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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbam here. When you consider the great bullies that

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Speaker 1: have graced the movie and television screen, most of them

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Speaker 1: are males. In two eight, the Boston Globe compiled a

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Speaker 1: list of the most intimidating pop culture bullies, and twelve

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Speaker 1: of fifteen spots went to bad boys, including Blue Do

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Speaker 1: from Popeye, Simon Cowell from American Idol, Nelson from The Simpsons,

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Speaker 1: and Biff Tannin from Back to the Future. Just three

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Speaker 1: women represented their gender on the list, Nellie Olsen from

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Speaker 1: Little House on the Prairie, Regina George from Mean Girls,

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Speaker 1: and Conservative commenter and Coulter. Proportionately, this list seems about right.

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Speaker 1: In real life, bullies are far more likely to be

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Speaker 1: male than female. As a culture, we tend to expect

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Speaker 1: boys to throw the punches, verbal and physical. American Idol

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Speaker 1: would be a much different experience if Paula was the

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Speaker 1: mean one and Simon was the one who gushed over contestants.

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Speaker 1: For decades, researchers thought that boys were inherently more aggressive

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Speaker 1: than girls, and playground scuffles usually ended with a boy

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Speaker 1: in detention. In the nineteen nineties, though finished, researcher Kai

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Speaker 1: Borkfist began interviewing adolescent girls about their interactions. What he

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Speaker 1: found is that girls are no less aggressive than boys.

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Speaker 1: They're just aggressive in different ways. Instead of fighting on

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Speaker 1: the playground like the boys, they play subtle mind games

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Speaker 1: that maybe even more damaging than a black eye. For

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Speaker 1: this reason, the Boston Globes inclusion of Regina George makes

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Speaker 1: perfect sense. Mean Girls was adapted from the book Queen

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Speaker 1: Bees and Wannabes Helping Your Daughters Survive Clicks, Gossip, Boyfriends,

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Speaker 1: and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman. Regina George's

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Speaker 1: insistence that her friends wear certain outfits on a given

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Speaker 1: day of the week was based on a real high

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Speaker 1: schooler's rules, and Regina like efforts to manipulate the girls

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Speaker 1: in a bully's orbit go on every day in the

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Speaker 1: halls of high schools. So how do these differences in

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Speaker 1: bullying develop? Up until the age of four? Kids tend

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Speaker 1: to show aggression in the same way. They'll grab toys

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Speaker 1: out of an their kids hands or push someone who

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Speaker 1: makes them mad. But researchers at Brigham Young University have

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Speaker 1: shown that girls as young as four have learned how

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Speaker 1: to manipulate their peers to exclude kids and become the

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Speaker 1: queen of the sandbox. They'll tell lies and secrets to

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Speaker 1: get other kids to shun the offender. That means that

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Speaker 1: before kindergarten, girls have started practicing relational aggression, a term

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Speaker 1: that's been used to describe the type of bullying most

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Speaker 1: commonly practiced by adolescent girls. Rather than just bullying weak

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Speaker 1: kids they hardly know as male bullies do, female bullies

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Speaker 1: go after their closest relationships. The female bully is hard

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Speaker 1: to catch an action and difficult to punish. There is,

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Speaker 1: after all, no bloody knows to serve as proof. Instead,

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Speaker 1: victims carry emotional scars resulting from the bullies habits of

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Speaker 1: spreading rumors, leaking secrets, savage put downs, backstabbing, and social exclusions.

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Speaker 1: Bullies may demean a person's choice of clothing or exclude

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Speaker 1: a friend from the guest list of a popular party

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Speaker 1: in order to gain social status within a group of girls.

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Speaker 1: At the same time, they send the victim into social exile.

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Speaker 1: Boys also tend to bully others in order to gain

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Speaker 1: social status, So it seems that bullies share certain motivations,

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Speaker 1: need for attention, fear of competition, anger at the way

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Speaker 1: they've been treated at home, and in long term, female

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Speaker 1: bullies suffer as much as male bullies because eventually those

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Speaker 1: closest to them tire of the manipulations. Though there's a

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Speaker 1: lack of research as to whether female bullies turn to

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Speaker 1: drugs and alcohol and end up in jail at the

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Speaker 1: same rates that male bullies do, there are a few

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Speaker 1: key differences. Though. Male bullies come in all shapes and sizes,

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Speaker 1: from the popular football captain to the social outcast, while

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Speaker 1: female bullies tend to be the popular girls. Another factor

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Speaker 1: that may help them escape punishment, and while some male

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Speaker 1: bullies appear to lash out because they haven't developed empathy

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Speaker 1: for others, girls seem to possess ample amounts of empathy,

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Speaker 1: so much so, in fact, that they know exactly how

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Speaker 1: to harm a perceived threat. Because girls tend to put

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Speaker 1: so much emphasis on relationships, female bullies know how to

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Speaker 1: get a fellow female to divulgeous secret and then how

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Speaker 1: to reveal it in a way that will maximize the

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Speaker 1: embarrassment for the victim. During middle and high school, it

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Speaker 1: may be important for parents to remind their daughters that

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Speaker 1: true friends are not manipulative, negative, or mean. Such a

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Speaker 1: warning may seem common sense, but a few things makes

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Speaker 1: sense in adolescence. Today's episode was written by Molly Edmonds

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Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and

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Speaker 1: lots of other social science topics, visit our home planet,

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Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot com