Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbam here. When you consider the great bullies that have graced the movie and television screen, most of them are males. In two eight, the Boston Globe compiled a list of the most intimidating pop culture bullies, and twelve of fifteen spots went to bad boys, including Blue Do from Popeye, Simon Cowell from American Idol, Nelson from The Simpsons,
and Biff Tannin from Back to the Future. Just three women represented their gender on the list, Nellie Olsen from Little House on the Prairie, Regina George from Mean Girls, and Conservative commenter and Coulter. Proportionately, this list seems about right. In real life, bullies are far more likely to be male than female. As a culture, we tend to expect
boys to throw the punches, verbal and physical. American Idol would be a much different experience if Paula was the mean one and Simon was the one who gushed over contestants. For decades, researchers thought that boys were inherently more aggressive than girls, and playground scuffles usually ended with a boy in detention. In the nineteen nineties, though finished, researcher Kai
Borkfist began interviewing adolescent girls about their interactions. What he found is that girls are no less aggressive than boys. They're just aggressive in different ways. Instead of fighting on the playground like the boys, they play subtle mind games that maybe even more damaging than a black eye. For this reason, the Boston Globes inclusion of Regina George makes
perfect sense. Mean Girls was adapted from the book Queen Bees and Wannabes Helping Your Daughters Survive Clicks, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman. Regina George's insistence that her friends wear certain outfits on a given day of the week was based on a real high schooler's rules, and Regina like efforts to manipulate the girls in a bully's orbit go on every day in the halls of high schools. So how do these differences in
bullying develop? Up until the age of four? Kids tend to show aggression in the same way. They'll grab toys out of an their kids hands or push someone who makes them mad. But researchers at Brigham Young University have shown that girls as young as four have learned how to manipulate their peers to exclude kids and become the queen of the sandbox. They'll tell lies and secrets to
get other kids to shun the offender. That means that before kindergarten, girls have started practicing relational aggression, a term that's been used to describe the type of bullying most commonly practiced by adolescent girls. Rather than just bullying weak kids they hardly know as male bullies do, female bullies go after their closest relationships. The female bully is hard to catch an action and difficult to punish. There is,
after all, no bloody knows to serve as proof. Instead, victims carry emotional scars resulting from the bullies habits of spreading rumors, leaking secrets, savage put downs, backstabbing, and social exclusions. Bullies may demean a person's choice of clothing or exclude a friend from the guest list of a popular party in order to gain social status within a group of girls. At the same time, they send the victim into social exile.
Boys also tend to bully others in order to gain social status, So it seems that bullies share certain motivations, need for attention, fear of competition, anger at the way they've been treated at home, and in long term, female bullies suffer as much as male bullies because eventually those closest to them tire of the manipulations. Though there's a lack of research as to whether female bullies turn to drugs and alcohol and end up in jail at the same rates that male bullies do, there are a few
key differences. Though. Male bullies come in all shapes and sizes, from the popular football captain to the social outcast, while female bullies tend to be the popular girls. Another factor that may help them escape punishment, and while some male bullies appear to lash out because they haven't developed empathy for others, girls seem to possess ample amounts of empathy, so much so, in fact, that they know exactly how
to harm a perceived threat. Because girls tend to put so much emphasis on relationships, female bullies know how to get a fellow female to divulgeous secret and then how to reveal it in a way that will maximize the embarrassment for the victim. During middle and high school, it may be important for parents to remind their daughters that true friends are not manipulative, negative, or mean. Such a warning may seem common sense, but a few things makes
sense in adolescence. Today's episode was written by Molly Edmonds and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other social science topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com