Study finds bullies have more children than non-bullies

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-bullies-children.html

by PaulHoule • 1 year ago

71 91 1 year ago

Abstract: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/ebs0000374

That's not the paper, that's just the abstract, which doesn't actually talk about sample size. It does point out an important limitation of the research: it looks at number of children specifically at 23 and 24 years old, rather than the full range of ages at which people have children in Canada. Which is the other limitation: it only looked at Canada, and the abstract doesn't say which parts of Canada, so there's so much information missing that it's impossible to tell what this study actually found.

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

Edited.

delichon• 1 year ago

Presumably individual aggression versus fertility is an inverted U shaped curve in which fertility rises with aggression to an inflection point and then declines. That point is probably higher than we would like for the achievement of other social goals.

It may be that at the level of civilizations the aggression versus fertility curve is different than for individuals: Memes may propagate more efficiently with more or less aggression than genes do. But social media is showing that brutality is more positively correlated with virality than we'd hope for.

If cultural values about aggression reduce fertility to below replacement they become culturally suicidal. For both aggression and pacifism the dose is the poison. Calibrating the dose is an eternal political and biological battle.

BriggyDwiggs426• 1 year ago

What exactly is fertility here? I don’t think all the non-bullies are shooting blanks. What if the bullies are just worse on average at family planning? How are you differentiating civilizations, especially in the modern age when national borders don’t constrain enormous trade of goods and culture?

decimalenough• 1 year ago

It's not about shooting blanks, but getting the chance to reproduce in the first place. There's a lot of research showing that women are attracted to confidence and dominant traits (read: "bad guys"), and that this preference is basically universal.

icantjuggle• 1 year ago

It's a small but confusing point that in academic demography, "low/high fertility" just means something like "how many children does a typical woman have" rather than how easy/hard it is to conceive them (which is what it means in everyday language). See the definitions of these rates for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography#Common_rates_and_...

reverendsteveii• 1 year ago

strictly speaking, fecundity is the number of offspring you could make (and thus low fecundity would imply shooting blanks) whereas fertility is the number you actually make.

wakawaka284• 1 year ago

I'm gonna guess a bit: Non-bullies are less attractive on average than bullies. It's not about their preference or aversion to other behavior. "Confidence" is a proxy for physical attractiveness. A confident unattractive person comes off as creepy.

optimalsolver• 1 year ago

Presumable individual aggression versus fertility is an inverted U shaped curve in which fertility rises with aggression to an inflection point and then declines

Are you sure about the decline part?

dboreham• 1 year ago

Because they have more money?

ziofill• 1 year ago

Oh I just got it, that was funny

rezmason• 1 year ago

Took me a minute, too. :D

firefax2• 1 year ago

Makes sense. I've seen folks justify being needlessly adversarial because their crotchspawn obviously deserve the best, so anyone who stands in the way of a promotion or publication is a threat and therefor they can reframe bullying as being a breadwinner.

dennis_jeeves22• 1 year ago

crotchspawn

New word for me. Good one.

firefax2• 1 year ago

Haha thanks, I'm guessing English is not your first language? Glad I could be of help ;-)

sitkack2• 1 year ago

Standing up for someone else, you can be 10x over the top karen, and you are an alley and a hero.

Do it for yourself and you are an asshole. Other people's causes give you cover to act poorly.

*pre-edit, I realize this gives us a way to demonize those protecting the weak via an Ad hominem against the moral.

FrustratedMonky2• 1 year ago

Because pressure works on girls?

The rapes?

actionfromafar• 1 year ago

Especially the marital rapes.

alabastervlog• 1 year ago

I can't see the article without buying it (nope) but my first "hm, I wonder..." would be to see if they adjusted for education, income level, and parents' income level.

This might just be saying something like "bullies don't excel in school", given what we already know about socioeconomic demographic trends WRT fertility. With the wrong study design they could even get this result if bullies have lower fertility than some SES sub-group they also tend to be a part of. One would suppose they adjusted for that, but sometimes papers make it out with some really weird oversights.

anon012012• 1 year ago

Color me naive, but isn't it simply more pleasant to have sex with a manly bully than with a "nice guy" pushover? Do we need to explain further? I guess, we can study the extent to which pushovers are being pushovers, but it should not be surprising that they are being pushed over to some extent.

johnny22• 1 year ago

"nice guy" pushover

These two things aren't as related as people think they are. One can be a "nice guy" and still not be a pushover. Being assertive is not the same as being aggressive.

itishappy• 1 year ago

Load bearing "simply" because that doesn't sound simple at all. For one, is the scale really this simple?

   less manly  <-------->  more manly
   pushovers     most men     bullies

That sounds extremely reductive to me. I suspect there's at least one more axis.

sophacles• 1 year ago

Wait... a bully is a person who uses force, threat of force, and/or intimidation to get others to do what they want.

Rape is using force, threat of force, and/or intimidation to get sex - aka rape is bullying for sex.

Why would we discount that fundamental connection for some sort of imagined "pleasantness" - particularly when the entire premise relies on there being a single woman cloned billions of times rather than assuming that women (who are also human) have a wide range of preferences and personality traits (like the men you discuss)?

FrustratedMonky2• 1 year ago

Guess it is the color of naïve then.

As much as I appreciate that everyone has their different tastes. Being mounted by a heaving silver back, with deep grunting and howls, sweaty and lumbering, isn't everyone's cup of tea.

sgentle• 1 year ago

My first thought also. Every reason to think a pattern of bullying would extend to romantic and sexual partners.

quantadev6• 1 year ago

No one needs to "prove" an obvious correlation. Why do people have such a hard time spotting root causes? The root cause here is obviously testosterone levels. There will be a precise correlation if anyone were to bother to check.

freedomben• 1 year ago

I'm guessing you are trolling, but this is a terrible take. Insert meme of Homer Simpson: "Everyone is stupid except for me"[1]

If you're interested on the subject, Robert Sapolsky has studied and written about Testosterone extensively. He has some videos up on Youtube as well as several books.

[1] https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ZzMAAOSwscVlpdzW/s-l1200.jpg

linksnapzz• 1 year ago

Ah, you went and did the ackchyually meme. Way to go.

mp05• 1 year ago

The root cause here is obviously testosterone levels.

This is a patently absurd observation and you didn't even bother to offer an anecdote, as if that would make a difference anyways.

bloomingkales6• 1 year ago

I can try to provide one:

https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/insights/how-common-are...

quantadev6• 1 year ago

My reply to you is same as the other guy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43327023

But I'll add another side-anecdote: High-T men are more sexually driven, making them care more about appearance of women. What is that appearance? Wide hips and large other things too. All of which are a signal of more vital and healthy child bearing. So not only do they want more sex, they choose women which are more fertile to begin with. Not exactly rocket science, to make the logical connection there, and predict the outcome.

djaouen• 1 year ago

Non-bullies don't want their unborn children to experience the same shit that they did. I wasn't bullied, and I think the exact same way and have no kids, btw.

scottLobster• 1 year ago

Counterpoint: I was bullied, have two kids and want more.

I was fed a diet of "just ignore them and they'll go away" (ha), the school promising to do something about it but never more than a slap on the wrist for the bullies, "violence never solves anything", I learned to stay within view of the teachers at recess.

As I got older, I realized the issue was the authority figures in my life never allowed or taught me how to fight, physically or otherwise. The practical solutions to the problem made them so uncomfortable that they avoided even discussing them. So they just let me suffer for years knowing that eventually I'd graduate and the problem would "go away".

Let's just say that my kids won't have that same upbringing, and any bully who tries what I experienced will be in for a shock.

nostrademons• 1 year ago

I was bullied and have 3 kids. Living well is the best revenge.

silisili• 1 year ago

I personally wasn't bullied, but if I had to live in the school district I grew up in and felt I had no way out, I would have never had kids. It was that bad.

Luckily that wasn't the case, so I do, and a change of scenery helps a ton. The way they describe school now is nothing like when I was in public school.

croissants• 1 year ago

I don't think there's a good discussion to be had about this article. The referenced paper is based on two data sources. One is a longitudinal study (great!) of "hundreds" of children in one region (not bad!) and only checks parenthood at the rather young age of 23-24 (uhhh). The other study is based on Mechanical Turk questions. In both the article and the fullest version of the paper I can find online [1], no further details are provided -- not the size of the effects, not the statistical power, nothing.

[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Febs0000374

boh• 1 year ago

Yeah it feels like too much "research" is just click bait at this point (or just a lazy dissertation).

r00fus• 1 year ago

Perhaps it would be more useful to say (specifically for that first more valid study) that bullies have kids earlier.

fxtentacle• 1 year ago

Yeah, checking at such a young age is a serious distortion of the data. The average age at first pregnancy is somewhere around 30. That means they are counting exclusively pregnancies that are untypically early. A more accurate summary of the results would be:

Bullies have more accidental children before reaching the age where the average couple will start to deliberately get pregnant.

TheRealPomax2• 1 year ago

No, a more accurate summary of the results would be: "we generated a tiny bit of data from which no conclusions can be drawn, but it's some extra data that other studies may be able to use in the future maybe".

elzbardico3• 1 year ago

My experience with bullying as the occasional victim is that bullying is mostly a social phenomenon. The bully itself was rarely the problem, he was just the enforcer of conformity for the group. And as such he was really popular.

bloomingkales6• 1 year ago

So if we have to go with your observation, the bully is the leader of a group. Such a person is rarely alone in life, and it would follow with the article. To live with yourself as a bully, you need a complicit group. If the group becomes aware of you, you kind of need a new group to believe you.

A group can be just two people. The bully exists because there is another that allows the group to exist (allows the abusive dynamic to exist). If the group stops existing, the bully stops existing, unless they find another group that allows it.

The bully by themselves (to be truly alone) would feel uncomfortable because their life is centered around extreme group dynamics.

elzbardico3• 1 year ago

The problem in my particular case is that the bully's group was basically every other kid but me and a couple of other nerds.

The other kids kind of didn't like our quirkness, or our poverty, or whatever other thing. Maybe they were fed up with the fact that we were the know it alls and the teacher's pet. It doesn't matter, but the fact is that we were the object of social rejection and the bully as the leader of the pack of kids, was also the executor.

abraxas• 1 year ago

I on the other hand, found no such correlation. The primary bully did not do it to get approval of the crowds but because he was a psychopath.

munificent• 1 year ago

I don't think we should consider "bully" to be synonymous with all violence perpetrated by kids.

Yes, some kids are psycho and violent, but to me, the term "bullying" implies some amount of social hierarchy too.

conductr• 1 year ago

My experience as a father of a son that’s 6 and observer of his friends. I’ve been coaching a group of his buddies since they were 3 and can see a lot of patterns. About 50% is seemingly innate and potentially communication related. A lot of them grow out of it as they learn to communicate better. About 10-20% are non aggressors and never behave this way even when communication was a barrier. They follow instructions and typically have a good moral compass and excel at communication until around 5-6 (others catch up). They share well, play nicely, etc. The others are somewhere inbetween. They likely are somewhat aggressive at times but it’s generally a learned from older siblings behavior or they’re going along with someone else’s behaviors. Then, there are a few little shits who act like they get beat in the home (and probably do, honestly) and these ones are the worst - they see red and will kill/maim your non aggressors without a thought. The non aggressors don’t really understand violence and it confuses them why a “friend” would hit/push/snatch/not share. It’s kid of sad.

My kid is one of the non aggressors and I teach him self defense. I’m slowly revealing my true feelings to him as he’s maturing enough to handle it responsibly but I’d much rather him get expelled for zero tolerance self defensive fighting than be a victim of bullying.

Kids change obviously so we’ll see how they continue to develop and mature out of or into bully behavior, a few of the worsts have already chilled out a lot over the past few years while a few have become worse than they were when I met them. The thing that's weird is when they start distinguishing on things that are completely learned from adults; "poor" vs "rich", cars, vacations, etc are notable but also the stereotypical "cool" vs "nerd" interests and how they organize accordingly into their cliques.

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

Most importantly the school is in the circle of support of the bully because they won't let the victim leave and won't allow the victim to defend themselves.

CaptWillard3• 1 year ago

I reject the premise that people can be sorted into bullies and non-bullies.

It's amusing/frustrating that such a premise is taken seriously.

bandinobaddies2• 1 year ago

I agree, somewhat.

In my high school, there was hierarchy of bullies. Some bullied other bullies. The victim bullies bullied other weaker kids. And some bullies only bullied other bullies, they were considered heros.

taeric• 1 year ago

I'm curious. If you had some that you would categorize as only bullying people that bullied others, would this fit with a justice perception? How does this account for someone "repenting," as it were, of bullying?

Put differently, I think the objection is that "bully" is not an immutable facet of someone. For many, it often isn't even a choice moreso a by product of the general environment they find themselves in. Obviously malicious actors are defined by their intent to bully. But sometimes people will feel bullied from someone's intent to maintain a preexisting order? How does that get categorized?

rexpop3• 1 year ago

some bullies only bullied other bullies, they were considered heros.

Tit-for-Tat is a Nash Optimal survival strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma.

cantrecallmypwd• 1 year ago

It's a spectrum rather than binary categorization.

It's pretty easy to see that certain people are bully-like and certain people are definitely not bully-like.

ithkuil• 1 year ago

There is also the effect of the person that engaged in bullying behaviour after having been bullied on the past and finally having the means to enjoy the feeling of being on the other side.

CaptWillard3• 1 year ago

It's pretty easy to see that certain people are XXXX and certain people are definitely not XXXX.

What a fascinating pattern of thought.

sitkack2• 1 year ago

I have known at least 7 people in my short life whose MAJOR defining personality attribute was bullying. Two of them were old enough to have had kids at the time, and both had 5 or more. One has a PhD and that was and still is way outside of the norm. Just anecdotal, but it is a data point.

rexpop3• 1 year ago

Do you reject the premise that people can be tagged or filtered by any aspects, whatsoever? Bullying behavior, perhaps, needn't be a "core" or "genetic" attribute of a person in order to meaningfully discern whether or not one's engaged in it at significantly higher rates.

What's the distribution, I wonder. Bimodal?

CaptWillard3• 1 year ago

I reject the premise for a number of reasons but many of them come down to how wildly subjective it is.

What constitutes bullying behavior?

Is there any context that would shift or nullify the label?

How often must someone engage in this behavior to have it be a defining characteristic?

What parameters would allow someone to shed the label?

You could add many more without much effort.

hcarvalhoalves• 1 year ago

The plot from the "Idiocracy" movie gets more real everyday.

jmugan• 1 year ago

I was thinking of that scene/meme from Back to the Future, "Hey, wait, I've seen this one!"

skyyler• 1 year ago

Eugenics watered down just enough to be palatable to the average American?

dandanua• 1 year ago

We live in an inexplicable mixture of idiocracy + matrix + terminator. Only aliens are missing. Yet.

aurumque• 1 year ago

Interestingly, the research doesn't indicate whether these additional children are wanted or expected. Similar to substance abuse, I would not be surprised if having more children is in fact an unwanted behavior that helps the genome but not the individual within society.

Retr0id• 1 year ago

Does this imply that parents are more likely to be bullies than non-parents?

ajb• 1 year ago

Shark neonates attack each other in the womb. Hyena cubs kill each other.

I don't know if the evidence of this paper is good, but it's plausible to me that human children attempt to damage each other for evolutionary benefit. It's not a very optimistic viewpoint, because it means the parents of bullies have a strong motivation to prevent the rooting out of this behavior.

nkmnz• 1 year ago

The biggest bullies have 14+ kids.

knowitnone• 1 year ago

Good guys ALWAYS finish last

terminatornet• 1 year ago

now just to look up how many kids one Elon Musk has

GistNoesis• 1 year ago

Unfortunately bullying doesn't stop with adulthood.

Bullies only get more power. Victims are ignored and blamed.

How could they have children when everyone in power rather look the other way than help.

Why would they bring a significant other down with them? Why would they have children if that's what await them?

Study finds bullies have more children than non-bullies

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