November 10, 2008
Remember that sociopath in elementary school — the overgrown mutant who would enjoy hanging you and the rest of your pre-pubescent buddies up by your underwear on the nearest fencepost or tossing you into a suitable hedge?
Well, according to a recent study making the news, that future Esso gas jockey was not behaving in this way simply to scar your memories of childhood or to encourage you to take Jiu-Jitsu lessons; he did these things because they gave him pleasure.
Presumably not wanting to pollute their results with an over-large sample, scientists rounded up eight teens between 16-18 years old with a history of being the school asshole and eight others with no such tendencies — those recovering from the wedgies doled out by the first group as it were.
They hooked all of them up to some neural-imaging equipment and, Clockwork Orange-style, showed them a series of violent images, some of them accidental, like a hammer dropping on a toe, and some of them deliberately violent, like someone slamming the lid down on a piano player’s fingers. The bullies’ brains lit up like a pinball machine whenever they saw someone in pain. (Admittedly, the thought of a piano lid being slammed down on the fingers of some wannabe Mozart tickling the ivories did give at least one of us a quiet giggle). The control group showed no such reaction.
That pain and pleasure are often connected comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever visited a fetish club, read a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or enjoyed the rush that accompanies rapping somebody on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. That bullies enjoy inflicting pain comes as no surprise to anyone who remembers the belly laughs that would echo throughout the school yard mid-recess torture session.
Still though, this study, with its test group of eight, has received major play on the Net, and the suggestion has been made that it could be used to help development better ways of dealing with bullying. It might just do that, but cages — placed at the backs of classrooms and with long poking sticks available for the use of other students — are a far cheaper and more permanent solution.
November 10th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I wonder if this is why the professionals have dictated so many stupid, useless counter-bullying techniques. Most teachers know better but the “educators” above them keep forcing them to try nonsense.
The only technique that I’ve ever had any success with is … let’s call it “empathy enforcement”. We must have the bully experience torment of the type and magnitude that he causes. It doesn’t seem civil, but maybe the geniuses behind this study can come up with a more civil way to ingrain empathy.