Modern Wisdom
#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health
Thu, 13 Feb 2025
Dr Tracy Vaillancourt is a professor at the University of Ottawa, a researcher and an author with a focus on the link between violence and mental health. A common feature of every generation’s schooling experience is the presence of bullying. Top psychologists over the years have wrestled with the issue and developed intervention after intervention, and yet it still persists. How can society eradicate bullying once and for all? Expect to learn why people bully and the different types of bullies, the common characteristics of victims of bullying, how bullies view their victims, why it happens so much in school particularly, how to overcome bullying as an adult and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 20% off the cleanest bone broth on the market at https://www.kettleandfire.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why did Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt start studying bullying?
How did you get interested in studying bullying?
I get asked that question all the time. People want to think that it was because either I was a bully or I was bullied. But the truth of the matter was I was just really interested in popularity and popularity led me to bullying because the kids at my high school were the ones who bullied the most. I went ahead and looked at that for my dissertation and found that
They were four times more likely to bully others than those who didn't have power, who were not popular. And then it just kind of snowballed from there.
Okay. So how much work is being done in the world of evidence-based bullying intervention, stuff like that?
So the past 25 years, we've studied this in earnest. It's been primarily correlational. I mean, it's going to be hard to do experiments on bullying when you think about it. I mean, it's just not going to work, really. But we've looked at it primarily from a correlational point of view. The first thing was just to sort of document the prevalence and the like.
And then after that, then people looked at... individual factors that were associated with it. Dan Ove has kind of led the charge. He's a Swede who was living in Norway at the time, conducted the largest study at the time, largest longitudinal study, but also intervention study, and then found a 50% reduction, but easy to do in Norway when you have everybody involved. It's a small country.
So anyhow, so he looked at what happens to kids who bully, as they move forward. So identified boys in grade nine found that a large percentage of them were criminally, were involved in the criminal justice system by the time they were age 24. So that was kind of like the first, I think,
well-conducted study in this area that was beyond just descriptives, although it is still descriptive to some extent. And then some people then focused on the broader context that it happens in. So not just at the individual level, but what do school-related factors look like? Kids are nested within schools, they're nested within their families. How do those interrelate?
And then my focus was always on the neurobiology of bullying. I was really interested in documenting how it hurt people, not just at that level where it could be easily dismissed, where people just say, ah, you know, you just need to be more resilient, suck it up. Yeah, she's sad, but she'll get over it.
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Chapter 2: What are the types and motivations of bullies?
Here is a story of what your effort could have as a positive or a negative impact. How effective is it to say to bullies, look at all of the downstream implications of doing this. Is that not an option?
So there's a few programs that are designed to increase moral engagement. And so there are interventions, bullying interventions, that specifically target moral disengagement and moral engagement. And they're not... Nothing is very efficacious, but they're doing something. There's a bit of a reduction. So I think that that should be applauded and replicated.
The issue is that schools invest in this when they have a bullying problem. But for the most part, they're not consistent in their investment. So whatever we're going to do, we're going to have to do it early and then maintain it over time. Social emotional learning is really efficacious at just reducing aggression, which is part of bullying.
But there's a huge anti-social emotional learning movement in the United States. I don't know if you know about that.
Nope.
You know, because you can't socialize kids in schools. That's the purview of the parents. Like, how dare you even try, you know, get that woke BS out of our schools, that sort of thing. And yet the evidence is pretty strong when it comes to social emotional learning. So there's a bit of a backlash against it. But I guess it depends what direction sustaining our efforts.
Yeah, it depends what direction the social and emotional learning is going toward, whether it's going toward that there's no genders or the biological sexes.
Well, that's what they think it is, but it's not.
So, you know, I saw this last year. There was a pivot in UK schools away from criticizing toxic masculinity and toward promoting positive masculinity. Now, the campaigns were exactly the same. It was very much derogating lots of typical behavior that you would see from boys and young men and done in the classic frame that everybody that isn't insane hates.
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