Is Adolescent Bullying an Evolutionary Adaptation?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bullying appears to be ubiquitous across cultures, involving hundreds of millions of adolescents worldwide, and has potentially serious negative consequences for its participants (particularly victims). We challenge the traditionally held belief that bullying results from maladaptive development by reviewing evidence that bullying may be, in part, an evolved, facultative, adaptive strategy that offers some benefits to its practitioners. In support of this view, we draw from research that suggests bullying serves to promote adolescent bullies' evolutionarily-relevant somatic, sexual, and dominance goals, has a genetic basis, and is widespread among nonhuman animals. We identify and explain differences in the bullying behavior of the two sexes, as well as when and why bullying is adaptive and when it may not be. We offer commentary on both the failures and successes of current anti-bullying interventions from an evolutionary perspective and suggest future directions for both research and anti-bullying interventions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".