Beauty covers many sins — including bullying
Pretty kids forgiven for being mean: study
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/06/2010 (5924 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
From mean girls to toxic jocks, one of the most enduring — and certainly puzzling — truths about school hierarchies is that the cruellest kids often have the most friends. The explanation, a new study finds, may be written all over the youths’ faces.
Photos of more than 140 kids in Grade 7 were rated by college students for facial attractiveness, while the kids’ social aggression, physical aggression and popularity were assessed by their teachers.
Researchers discovered aggressive children’s status only declined if they were unattractive, with good-looking youths suffering no loss in popularity for hostile behaviour.
Put simply, of the multitude of sins beauty covers, bullying appears to be one of them. Reporting in the Journal of School Psychology, the study authors propose the beauty-is-good stereotype as a possible explanation. That is, aggressive youths may be more leniently assessed by their peers because of society’s demonstrated tendency to assign positive qualities to attractive people, and negative ones to those who don’t fit the beauty mould.
"We know that very attractive children, for example, aren’t spanked by their parents as much as their ugly counterparts," says sociologist Jack Levin, co-director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.
"In school, when kids are the best-looking, it assures that their aggressive behaviour will be ignored; it almost inoculates them against losing their valued position in the group."
It’s about aggressors "not fitting the stereotype of a monster," he said.
Wendy Craig, professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Ontario, says the findings may explain why visible minorities are at a higher risk for bullying, and why more homogeneous nations have lower incidents of victimization. It could be as simple as not physically conforming to popular norms. "It speaks volumes about how we have to look at kids’ behaviours versus their appearance," says Craig, co-founder of the anti-bullying coalition PrevNet. "We need to look at the leaders in our schools and ensure that their way to power is positive."
The new findings dovetail with a forthcoming study in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, which finds something as superficial as good grooming can mislead people into a false sense of security about others’ aggression.
"There’s a tendency to assume — wrongly — that people who take care of their appearance are incapable of violent acts," says study co-author Tyler Stillman, a social psychologist at Florida State University.
Across Canada, bullying is estimated to occur every 7.5 minutes in playgrounds and every 25 minutes in classrooms. The World Health Organization ranks Canada among the worst-third of developed nations for bullying.
Expert Faye Mishna cautions that appearance is just one of many issues in the problem. "If they like the kid doing the bullying more than the kid being victimized, they don’t call it bullying."
— Canwest News Service
