Psychology: Social Bullying: motivation, part0

Self-tutoring about social bullying: the tutor begins about motivation.

Social bullying is probably more common than physical nowadays. It’s always been very hard to enforce against, and is ugly to experience. Yet, what motivates it?

A lot of people mention jealousy as a motive for social bullying. I agree with that, but perhaps with more specification:

A lot of people seem to worry about line-jumpers: people who aren’t “qualified,” or didn’t “pay their dues,” getting the same benefits/opportunities as others they feel did. Line-jumpers, they reason, have to be stopped somehow. Hence, social bullying begins.

You see this done by popular/successful people, perhaps when a new person will join a school, workplace, or sports team. The others, who’ve been there longer, feel they’ve paid their dues. In walks this new person, perhaps even better at whatever the “in-crowd” feels distinguishes its members.

On a sports team, if a new, but more skillful player joins, the original members of the team may feel this person has jumped the line: Why do they suddenly get to be part of a team that’s taken months, or years, to form? (Interestingly, skill may not acquit the person.)

The team members are jealous, yes, but perhaps what really bothers them is that they feel they’ve invested a lot of effort in the team, so have earned their right to be part of it. This new person – what have they done for the team? (That they very likely were paying their dues on some other team may seem not to count.)

Sports teams present the most direct example, but other situations might be even more familiar. One example is when a really attractive person arrives at a new school (perhaps more glamorous than the “most attractive” person already there); another is a workplace where new, exceptional talent is hired, but the other workers won’t accept them.

Social bullying seems more to be a disease of “successful” people (already popular, already on the team, already on their desired career trajectory). What makes those people successful is just as likely their ability to function in a given system, then use it for their own goals. Such people can just as deftly use said system to bully people they see as competition. It seems any system that emphasizes people skills will invite social bullies and be vulnerable to exploitation by them.

Social bullying is something I’ve been witnessing and hearing about for decades. Numerous people in middle and high school would observe that the students who spoke out against it were often frequent perpetrators of it.