Why are bullies so popular? Neuroscience can explain it

The brain’s use of empathy against cruelty is counterintuitive. In fact, we usually think of empathic people as people who are completely incapable of bullying others. Empathy is our innate ability to recognize what others are thinking, feeling, and intending. Dr. Helen Rees explains that humans are born with empathy. Research shows that infants imitate facial expressions from an early age to imitate those who care for them.

Researchers observed that when conspecifics recognize the suffering and pain of other animals, they stop their aggressive behavior in response. In a 1964 study, primatologist Jules Masserman and colleagues showed that rhesus macaques would not pull on a chain to get food if they knew it would result in electrocuting another monkey.they chose do not have If you have caused suffering to another person, eat that food. That’s empathy at work.

Empathy is our ability to walk in another person’s shoes, see the world from their perspective, and feel their pain. Our empathy is critical to our social interactions and our chances of safety and survival through living in communities. Bullying is the opposite. cause Pain; it divides people. It shames and sends a message to the target that they don’t belong. Bullying does not acknowledge our essential human bonds. Rather, it is dehumanizing.

Bullies are often well-liked within their communities

That’s why it’s perplexing that people who bully and abuse people are well-liked in their communities. They are often popular, charismatic, and sometimes even have a cult following. Even children who bully seem to turn their cruelty off and on until only the victim is targeted and other children are treated kindly. Even children who bully can hide their harmful behavior in the presence of adults.

It becomes even more sophisticated when there is an adult who is bullying or abusive. As has been widely documented, they are adept at grooming superiors in the workplace, masquerading as pillars of the community in social circles and virtue-signaling to avoid being identified as abusers. Masu. This dual personality – one exuding admirable kindness, the other by default abusive toward the victim – often serves as an effective means of concealment, even from the law.

Figures featured in recent media scandals, such as Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, and Bill Cosby, are classic examples of abusive individuals who are well-established and honored in their communities. Their abuse has continued for decades, systematically ignored, as if it were impossible that such respected, powerful, and honorable people could be so harmful to their targets. Masu. One moment that person is kind and considerate, and the next moment they are humiliating someone. How can this person become a “bullying sympathizer”? How can a person be empathetic and yet abusive?

Empathy is not one brain system, but two brain systems

A frightening answer to the bully-empath divide is provided in the work and research of neuroscientist Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen. He and his colleagues refer to people who harm others as “zero negatives” on the empathy spectrum. Zero negative people may include people who are borderline, narcissistic, or diagnosed as psychopathic. What these people have in common from a neuroscience perspective is that their empathic circuits are significantly underactivated. If you look at his 10 interactive areas of the empathic circuit, their brains operate in unusual ways. When researchers looked at her two empathic systems separately in the circuit, they found that a person who harms another has only one empathetic system intact, and one that is eroded. Masu.

Baron-Cohen’s research provides an answer to the confusing fact that bullies and abusers also appear to have empathy. Psychopaths have “unimpaired cognitive empathy but reduced emotional empathy.” In other words, psychopaths who lie, abuse, mistreat, and hurt others in various ways, and don’t care about it at all, have brains with eroded emotional empathy. Our emotional empathy is feel Other people’s pain. We can see, hear, and experience their pain. If you saw someone cut their hand, you would probably react physically, wincing and wincing.

psychopaths don’t do that feel Other people’s pain. They lack emotional empathy. But they can still gain cognitive empathy. This gives you the advantage of being able to read other people’s writing. With a calm and calculating demeanor, you can very skillfully consider what someone is thinking, how they are feeling, and what their intentions are. Psychopaths have no emotional responses such as remorse, guilt, or distress and use cognitive insight to create followers and destroy their targets.

When bullies and abusers are reported or confronted about the harm they are causing, they deny it and turn to their allies (those who treat them kindly and offer them benefits). We call on them to vouch for us. Bullies and abusers know they are causing harm and have an incentive to cover it up.

Textbook example of zero negative empathy

A classic example of this is Lucy Levy, a British nurse who doctors reported to be suspected of being involved in too many infant deaths. She accused them of bullying her. Her doctors had to issue an apology, which allowed her to continue her activities as a serial infant killer. She was eventually prosecuted and convicted. While Ms. Levy was killing her baby, she was comforting her devastated parents, who were grateful for her care and her kindness.

Nurse Levy has cognitive empathy. She had no hesitation in killing seven babies and tried to kill six more, but she knew how to manipulate doctors and administrators, and most tragically, she knew how to manipulate her grieving family. He knew how to read his parents’ feelings. If Levy’s brain were studied by Baron Cohen and his team of neuroscientists, it would show abnormal and eroded emotional empathy.

At the end of his book, Baron-Cohen argues: evil science He says empathy is “the most precious resource in our world” and expresses deep concern that it is not the basis of education. He wants empathy to be prioritized in parenting, policing and especially politics. Low empathy is complex, but the environment plays a huge role. Abuse begets abuse. Children who have been ignored, hurt, and verbally belittled are much more likely to develop atypical emotional empathy, which can lead to bullying and abusive behavior. When we learn how important our two empathic systems (emotional and cognitive) are to every individual, community, and world, we know how much we need to invest in them.

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