What is the psychology behind bullying? (adult-bullying too)
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By forcing people to feel a certain thing, a person feels power and signals that they are powerful.
A person who’s highly motivated to feel powerful and signal being powerful can do so by opposing someone else and winning.
Bullying is a way to force competition, because regardless of people’s differences in goals, almost everyone has the goal of avoiding pain. Hence pain is a solid bet as to a goal you can threaten and a person will oppose you.
That’s one angle of it at least. Feel powerful and signal being powerful.
There are probably others.
However for bullying to continue it needs to avoid becoming a war. That means it’s in the bully’s best interests to stop the target from fighting.
Hence a bully will use demoralizing tactics such as escalating in response to retaliation, attempting to shift a state of war back to a state of abuse.
And finally, that word abuse is important. The simplest way to define bullying is it’s a form of abusive relationship that happens in public. Most abuse is secret but bullying can happen out in the open (if the local culture supports it).
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