What Motivates a Bully?

As someone who was bullied a great deal in school, I came to have a distinct lack of empathy for the perpetrators of this behavior. Anyone who wasn’t considered normal either because they had a disability, were too short, too smart, too anything, came to have that same lack of sympathy. However, new research made me pause and wonder: “Might there be another reason bullies do the things they do?”

According to the study, bullies’ brains may be wired to feel pleasure when they see other people in pain.

Normally, when children see other people in pain, the same areas of the brain light up as when they themselves experience pain, signaling their empathy.  Researchers believed that bullies would show no response when others were in pain, that in fact, it was that emotional coldness that allowed them to do things like stealing milk money without remorse. The surprising thing that this study unearthed was that the areas which become active either when you are experiencing or watching someone experience pain light up even more strongly than in the brains on non-bullies. The problem is that in bullies, this area of the brain may be warped by activities in regions of the brain devoted to reward and pleasure.

There was another surprising fact unearthed in the study. Bullies may be missing a key component of the brain that allows them to self-regulate emotions, and by extension, actions.  This means that there may be a reason for the uncontrollable burst of anger a bully feels when a kid bumps them in the lunch line; an anger that is far beyond the scope of what the situation calls for.

So, is there a solution for the bullies and the bullied? According to David Lahey, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and the coauthor of the study, “We will have to develop therapies to either treat or compensate for this lack of self-regulation that we think is there and the fact that it may be positively reinforcing every time they hurt somebody.”

This does not offer an excuse for bullies, but it may offer an explanation. If we have an explanation, as Dr. Lahey said, it may be possible to find a way to treat or compensate for these behaviors.  And really, that would be the best solution for all.  We tend to focus our sympathy on those being bullied, and tag the bullies as the problem. Unfortunately, what we don’t seem to realize is that the behavior of the bullies makes them as much social outcasts as those they are bullying.  If this study is viable, and it will take more studies done under similar conditions before we know that for sure, we may finally be on the road to stopping the problem at its source, effectively.