Study finds bullies have more children than non-bullies
13 comments
·March 10, 2025firefax
Makes sense. I've seen folks justify being needlessly adversarial because their crotchspawn obviously deserve the best, so anyone who stands in the way of a promotion or publication is a threat and therefor they can reframe bullying as being a breadwinner.
toomuchtodo
TheRealPomax
That's not the paper, that's just the abstract, which doesn't actually talk about sample size. It does point out an important limitation of the research: it looks at number of children specifically at 23 and 24 years old, rather than the full range of ages at which people have children in Canada. Which is the other limitation: it only looked at Canada, and the abstract doesn't say which parts of Canada, so there's so much information missing that it's impossible to tell what this study actually found.
toomuchtodo
Edited.
djaouen
Non-bullies don't want their unborn children to experience the same shit that they did. I wasn't bullied, and I think the exact same way and have no kids, btw.
FrustratedMonky
Because pressure works on girls?
The rapes?
alabastervlog
I can't see the article without buying it (nope) but my first "hm, I wonder..." would be to see if they adjusted for education, income level, and parents' income level.
This might just be saying something like "bullies don't excel in school", given what we already know about socioeconomic demographic trends WRT fertility. With the wrong study design they could even get this result if bullies have lower fertility than some SES sub-group they also tend to be a part of. One would suppose they adjusted for that, but sometimes papers make it out with some really weird oversights.
actionfromafar
Especially the marital rapes.
quantadev
No one needs to "prove" an obvious correlation. Why do people have such a hard time spotting root causes? The root cause here is obviously testosterone levels. There will be a precise correlation if anyone were to bother to check.
freedomben
I'm guessing you are trolling, but this is a terrible take. Insert meme of Homer Simpson: "Everyone is stupid except for me"[1]
[1]: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ZzMAAOSwscVlpdzW/s-l1200.jpg
Presumably individual aggression versus fertility is an inverted U shaped curve in which fertility rises with aggression to an inflection point and then declines. That point is probably higher than we would like for the achievement of other social goals.
It may be that at the level of civilizations the aggression versus fertility curve is different than for individuals: Memes may propagate more efficiently with more or less aggression than genes do. But that's not very testable without experiments on whole cultures.
If cultural values about aggression reduce fertility to below replacement they become culturally suicidal. For both aggression and pacifism the dose is the poison. Calibrating the dose is an eternal political and biological battle.