What’s the best modern theory of what turns people into bullies? Is there any truth to the movie trope that it’s a sort of punch-down cascade due to being abused at home? That seems very unconvincing to me. It feels like at best one kind of etiology that accounts for a fraction.
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I’ve known bullies with mild-mannered weak parents and no visible bigger-bully in their environment. The more plausible general mechanism seems to me to be that people develop an addiction to intimidation/brute force as an easy way to get what they want.
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Intriguing curse-of-resources analogical theory. Strikes me as right. Fits the cases I am thinking of. twitter.com/alexqgb/status
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Hmm. Nice triangle. My main impulse is savior though I can almost never think of a way to productively intervene.
I’ve never knowingly been the bully, though I’ve been called out on occasion for being pushy. Rarely the victim outside of a couple of minor episodes as a kid. twitter.com/alexqgb/status
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TL;DR it’s unsurprisingly multifactorial (home situation, previous abuse, popularity among other kids, enjoyment of school, etc). The “bully to victim” paradigm is there but those kids aren’t anywhere near the majority (though they do seem to have by far the worst outcomes)

