their self-interest or disagree with you are incapable of making good voting decisions? Or, even whether you frame voting as a privilege or a right?
Teens who have jobs, pay income tax, teens who buy things pay sales tax, and yet aren't represented seems like a contradiction in our foundational principles. It fundamentally strikes at the question, "How are rights formed?" If the answer starts and ends with, "asking the people nicely," then we have some history to revisit.
> You seem to be hinting that [..] younger voters have worse decision making abilities
I'm not hinting at it - I'm saying so outright. Have your decision-making abilities not progressed since you were 16?
> How do you get out of the trap of thinking that people who vote in their self-interest or disagree with you are incapable of making good voting decisions?
The majority of people above the age of 21 will vote in ways I disagree with, so I don't see how it is relevant to raising or lowering the voting age.
> Teens who have jobs, pay income tax, teens who buy things pay sales tax
So because a kid can get a part-time job at 13, that should be the new voting age? Unless you put the voting age at 0, for some part of our lives, we all must live in a society whose laws we can't vote on. After that it's no longer a philosophical question of where rights come from, but a pragmatic balancing act between representation and an informed voting body.
Honestly, I made pretty good decisions at 16. I have few regrets from that time period other than perhaps some social faux pas, but no, nothing that would have impacted my voting decisions. I'm curious what life experiences you have had in the intervening years that have impacted your ability to make voting decisions. That probably says more about you than it does about other people.
So it should be 16, not 15 or 14? And should the age of consent match it? Since kids are so mature and responsible by that age.
Edit: Oh, and they should be able to sign up for the Army at that age, too? The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 because of the absurdity of drafting teens into a war when they can't even vote on yet. I would have preferred the opposite solution - raise the draft to 21.
If you learned something between your youth and now that helped you make better decisions that relate to voting, it should be pretty easy to share them. We would all benefit from that knowledge.
even if you'd be allowed to vote at 16, doesn't mean that you actually CAN vote at 16 just because voting doesn't occur every year (maybe somewhere, but i disgress). Additionally, we let old people vote who don't have much to gain from it anymore. So where should the balance be? That's up for discussion but my personal opinion is that allowing people to vote at 16 doesn't dent the votes too much. It would be worthwhile if only because kids would talk about it at school and would probably learn in school a little more about it than right now.
Arguments against youth suffrage remind me of other anti-suffrage arguments.
Perhaps schools could (and should) practice more of the democracy they preach (would 4th graders vote unanimously to ban math because it's "too hard" and expand recess because "it's fun?") and we could gradually phase in the things that citizens can vote for - rather than having a strict step function. Taxation with representation does sound better than the alternative.
Gradual/progressive suffrage would allow citizens to gain some actual experience with democracy – rather than living under a strict authoritarian system.
A parent/parents who already have a narcissistic tendency imprinting how they act towards other people onto their children.
A parent/parents who aren't paying attention to how their kid acts outside of the home, using excuses and blame deferral to hide the fact that they're bad parents, not exactly encouraging the behavior but ignoring that it's a problem.
Some kids are just predisposed to be little arseholes, maybe it's genetic, maybe it's something developmental.
There's so many possibilities and different bully archetypes.
There's a girl at my kids' school that bullies my daughter and other kids. I talked to her father and found he's as exacerbated with the situation as I am. There may be something going on at home, but I sincerely believe he's trying and at the end of his rope.
There was this big dude that used to intimidate and bully me for 3 years of high school. One day in senior year I finally snapped and just punched him. His facial expression immediately changed - it was a look of "That's what I've been waiting for you to do all these years." We're friends to this day.
Just to give another perspective: Bullying was very, very common in my school. I bullied in Grade 2*, and over the years got bullied back. Personally, I don't think your possible causes could have applied to everyone. I just think most small children don't have fully developed empathy, and are uncritical about ethics, and so will cruelly bully someone for very little reason.
This kind of in-group, out-group dynamic seems like a default for humanity. It's pretty easy to lapse into xenophobia - since that's our default. Trying to widen the circle of the "in-group" status is hard, and goes against our instincts.
* ETA: Thinking back on this period, I recall our teacher trying her best to combat the bullying of one girl in particular. She would do things like sit us down as a class and explain to us why it was cruel, with the girl in her lap, and reading stories to us about bullying. None of it worked, I literally remember sitting there, nodding along, and being frankly too dumb to connect this back to my own bullying. In hindsight, the one thing that I think would have worked is if she had publically reprimanded us everytime she had caught us in the act. I think that kind of repeated, instant feedback would finally gotten through to us.
I still feel too dumb for that kind of diffuse moralizing. I understand why the teacher wouldn't want to police directly though. Really effective leaders have emotional liquidity built up for that kind of situation, and do subtle work to restore balance.
There's a grey zone where bullying blends into friendly teasing. A little bit of poking gets the blood flowing, especially if you already have social velocity, but repeated exploitation is just cruel.
If you ever observe a litter of puppies, they fight eachother constantly. The purpose of this is building fighting skills. The same thing happens with children.
To play devil's advocate: If child A can verbally bully child B into giving them a cookie/lunch money/pokemon card, from their perspective its a valuable skill!
I think an argument can be made that it 1) toughens you up-you get used to being attacked and find ways to handle it and 2) can serve the same sort of purpose as hazing, where its some kinda test to see what youre made of in order to be accepted.
I will day probably a vast majority of bullying does not fit either of these criteria and is just straight cold blooded meanness with no upside.
> Picking on the vulnerable builds no skill of value.
Picking on the vulnerable is an easy and effective way to raise and maintain your status in any social dominance hierarchy (which tend to emerge in most groups of more than a few humans.)
It seems to be a primary qualification for "leadership" roles, including management and supervisory positions, teaching, coaching, public office, and law enforcement.
I've always heard that "hurt people hurt people", and so most of the bullying behaviour that kids turn around and repeat to each other is something they've experienced for themselves elsewhere.
I just (last night!) had to take mandatory reporter training on child abuse. Pretty horrible actually.
But it addressed your question. Some kids hear at home things like "you're useless" or "you're a disappointment to me" or "why can't you be more like $SIBLING"? The parent themselves may be under stress and not have enough energy to have adequate empathy for their child, and/or they likely may themselves have been on the receiving end of such treatment, which may have normalized such behavior.
While true, I think it's a cop out to say "groups of humans are just like this". The training I just took was pretty disturbing as it naturally focused on the consequences of awful behavior, but to flipp the statistics around the other way: I was glad the prevalence the worst kinds of abuse (which includes emotional abuse == bullying) was not huge. Most people are not like this.
And sure, some people do seem to simply be bad seeds but the training did (appropriately delicately and dispassionately) show that certain exogenous drivers were more far more predictive of abuse than demographics. I didn't follow this part closely because it wasn't relevant to why I needed to take the training (I'm not a social worker).
I agree with what you wrote, but would like to add that the percent of victims can be much greater than the percent of perpetrators, if the perpetrators have multiple victims. So it can be simultaneously true that only a few people become bullies, and that many experience bullying at some moment of their lives.
Jockeying for social status is our natural behavior. For early humans good social standing became critical to survival. It takes awhile before your brain realizes not being accepted by the group isn’t going to result in you dying due to starvation or predation. I live with a 13 year old and they are just a jerk naturally, it is funny as an adult because you can reflect on that time of life and not take it seriously, but It’s probably harder as a kid.
The same place birds and monkeys learn pecking order/social dominance hierarchies from?
Putting kids in classrooms (and requiring them to compete with each other for grades etc.) might also have similar effects to putting chickens in coops or monkeys in enclosures.
This story shows the person at the top of the hierachy exercising power over her subordinates, solidifying everyone's position while simultaneously making Jennifer loyal to her.
37 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 85.3 ms ] threadWhere do kids learn this from? Why is it so common/"the default" for some kids to think "let me pick on other kids"?
That they don't is the reason for the prevalence of the behavior in American public schools. That the faculty are often restricted from doing so due to ideological, legal, and political reasons is another reason for the proliferation.
Not only would I be deathly afraid of being the one doing the bullying, but also if I saw some bullying happening from others... knowing what we know with school shootings... why wouldn't peers stop at nothing to squash bullying ASAP?
Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are still children. They're just less bad at decision making than, say, 5-year-olds. But their brains still don't work like someone over the age of 25.
How I wish that were true:
Dems in several states push measures to lower voting age to 16 - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-several-states-push-me...
Majority of House Democrats vote in favor of lowering voting age to 16 - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-democrats-hr-1-lower-...
Lest anyone think this is limited to the Democrats or the US, there has been serious talk of similar changes in other countries as well, though I cannot find a source at the moment. Then there is this gem of a justification:
Lowering the voting age to 16 in the US could increase the voting rate for the entire country, improving our democracy in the process. - https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/this-is-why-16-year-olds-shoul...
As if the quantity of votes were the sole measure of the health of a democracy, and not how informed and mature they are. How many of us think a person makes better decisions at 16, vs. at 18 or 21? Yes there is a tradeoff between the average maturity of voters, and people having a say in how they are governed. But to think that tradeoff is optimal at 16, when even 18 is low..
There's a lot of interesting directions to take this. How do you get out of the trap of thinking that people who vote in their self-interest or disagree with you are incapable of making good voting decisions? Or, even whether you frame voting as a privilege or a right?
Teens who have jobs, pay income tax, teens who buy things pay sales tax, and yet aren't represented seems like a contradiction in our foundational principles. It fundamentally strikes at the question, "How are rights formed?" If the answer starts and ends with, "asking the people nicely," then we have some history to revisit.
I'm not hinting at it - I'm saying so outright. Have your decision-making abilities not progressed since you were 16?
> How do you get out of the trap of thinking that people who vote in their self-interest or disagree with you are incapable of making good voting decisions?
The majority of people above the age of 21 will vote in ways I disagree with, so I don't see how it is relevant to raising or lowering the voting age.
> Teens who have jobs, pay income tax, teens who buy things pay sales tax
So because a kid can get a part-time job at 13, that should be the new voting age? Unless you put the voting age at 0, for some part of our lives, we all must live in a society whose laws we can't vote on. After that it's no longer a philosophical question of where rights come from, but a pragmatic balancing act between representation and an informed voting body.
Edit: Oh, and they should be able to sign up for the Army at that age, too? The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 because of the absurdity of drafting teens into a war when they can't even vote on yet. I would have preferred the opposite solution - raise the draft to 21.
They still do.
Perhaps schools could (and should) practice more of the democracy they preach (would 4th graders vote unanimously to ban math because it's "too hard" and expand recess because "it's fun?") and we could gradually phase in the things that citizens can vote for - rather than having a strict step function. Taxation with representation does sound better than the alternative.
Gradual/progressive suffrage would allow citizens to gain some actual experience with democracy – rather than living under a strict authoritarian system.
Bad/absent parents or role models.
A parent/parents who already have a narcissistic tendency imprinting how they act towards other people onto their children.
A parent/parents who aren't paying attention to how their kid acts outside of the home, using excuses and blame deferral to hide the fact that they're bad parents, not exactly encouraging the behavior but ignoring that it's a problem.
Some kids are just predisposed to be little arseholes, maybe it's genetic, maybe it's something developmental.
There's a girl at my kids' school that bullies my daughter and other kids. I talked to her father and found he's as exacerbated with the situation as I am. There may be something going on at home, but I sincerely believe he's trying and at the end of his rope.
There was this big dude that used to intimidate and bully me for 3 years of high school. One day in senior year I finally snapped and just punched him. His facial expression immediately changed - it was a look of "That's what I've been waiting for you to do all these years." We're friends to this day.
This kind of in-group, out-group dynamic seems like a default for humanity. It's pretty easy to lapse into xenophobia - since that's our default. Trying to widen the circle of the "in-group" status is hard, and goes against our instincts.
* ETA: Thinking back on this period, I recall our teacher trying her best to combat the bullying of one girl in particular. She would do things like sit us down as a class and explain to us why it was cruel, with the girl in her lap, and reading stories to us about bullying. None of it worked, I literally remember sitting there, nodding along, and being frankly too dumb to connect this back to my own bullying. In hindsight, the one thing that I think would have worked is if she had publically reprimanded us everytime she had caught us in the act. I think that kind of repeated, instant feedback would finally gotten through to us.
There's a grey zone where bullying blends into friendly teasing. A little bit of poking gets the blood flowing, especially if you already have social velocity, but repeated exploitation is just cruel.
Picking on the vulnerable builds no skill of value.
I will day probably a vast majority of bullying does not fit either of these criteria and is just straight cold blooded meanness with no upside.
Picking on the vulnerable is an easy and effective way to raise and maintain your status in any social dominance hierarchy (which tend to emerge in most groups of more than a few humans.)
It seems to be a primary qualification for "leadership" roles, including management and supervisory positions, teaching, coaching, public office, and law enforcement.
But it addressed your question. Some kids hear at home things like "you're useless" or "you're a disappointment to me" or "why can't you be more like $SIBLING"? The parent themselves may be under stress and not have enough energy to have adequate empathy for their child, and/or they likely may themselves have been on the receiving end of such treatment, which may have normalized such behavior.
While true, I think it's a cop out to say "groups of humans are just like this". The training I just took was pretty disturbing as it naturally focused on the consequences of awful behavior, but to flipp the statistics around the other way: I was glad the prevalence the worst kinds of abuse (which includes emotional abuse == bullying) was not huge. Most people are not like this.
And sure, some people do seem to simply be bad seeds but the training did (appropriately delicately and dispassionately) show that certain exogenous drivers were more far more predictive of abuse than demographics. I didn't follow this part closely because it wasn't relevant to why I needed to take the training (I'm not a social worker).
I agree with what you wrote, but would like to add that the percent of victims can be much greater than the percent of perpetrators, if the perpetrators have multiple victims. So it can be simultaneously true that only a few people become bullies, and that many experience bullying at some moment of their lives.
Of course number of reported victims < number of victims, and more importantly any non-zero number is terrible.
The same place birds and monkeys learn pecking order/social dominance hierarchies from?
Putting kids in classrooms (and requiring them to compete with each other for grades etc.) might also have similar effects to putting chickens in coops or monkeys in enclosures.
This story shows the person at the top of the hierachy exercising power over her subordinates, solidifying everyone's position while simultaneously making Jennifer loyal to her.
Neither a good Lord nor a LOL for the death of a preteen who made dumb decisions.