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Bullying
and Self-Esteem: Is There A Connection?
by Katy Allen
copyright © 2006 Impact Training, Inc.
What people think
One of the most widely held beliefs is that bullies have low self-esteem.
A great deal of non-academic (and some academic) writing endorses this assumption.
In selfhelp books, children who are bullied are told that bullies do it because
they feel badly about themselves and bullying helps them feel better. In books for
parents whose children are the targets of bullies, the reader is told that bullies
have low self-esteem and that is why they are so nasty. In conversations with educators,
guidance counselors and psychologists, this sentiment is repeated. Teachers believe that
children only behave aggressively if they have low self-esteem. Their thinking goes like
this: If Johnny or Jane is mean, it’s because he/she has been badly treated as
a child. (I.e. He/she is in pain.) He/she doesn’t feel good about him/herself and tries to compensate
for this by hurting others.
The underlying premise is that making someone else feel bad makes
me feel better… or I can enhance my low self-esteem by trashing someone
else’s. This thinking implies a direct cause and effect relationship between low self-esteem
and bullying. It also acts on the assumption that having low-self esteem is bad and
having high-self esteem is good. It subscribes to the belief that people who have
high self-esteem don’t behave aggressively because they like themselves and that those
who suffer from low self-esteem don’t like themselves and act badly because of
it. Much time, money and energy has been spent during the past two decades attempting to
raise self-esteem in children because high self-esteem is thought to be connected to
a wide variety of positive outcomes. If a child feels good about him or herself, the child
will succeed in school, make good behavioral choices, stay out of trouble and ultimately
become a model citizen.
It’s never as simple as it looks
Social scientists have been wrestling with the question of aggression
and selfesteem for a long time, and they can’t agree on an answer that simply
and definitively links the two. For starters, there are different ways that two things
can be linked. One way is cause-effect and the other is correlational. Cause-effect
is tough to establish in the social sciences. It indicates that situation A causes situation
B. Even in the “hard” sciences there are difficulties establishing cause-effect. Everyone
“knows” that smoking causes cancer, yet there are lots of people who smoke a pack a day
and never get cancer. Conclusively proving that low (or high) self-esteem causes a person
to be aggressive, has never been accomplished.
Correlational links are much easier to establish. The smoking analogy
works here, as well. When looking at people who have lung cancer, there
is a high incidence of the same people who also smoke, more so than among people who don’t
smoke. Smoking and lung cancer have a high correlation. So when social
scientists study bullying, aggression and self-esteem, they are usually looking for
co-occurrences of these behaviors and concepts, not a cause-effect relationship among them.
It should be noted here, that there is one link that social scientists
all agree on, and it’s the link between being a victim of bullying and low self-esteem.
No study has ever shown that victims have high self-esteem. What scientists haven’t
established is whether low self-esteem comes before or after the victimization, although
they have suggested that low self-esteem sets one up to be victimized, and they have
also suggested that being victimized lowers one’s self-esteem. It can probably happen
either way, and for some victims both situations occur together. Either way, it’s not
a happy place to be.
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What is self-esteem and how do you measure it?
Although many people associate self-esteem with the “feel good”
movements of the seventies, social scientists have been talking about it for
at least a hundred years. The discussion of self-esteem grew out of work done by people who developed
theories of identity, self-perception, and self-concept. In essence, self-esteem
follows as a result of how one views him or herself. Using the metaphor of a mirror (which
a man named Cooley, first employed), self-concept is the picture of yourself
that you see when you look in the mirror, and self-esteem is how you feel about what you
see in the mirror.
Social scientists often talk about “global” self-esteem,
or an overall feeling about oneself. Global self-esteem is made up of “domains” such
as appearance, intellectual ability, athletic ability, etc. Social scientists have devised a
number of tests that measure both global and domain-specific self-esteem. Sometimes the tests
just measure global self-esteem, but a few tests measure domains, and create scores
for each domain, as well as for global self-esteem. There are difficulties with some of these
tests for a number of reasons. First, it’s easy for the person taking the test to
fudge it. Second, some of the tests mix self-concept and self-esteem. Third, self-esteem is a
complex phenomenon which tends to be treated rather simplistically by the tests. No
science is perfect, social or other, and so the tools we use to measure things are also imperfect.
Is it an either/or proposition?
Self-esteem is a household word that everyone understands and knows
about. It is also, almost always discussed as if it is something that can be
measured, like fuel in a gas tank. But unlike our fuel tank which has a mid-range, people discuss
self-esteem as if it is something a person has lots of, or not much of. Self-esteem tends
to come up when someone is doing well and is thought to have “high” self-esteem,
or when someone is doing poorly, and has “low” self-esteem, when in fact,
we all “have” self-esteem, and we have varying amounts of it, all of the time. What is also often
missing from the conversation is the fact that there are types of self-esteem besides
different amounts of self-esteem.
A psychologist by the name of Chris Mruk has created a diagram that
helps to picture how self-esteem is something that comes in different types
with the potential for different amounts.
The top right and bottom left corners are the areas that correspond
to our traditional notions about self-esteem. The top left and bottom right
corners reflect different types of self-esteem. Both are labeled “defensive”
in that the individual defends one of two situations. Either the person is narcissistic and defends
his unfounded sense of self-esteem which is based on high self-worth and low self-competence,
or the person thinks less of himself and defends his self-esteem which is based
on low self-worth and high self-competence. In the Type I quadrant the individual thinks
he’s better than he is, and in the Type II quadrant, the individual thinks he’s much
worse than he is.
Depending on where a person falls on this two dimensional matrix,
he or she could have low, moderate or high levels of different types of self-esteem.
In fact, most of us would probably end up being labeled as having an average amount
of self-esteem.
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Narcissistic Self-Esteem and Bullying
Roy Baumeister has studied self-esteem and aggression at length
and has come up with a theory about bullying, narcissism and self-esteem. He believes
that violence results when people who have very positive views of themselves find
that view threatened by other people. Not all people with high self-esteem
have this trait; only narcissistic individuals do. In other words, having an inflated
view of oneself, which is a form of high self-esteem, may be a predictor of aggression in certain
types of situations. Other researchers have called this type of self-esteem, high, but
unstable or fragile selfesteem. Although there may be a relationship of sorts between self-esteem
and aggression, Baumeister asserts that it is not a cause-effect relationship,
meaning that neither high nor low self-esteem causes one to be aggressive or
passive.
Returning to the top left corner of Mruk’s matrix, one can
see that bullies might be located in that quadrant. These individuals have moderate amounts
of self-esteem, based on a high sense of worthiness.
One characteristic of some bullies is what is called “hostile
attribution bias.” People who are afflicted with hostile attribution bias are highly
sensitive to insult and at the same time attribute negativity to many benign and neutral behaviors
directed at them. These individuals pretty much fit Olweus’s descriptions of
bullies, and they also have moderate levels of self-esteem. Narcissistic self-esteem, clearly
isn’t the best kind of self-esteem to possess, but it is more beneficial, than no self-esteem
at all, at least from the individual’s perspective.
So, do bullies have high or low self-esteem?
That’s the million dollar question, or at least the one that
social scientists politely, but vehemently argue over. One researcher sought to answer the question
and put the issue to rest. She did this by giving a large number of children
two surveys. One survey attempted to determine where the students fell on the continuum
of roles that students play in the bullying drama, and the other survey was to measure
their self-esteem. She defined the roles as pure bully, pure victim, bully-victim and bystander.
A pure bully was a person who bullied others, but had never been victimized.
The pure victim was a person who been bullied, but had never bullied anyone. A bully-victim
was a person who had bullied and been a bully. A bystander was a person who had not
been involved in bullying as a perpetrator or as a target.
Mona O’Moore found that bystanders generally had high self-esteem.
Pure bullies had average amounts of self-esteem, pure victims had slightly
less self-esteem, and bully-victims had low self-esteem.
So if you see the glass as half full, then pure bullies have sort
of high self-esteem, and if you see the glass as half empty, then pure bullies have sort
of low self-esteem. At this point, it’s a matter of interpretation, and there are
researchers who see it both ways.
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Pure bullies, pure victims and bully-victims – How many?
Dan Olweus did the first large-scale study of bullying. He is generally
recognized as a major authority on the subject, although his research tended
to look at bullying among boys, not girls, and even he acknowledges that this is problematic.
Olweus’s original research (based on the 1983-84 school year)
found that the main players in bullying comprised about 15% of the student population.
• bullies – 6%
• victims – 9%
• bully-victims – 1.6%
• These statistics would identify approximately 83% as bystanders.
More recently, a study in the United States provided data that would
indicate more bullying problems here at this time than were apparent in Norway
twenty years ago. A study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
in April of 2001 (Nansel et al.), which included 15,686 students in grades 6-10.
The results, when compared with Olweus’s, showed a significant increase in the
numbers of bullies and bully-victims, with only a slight change in the percentage of victims:
• bullies – 13%
• victims – 10.6%
• bully-victims – 6.3%
• These statistics would identify approximately 70% as bystanders.
One of the most startling observations has to do with the category
of bullyvictims. While it is alarming that the number of pure bullies has doubled,
the number of bully-victims has increased by five.
Pure bullies, pure victims and bully-victims – What are
they like?
Olweus described two categories of victims in his research, the
passive victim and the provocative victim.
The passive victim is a child who doesn’t fight back, is quiet
and shy, tends to be a loner, plays on the sidelines or all alone, doesn’t ask for
help from adults, is likely to be sensitive, and may be anxious and insecure. (It should be noted
that anxiety and insecurity are high correlates with low self-esteem.) When looking
at the numbers of victims who fall into this subset, passive victims are greater in
number than the other type of victim, the provocative victim.
The provocative victim, also referred to by other researchers as
an “ineffectual bully” or “reactive victim” is characterized by annoying
and irritating behaviors, a low threshold for frustration, and poor social skills with particular
difficulty in reading social situations accurately. Whereas the passive victim tends to be invisible,
this type of victim tends to be front and center in many hostile interactions
at school. These kids have no friends because other kids don’t like them, and in
many cases, teachers don’t like them either. They look and act like bullies because they have
aggressive behavior patterns and are very good at stirring up trouble. Some researchers
refer to these chronically bullied children as “aggressive victims.”
The conclusion of many researchers over time has been that victims
(both types) have low, or at least lower self-esteem than bullies, bystanders
or defenders. There is little disagreement on this point.
Olweus’s work also described the characteristics of bullies.
He noted that they were not only aggressive, but that they liked aggression. They could
be impulsive and wanted to dominate others. They didn’t seem to have much empathy,
therefore, they weren’t upset by a victim’s pain or discomfort. Olweus
also found that bullies had a generally positive view of themselves. Although there seems to be
a common perception that bullies are “anxious and insecure under the surface,”
Olweus found them to be average on both counts. These findings represent bullies as a group,
not individuals. Additionally, Olweus categorized some children as passive bullies,
followers or henchmen because they didn’t initiate bullying but they actively
supported it.
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But what of the “pure” bully and victim categories
and the descriptions above?
It is complicated, but it could sort itself out as follows:
• There is a subset of pure victims who are passive. They don’t
react aggressively to victimization and they don’t initiate aggression.
• There is a subset of pure victims who are aggressive, but
their aggressive responses to bullying are ineffective and defensive. They really
aren’t guilty of bullying.
• There is a subset of victims who are also bullies. They might
have started out as reactive or aggressive victims, but at times when they can get the
upper hand, they bully others. These kids are probably the “bully-victims”
and at least one researcher has hypothesized that they were first victims who then
became “bullyvictims.” These children have the lowest amounts of self-esteem.
• There is a category of pure bullies, who, although greater
in number than “bullyvictims” seldom get noticed because they are good at hiding their bullying.
It is well documented in the research that teachers and adults miss
most of the bullying that is going on in school. Pure bullies may be savvy and
sophisticated enough to evade all but a small amount of detection from adults. In fact,
these students may have pretty decent (even excellent) social skills and may be able to
turn it on and off depending on their immediate needs. If educators are only pulled
into the arena when the aggressor is a bully-victim (because the distress they create is
so obvious), it makes a great deal of sense that educators are of the opinion that bullies
have low self-esteem, because this type of child, in fact, has terrible self-esteem, and
it’s hard to miss. If educators hardly ever come in contact with the 13% who are pure
bullies, they would have had little opportunity to draw conclusions about these students.
What is really sad, is that these kids are in a sense “getting away with murder,”
because they are pretty much off the radar screen.
Empathy, Bullying and Self-Esteem
One of the key characteristics of the pure bully is lack of empathy.
Empathy is considered to be an important characteristic in the inhibition of
aggressive behavior. If a person is empathic, when that person sees someone suffering because
of behavior that he has inflicted upon another, the empathic person will feel the pain
of the other and will stop the behavior.
Victims have not been described as lacking in empathy, so it can
be concluded that victims by and large are probably empathic. In fact, they have
been described as being sensitive or oversensitive, which may make them acutely aware
of and disturbed by others’ suffering. One hypothesis is that provocative victims,
who are already familiar with and comfortable with aggressive behavior patterns become bullies
when they see others getting away with bullying. (They develop a sense of entitlement.)
If a child is frequently bullied and only knows how to respond with aggression
(as opposed to avoidance or being assertive), then the child doesn’t have
to learn any new behaviors to become a bully. He (or she) has all those behaviors well rehearsed.
If provocative victims turn into bullies, their downward spiral
regarding selfesteem might be explained by their possession of empathy. One reason that
pure bullies have moderate amounts of self esteem is probably due to the fact
that when they hurt others, they don’t feel any pain. With a victim (turned perpetrator)
who does feel the pain he or she inflicts on another person, the effect of disregarding
the feelings of empathy could actually serve to erode what little self-esteem the
victim has. In other words, bully-victims know that what they are doing is wrong when
they bully others (they probably experience some shame), and when they continue bullying
it diminishes what self-esteem they might actually possess.
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Bullying and Aggression
One point of clarification should be made. Not all aggression is
bullying, but all bullying is aggression. A dictionary definition of aggression goes
something like “intending to hurt someone who doesn’t want to be hurt.”
Bullying is always aggressive because the relationship between the perpetrator and the target
is imbalanced and even if a victim seems to be willing (as some researchers have observed),
it is not mutual because of the inequality between the two. Bullying aggression covers
all kinds of negative behaviors including physical, verbal, visual, and social.
All bullying is a form of emotional aggression or abuse. It usually is a repeated activity
and it is never an accident.
However, not all aggressive acts can be framed as bullying. Normal
or peer conflict is one case in point. This involves situations where two
equally functioning individuals have a disagreement or conflict of interests and because
of poor anger management skills and conflict resolution skills, they lose control
of themselves and engage in behavior that is clearly aggressive (name calling, shouting,
hitting, kicking, etc.) Most instances like this result in remorse, a sentiment missing
from bullying interactions, because pure bullies don’t seem to be empathic.
Another dimension of the aggression picture is the distinction between
proactive and reactive aggression. Proactive aggression is “pre-meditated,”
whereas reactive aggression is in response to a particular hurt or injury. Pure bullies
are probably masters at proactive aggression. (Students report that they think bullies
often bully because they are bored and find it entertaining, which sounds like enough motivation
for a pure bully.) Bully-victims are more likely to be reactive in their bullying behaviors.
Narcissistic bullies might be a little of both in that they strike before any
true damage takes place, but the difference between narcissistic bullies and bully-victims is
that bully-victims are responding to real injuries (when they are the victim), whereas
narcissistic bullies are reacting to imagined affronts or honest evaluations.
So where does that leave us?
One thing is clear, there is a lot of confusion when it comes to
self-esteem and bullying. We can probably safely agree that:
• Some bullies have at least average self-esteem. They are
comfortable with who they are and how they act, at least in some capacity. They shouldn’t
be remediated with a self-esteem enhancement program. They need firm
limits on how they behave, particularly around students who are likely to
be victimized.
• Some students, particularly pure victims and bully-victims
suffer from low selfesteem and have serious psychosocial problems as a result. They need to
be sorted out from the pure bullies and from each other.
• Pure victims need help learning how to be assertive in pro-social
ways. They need to develop friendship skills.
• Bully-victims are the toughest group to work with. First,
they need to know that using aggression is not acceptable. Second, they need to be protected
from pure bullies and other bully-victims. Third, they need to learn how to
assert themselves in pro-social ways. Fourth, they need to learn friendship skills.
And lastly, it would be hoped that as they find themselves in safer situations
and are taught how to insert themselves into the social world of their peers in acceptable
ways, their self-esteem will improve. These children need counseling to do this.
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A final word about self-esteem
Self-esteem is far more complex than the average person realizes,
and hence, sizing someone up based on a brief conversation and then making
a pronouncement about the person’s self-esteem is kind of like practicing medicine
without a license. Even the tests that psychologists use to assess self-esteem are lacking in
ways that would help us to understand the relationship between self-esteem and aggression.
If anything, when we are working with children who have problems around bullying, we
shouldn’t assume that self-esteem is the cause of a behavior, because no one has established
that self-esteem causes behavior, particularly aggressive behavior. It might be helpful
to know something about the child’s self-esteem when we are considering how to
help the child learn new behaviors, but it’s pointless to attribute a certain role in
the bullying drama to a particular level of self-esteem.
A problem that needs to be fixed
In hindsight, it almost seems irrelevant to argue about bullies
and whether they have high or low self-esteem, when what is well documented is that
bullying causes a lot of suffering for too many kids. We know that bullying erodes self-esteem,
and if we subscribe to the common belief that self-esteem is something that
we should have in average or high amounts, then we should work towards solving this
problem. We also know that children who bully have their own set of difficulties
that many carry with them through life. Helping these children learn better ways of navigating
their social relationships seems to be in order also.
The social world of children can be excruciatingly painful, and
bullying is one of the landmines that too many children step on. Regardless of how
self-esteem fits into the picture, it’s time to fix things up.
See References
at bottom.
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