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Childhood bullies experience greater sexual success than non-bullies
Volk et al. (2015) tested the hypothesis that a behavioral tendency towards bullying others, far from only representing a maladaptive social behavior, could actually benefit the perpetrators in terms of the sexual opportunities that accrue to them.
Two separate samples consisting of adolescents (N = 334) and university students (N = 144), were examined by the researchers. Participants filled out questionnaires relating to their perpetuation of bullying behaviors, whether or not they were sexually active or dating, and at what age the commenced dating and how many partners they had dated. The participant's popularity with other students, and self-perceived attractiveness and likeability, were also reported.
The researchers found generally positive evidence that bullying was an evolutionarily adaptive behavior, and this was mostly independent of the common variance with attractiveness and age, sex, or popularity.
A further study by Provenzano et al., used cross-sectional samples consisting of older adolescents (N = 144;111 women Mean Age 18.32) and 396 younger adolescents (N = 396;230 girls, Mean age 14.62). Participants reported their level of engagement in bullying behaviors and their level of bullying victimization, as well as answering a question measuring their number of sexual partners, since the age of 12.
It was found that a greater likelihood of being the perpetrator of bullying behavior was correlated with a greater sexual partner count. However, due to the nature of the study it was impossible to tell if the mediating factor in this relationship was the bullying itself, or the
HEXACO personality traits that are associated with a greater likelihood of engaging in this behavior, specifically the trait 'Honesty-Humility', that was found to being generally lower among bullies. This personality trait has also generally been found to be related to the 'dark triad' traits.
Discussion: Bullying likely makes men more directly attractive to women for a variety of reasons. Despite frequent claims that bullies are primarily motivated by low-self esteem and unstable home environments, exclusive bullying victims generally have lower self-esteem vs. those who are both perpetrators and victims of bullying in boys (Pollastri et al., 2009). Thus, bullying may be an effective tactic that lowers one's sexual rivals' social status and boost one's status, likely explaining (at least partially) why bullies are more attractive to women.
Such effects are likely to be weakened or obscured by school anti-bullying programs, potentially making engaging in overt bullying behaviors more costly in terms of potential reputational damage that this behavior may incur. The effectiveness of bullying as a socio-sexual tactic also seems to vary wildly by differences in the initial social status and physical attractiveness of the perpetrators/victims, with higher-status individuals likely being socially rewarded more for bullying and excluding lower status individuals. Rosen & Underwood (2010) found some indirect support for this assertion, as the researchers found that overtly aggressive behavior was associated with lower peer popularity for facially unattractive boys. Thus one would expect bullying to be a much more effective tactic for further increasing the mating success of high status and physically attractive individuals, and being a bully may hamper the mating success of less attractive individuals.
Bullying is also robustly associated with other personality and interpersonal traits that have been demonstrated in other research to be attractive to women (at least in some mating contexts, or perhaps certain types of women) such as low empathy (Enderson & Olweus, 2001) and some of the 'Dark Triad' traits, most notably psychopathy (Baughman et al., 2012,). Baughman et al. discovered that the dark triad trait most strongly associated with bullying perpetration was psychopathy, with there being a moderate correlation (r= .53) between self-reported tendencies to engage in direct bullying behavior in adulthood and psychopathy scores. Thus bullies are likely more sexually successful as a result of the traits that make them prone to bullying in the first place, as well as their greater mating success being mediated directly through their perpetration of bullying. Research has demonstrated that certain women are implicitly more attracted to men higher in certain aspects of psychopathy, as detailed above in this article.
Peer group exclusion through would also be expected to directly reduce one's sexual opportunities, with this being exacerbated by the fact that those with developmental disabilities or poor physical appearance are those particularly prone to experiencing bullying victimization (Sweeting & West, 2010).
The tendency to bully others (and even one's likelihood to be a victim of bullying) is also substantially heritable (Huhtamäki et al., 2020), with genetic factors accounting for up to 62% percent of the variance in the tendency to be a perpetrator of bullying behaviors. Thus if a man's tendency towards engaging in bullying was effective in increasing his reproductive fitness, as the literature into the subject has generally demonstrated, it is certainly possible that women have evolved to be attracted to this trait. The women that reproduce with such men will likely have increased reproductive fitness if their sons inherit their father's tendency to be a bully (Fisher's Sexy Sons Hypothesis).
The general implication of this research is that bullying, at least partially, represents an innate evolutionary adaption. Since this behavior appears highly effective at getting men things they generally desire immensely (women, resources, peer status) efforts to eliminate bullying completely (e.g., 'zero tolerance' policies for bullying) seem quite futile and overly idealistic. Programs that genuinely seek to reduce incidences of bullying will likely need to acknowledge the role of genetics in causing this behavior to begin with and will need to acknowledge (and attempt to counter) the clear evolutionary and social benefits of bullying in order to have any chance of succeeding.
Quotes:
- Taken together, results from the present study offer mixed, but generally positive, support for our hypothesis that bullying is an evolutionarily adaptive behavior.
- The links between bullying and dating/sexual outcomes are (for the most part) not simply a function of common variance with attractiveness and age or sex, although those variables do play a role in dating and sexual behavior. (Volk et al. 2015)
- Bullying research and interventions should be increasingly cognizant of the fact that bullying may indeed be, at least in part, due to evolved mental adaptations that predispose some individuals to harm others to obtain personal goals. These goals may go beyond social dominance and extend specifically toward obtaining sexual partners.
- Taken together, Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness may be associated with having more sexual partners by allowing adolescents more willing and able to use bullying as a strategy to facilitate intrasexual competition and intersexual selection, as opposed to being a mechanism leading directly to engagement with more sexual partners. (Provenzano et al. 2017)
References:
- Volk AA, Dane AV, Zopito AM, Vaillancourt T. 2015. Adolescent Bullying, Dating, and Mating: Testing an Evolutionary Hypothesis. Evolutionary Psychology. [FullText]
- Provenzano DA, Dane AV, Farrell AH, Marini Z, Volk AA. 2017. Do Bullies Have More Sex? The Role of Personality. Evolutionary Psychological Science. [FullText]
