A bully’s search for meaning

Middle school is a tough hurdle of lots of kids, but for far too many the academic rigor of algebra and world history is the least of it. Far more fearsome are the ridicule and verbal taunts and outright violence found in the corridors and schoolyards. Bullying is a serious problem worldwide, and one that grows worse as kids enter the threatening world of adolescence. Educators and mental health experts have tried mightily over the years to solve the problem of aggressive teenagers, yet the threat persists.

Many psychologists believe that the root problem is the school bully’s fragile self-esteem, and many interventions now aim to reduce violence by boosting self-image. But an international team of psychologists is now challenging that wisdom. They argue that bullies do not suffer from low self-esteem; indeed, that their aggression results from their grandiose, inflated and narcissistic self-assessments. That means there is no scientific justification for the trendy esteem-boosting interventions.

Psychologist Sander Thomaes of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues believe that bullying is the product of “normal narcissism.” That is, bullies may not have a diagnosable personality disorder, but they do display a paradoxical mix of bloated self-image and extreme emotional vulnerability. As a result of this toxic combo, narcissists engage in whatever strategies will protect their ego, including unprovoked aggression.

At least that’s the theory. And if true, Thomaes and colleagues speculate, then a different kind of intervention just might work with schoolyard bullies: not ego boosting but ego buttressing. That may sound like semantic hair-splitting, but it’s not. Because bullies’ self-esteem is not low to begin with, they don’t need ego boosting. What they need is an affirmation of their overall sense of self—not just a giant ego but a multi-faceted self with various attributes and values and interests. The psychologists decided to test this idea in a real world study.

They recruited a large sample of sixth-and seventh-graders, both boys and girls, and screened them for narcissism and self-esteem. They also had their classmates rate each of them for aggression. Then the researchers randomly assigned the teenagers to two groups. One group wrote a short essay on two or three of their core values and why they were important to them; these values might be religious values, or athletic talent or sense of humor, that kind of thing. The others also wrote a short essay on values, but specifically on values they did not hold dear.

The idea was that the kids who wrote about important aspects of themselves would emerge with a greater sense of being complete, complex people—and that this self-concept would diminish their need to act out. And that’s what the psychologists found. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, when they again measured aggression some time later, those with a greater sense of wholeness were indeed less aggressive toward their classmates.

This is the first evidence that “buttressing” self-esteem can reduce narcissistic violence. The effect only lasted a week, which makes essay writing an unlikely form of intervention for the long-term problem of bullying. Plus it reduced but did not entirely eliminate aggression. But even so, it does undermine the case for the ego “boosting” interventions now in vogue.