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Nerds Still More Likely To Get Bullied
trashbird1240 writes "Reports on a recent meta-analysis of bullies and victims found that bullies and victims have similar personality traits, but that bullies tend to do poorly in school, as opposed to those who get bullied. Both bullies and victims are poor social problem solvers, but they resort to different tactics to handle their social ineptitude. To me this represents a huge leap forward in understanding nerd psychology."
That makes me feel so much better about being beaten up.
It's pheromones!
Still mad that the jock who beat you up banged the girl who you thought was your girlfriend because you popped her bra strap?
I could have told you this 25 years ago.
So basically, if you can't develop social skills you do what every other animal does: Become a predator. And if you fail at that, you're dinner.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You type something in, and I will smack you down, nerd!
You means those with little physical prowess and poorly developed social skills are often victims to those with pent-up anger and limited intellects? My god. This is quite a revelation?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Work out. A lot. Throughout middle school and high school, I was a huge geek (and dressed like one)...but I was also huge. In high school, at only 5'6", I weighed around 200 pounds, and could lift what the varsity football team lifted in the weightroom (and, in some cases, even more.)
I was a dork, but no one dared fuck with me. A good thing, too...I had no idea how to fight :p
Living With a Nerd
TFA said
I didn't grow up in a home with conflict, or feel badly about myself, so maybe that's what's different about me, but I was only bullied once. There was a kid in the 7th grade who bullied me for three months before I snapped and beat the holy hell out of him.
Nobody ever bullied me after that. In fact, after I was almost expelled for nerdiness the kids talked about how "that crazy nerd mcgrew brought a hydrogen bomb to school and almost blew the school up". I only got one swat for beating the hell out of the bully.
Free Martian Whores!
Nerds are still more likely to have a better job.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Every now and then there is a study about bullying - and virtually none of them brings up something new a typical /. user didn't know already.
We should just issue handguns to everyone over a certain GPA... That seems like a good, solid, American solution to this bullying problem.
"To me this represents a huge leap forward in understanding nerd psychology."
wat.
This just in, rain still likely to be wet.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Um... what about NerdBullies?
http://windows.scares.us
The meta-analysis was done by the bullies!
That the problem is that people are so hard-wired to find social ineptitude a problem.
There are times where I wouldn't want to hang out with people because I didn't like the people. At one point (it was between grade 8 and 9) I realized that I could be whoever I really wanted to be, and was not relegated to any kind of social outcast or nerdy clique for the rest of my days. I went out, bought some clothes, got a haircut, and emailed someone I didn't usually hang out with, and asked if they wanted to go Skateboarding. I - however - had never been great at skateboarding. However, this new friend of mine took my motion as a kind gesture and proceeded to teach me a bit so that I could hang out with him and his friends more. He understood that I had wanted to get out of any antisocial tendancies I might have had and wanted to have fun with more friends. Obviously, he was not the bullying type.
However, after a year or so of this, I began to miss the old things. Playing LAN Starcraft till 5 am, reading Fantasy Novels, and programming. Things I never had time for when there was a party that weekend, movie night at a friends house, or hanging out after class. Eventually, I went back to my old tendancies, and I really didn't care if I was labelled a nerd because I liked being alone a bit more.
I, for once, like living in Portugal. I have never seen the highly dispersed not-that-of-a-myth that *all or most* nerds get beaten up. It seems that in the USA that really happens. I've been what you can consider a nerd for a long time and yes, people tried to set me aside for a while. Eventually, I always managed to get along with everyone in my classes and school by studying their behavior and showing them how they can be better. That way, instead of having to adapt and change, I am myself trying to get them to adapt and change for what I consider something better. In the end, we all get along just great. I have seen some examples of bullying, but never against nerds, only against dumb(=not intelligent)-and-too-shy people. It seems that, in here, nerds find a way to fit in. Sure, some nerds just lay clear that they don't want contact with what they consider "inferior people", while others, and I include myself in this group, try to be able to live with everyone.
That said, the worst thing I've seen happened about 4 years ago. A group of 13-year-olds hung another 13-year-old on top of a tree, stripped him off of his clothes and let him there crying. On a scale from 1-10, defining how much that happens, I'd give it 1/infinity; I had never seen something like that. Usually bullying here is mostly verbal and, sometimes, with the typical "steal this & steal that".
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
* Panty raid
* Join an all-black fraternity
* Out-chug, out-burp, and out-airband the jocks.
Success!
I don't even know how to get laid. Got a girl grabbing at it and crawling in my lap and I'm like, wtf do I do? Is this right? I haven't studied for this, I know some of the basic theory but I don't think I can get it right!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Cowards are always looking for the reason they are cowards. Most of you here are REAL BIG behind the keyboard waxing philosophical about how you'd handle a bully. But when someone actually confronts you in real life, you go looking for the bitch switch and start hemming and hawing. Maybe if you had some stones you'd get more than the left overs of life.
What does this mean, bullies not knowing how to interact are pent up with rage, and take it out on others. There’s one problem with this bullies are very good at reading people. Quite often they can bully under every bodies nose without arousing suspicion. They even have good mechanisms to handle tense situations (like being investigated), they can even lie effectively under these tense situations. How do you think they can get away with it.
they end up on Slashdot, and carry on being bullied further. Mutually.
Still busy coughing back up my own glasses.
Yeah well, my dad could fuck your dad!
Clinical Psychologists (sorry, I can't call them scientists with a straight face) prove what we already knew! Story at 11!
If people are nice to you, they can borrow your homework. If not, they don't get to. And don't present it as a deal or quid pro quo, either. There are enough nice jocks to protect you from the bullies. More importantly your social status will escalate above being an acceptable bully target.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
To me this represents a huge leap forward in understanding nerd psychology.
Really? Bullies don't attack the "cool" people, so they bully those that don't manage to turn popular opinion against them. Well doh of course neither bully nor victim have huge social skills...
That's not the whole story though, because there's definitively people that were not smart, not popular and not bullying. Being a bully is a choice all of its own.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was the typical introverted high school nerd (5'4 at the time), and had a 6'5" upper-class psychopath following me around and finding new ways to harass me.
I talked to my principal over it (God bless you Roger Hood!). He told me next time it happened, kick his ass and he (the principal) wouldn't punish me.
A few days later at PE we were playing soccer, and whenever I had the ball he would "accidentally" kick me in the leg as hard as he could. For days, it felt like a knife every time I put weight on that foot. Hurt so bad it took my breath away.
Two days later I spotted him in the hall. I kicked him in the jewels, and laid him flat on the ground. I proceeded to spend the next 3 minutes kicking and punching him in the balls, the sides, the head, anything I could hit. I didn't feel any pain in my foot at all during this. Eventually he was bawling so loud that the girls in a nearby classroom came out and rescued him (and had the gaul to ask why I was picking on the poor psychopath and being such a mean person).
Two things happened: the psychopath transferred out of the school a week later, and *no one* ever messed with me again.
I wish we could all get along. But some whack jobs only understand the language of violence, and you have to be willing to speak their language to teach them a lesson.
When I was a kid, I was somewhat socially inept*. Quite definitely a nerd from a science, math and other geek pursuits. But I didn't like getting pushed around. Get in my face and you'd get your head pushed through the wall. But I never sought out victims.
* I think it comes down to the school social structure attempting to pigeon-hole everyone into some sort of pecking order. In their eyes you either rank high or low. But that sort of tribal culture has a problem dealing with people who just don't want to play their game (hence my 'social ineptitude').
Have gnu, will travel.
Interesting interview on NPR a few weeks back on a woman (who had been raped as a teen) who had studied middle eastern terrorists and came up with the thesis that many had been seriously sexually abused as children in the training camps. Pointing out that the common thread with terrorists and other people who went postal or Columbine was that they had been subjected to some form of grave humiliation and didn't really have a support group or other form of outlet.
Not excusing their means of retaliation, but it was interesting to draw the connection between humiliation and people who eventually snap violently. If the world had less humiliation going around and bystanders who are complicit with it, we'd all probably be better off, bullies and nerds alike.
...but ONLY in physical reality which is full of swatikas and cancer anyways.
This is truly "news for nerds."
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Of course, that's because I spent most of my high school years stuffed in my locker...
This ain't rocket surgery.
We need nuns that use rulers to slap kids back in the class room!
Slashdot n00bs :P
If this doesn't call out for a Voices from the Hellmouth link, nothing does...
How can "News" items contain the word "Still"?
I can believe they both share common traits. When nerds are in the cyberspace, they let their inner bully out. How else can you explain those shitty game communities? ;)
I don't have an intelligent phone, so I need to be.
As a 'nerd' who has been bullied all throughout school yes, I worked hard to overcome and make something of my life. And yes, I think I've done it well.
That said -- I still don't forgive those kids that bullied me, and I still hate them. I will carry that hate to my grave. I know it's probably wrong of me, and those kids would probably apologize to me now as adults, but as an adult my childish response is never going to be to forgive them. I hold strong the hatred I carry and the resentment towards those "types" of people, and use it as a positive force in my life to overcome situations, and succeed.
Nobody will ever be able to pry my hate away. And I suspect, for many other nerds as well. It's easy to feel bad about something stupid you did when you were a kid, and it's quite another to forgive for something that almost ruined your life.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
When I was bullied, I really didn't care. Yeah, it was annoying, and physically painful at times, humiliating at others, and pissed me off, but I never let it bother me. Because the physical contest just holds no attraction to me. The moments spent in a locker or in pain (no lasting damage) never really had any bearing on my outcome later in life. Once I got into college, I wasn't bullied anymore and the sky has been the limit... So I think I am right.
Physical confrontation over anything outside of a survival or safety context just seems irrelevant.
But what's your take?
Later I found out my bully never amounted to anything. Karma.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The grey uncreative mass is neither smart nor dumb. It packs up like wolves and feeds on the dumbest among itself to feel minutely superior. This causes violent outbursts in the weakest of the mind since its the only way for the feeble minded to protect their deteriorating selfimage. The smart ones are also rejected by the pack. The highest minds seem odd and incomprehensible to the pack and need to be made apart from the maingroup to keep it coherent. While the pack dwells happily in its dull mediocre harmony, the lowest of the mind try to attract the interest of the pack by attacking the other outcasts, the high minds. The smartest ones should somehow make it seem profitable for the pack to guard them or just endure since the relieving outcome is that the high minds shouldn't have any incentive to attract the pack, who are just the right kind of average consumers for the next vc backedup startup to exploit :)
Let the word go out of the new understanding between Nerds and Bullies. No longer let them be enemies. Indeed, they are as the same flesh, and today they have become brothers under a common cause. Let the norms now tremble before the combined might of the Nerds and Bullies, hereafter known collectively as the Outcasts. Their powers of intelligence and strength have at last combined in a mighty aliance.
Shutup NERD
It's when the nerds and the bullies start working together that things really get ugly.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
beaten up alot in school, but i had better things to do. calculus, geometry, biology, chemistry, all these things took precedence over the day-in-day-out fisticuffs i never warranted. I dressed in alot of black clothing partly to detract attention from me, and partly because i just liked it. Lots of bauhaus and sister machine gun but it was just what i liked, no personal angst or vendettas buried deep within the sonic musings of KMFDM did i cling tenaciously to. I stayed on the internet alot and learned new things constantly
then one day someone spread a rumour i was going to kill my spanish teacher, and I was detained for several hours in the principals office while a sherrifs department combed my locker and i was accused of plotting the demise of the entire faculty. Turns out with my high GPA and low social standing i was considered a stunningly dangerous nerd who should be ashamed for tying up the phone line so as no administrator could properly accost my parents as to my fiendish plot to edit wad files in doom levels and include beavis and butthead sound effects.
thanks to "no tolerance" policies i failed calculus, failed spanish, and my ending GPA was 3.1 so yeah, do i blame bullies? sure, but the alternatives to the average bullshit school culture for the seemingly intellectual elite in school are pretty fucking dismal indeed.
Good people go to bed earlier.
tl;dr version? - They're exactly like us, except they're stupid.
I'm not sure if I feel better or worse with this new knowledge. Certainly, if I had known this 4-15 years ago, maybe I could have convinced my enemies that we were basically the same thing, and for that reason, we should have been working together.
"If I had known then what I know now..." >_<
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you say social skills aren't hard to learn. Speaking as someone with Asperger's syndrome... HOW!? I've been trying for 38 years, and still seem to be a complete failure. Is there a book? A manual? A magic bullet?
Learning social skills might be easy for you, but I've not found it easy. So kindly stop beating people like me up (metaphorically) and shut up until you've got some useful advice.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
An article that derides both predator and victim is rare...on the one hand, castigating the predator; on the other, justifying the treatment of the victim by pointing out their deficiencies in social situations.
lollll...guessing the author's technology skills suck.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
In HS, I never had any trouble with the real jocks. They had better things to do than pick on nerds. My problems were with the "wanna-bes". Those bozos couldn't make it as jocks, so they tried picking on people smaller than they.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
OMG!!! PONIES!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Underrated comment.
Investigate Columbine and you'll find Eric and Dylan were badly bullied, including specifically by some kid who went by, I think the name was, "Rocky".
Humiliation can be a big part of it. More fundamentally the issue is feeling devalued. Ruin someone's sense of self-worth and they become a serious danger.
punk rock + nerdliness = not bullied
When you walk the suburban white schools yelling "kill the white devil" no messes with you...or speaks with you.
Boxing is by far the most useful thing a kid can learn. Unfortunately, it's been out of vogue for decades. You can find a karate school on every street corner, but in a lot of places it's almost impossible to find a good boxing gym. Unfortunately, AFAICT, Karate is pretty much useless for real-world street fighting. I saw a kid get the crap kicked out of him once (almost put in the hospital) because some Tae Kwon Do instructor had told him he could handle himself.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I was a bully because I got fustrated on the teaching pace, being too awesome for school.
I was a bully until after high school. I started out VERY poor and everyone in the poor neighborhoods are mean to each other which provided the humiliation and the bully framework. I didn't have any gadgets for me to tinker with, being poor and all, but I would play with any tech type stuff I could get my hands on. Once my dad pulled us up out of the slums, I was still kind of a dick, but starting in high school I quickly became a nerdy bully, and after high school I've moved to just nerdy. A little maturity helps most people, but some will never change.
Yet another problem solved by the baseball bat, man's greatest invention.
...water is still wet.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
it's also interesting that you encourage bullying on CL, and will silence those who point out your hypocrisy. Enforce your damned TOUs
the nerd you bully today may be your unforgiving, underpaying manager of tomorrow
"People say bullies are cowards. Well, they're wrong. Bullies are brave because they're strong." - Abraham Simpson, "The Simpsons"
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003005/quotes
REGARDING:
"To me this represents a huge leap forward in understanding nerd psychology"
The statement above indicates that the writer has limited understanding of the issues or the problems they present.
It is interesting that even those who purport to be interested in psychology exhibit such overt bias to the issues being studied.
The trouble here is that once we pigeonhole the individuals as 'bully' and 'nerd' we create powerful image stereotypes which
undermine examination of more subtle forms of abusive behavior. Thus abuse goes unnoticed and unaccounted because the
social group is looking for the stereotype rather than the reality.
In fact, the very act of using 'naming' to qualify one group of people as outside the stereotypical norm is, in itself, a form of bullying.
This is because 'naming' is commonly used to dehumanize the target and desensitize the social group to further targeting of the victim.
It is common for people who have suffered abuse to turn abuse outward against others and inward in forms of deprecation and self destructive behavior.
This can provide even more ammunition to the abuser who, seeing that the victim(s) are making light of the abuse, or worse participating in it,
feels that it's actions are in some way normal and justified. The actions become socially acceptable because the abused has/have validated it as a norm and so has everyone else.
This is the problem with terms like 'nerd', 'geek', 'bully', 'nigger', 'fag', etc.. The words are just words but the intent, how ever masked, is the same.
The intent is to marginalize and control possibly to victimize and exploit people for gratification. The names mask the issues of abuse and helplessness.
There is a great deal of institutionalized exploitation of technical people in our society. For some reason even
the technical people seem to fall for this and don't recognize when it is happening.
(ie: not getting paid for overtime simply because this makes I.T. somehow not cost competitive with shoveling gravel [??!!])
People should try to avoid using grouping or stereotypical association when describing events. The results compound and
create an environment that is just sad and unjust for everyone.
You're not a geek or a nerd. You're a skilled human being with only so many valuable hours in life, just like everyone else.
Refuse the name [title ??] and the marginalization that comes with it.
"Typical bullies have negative attitudes toward others, feel badly about themselves, and most likely grew up in a home with conflict. Victims share much of same, negative attitude, conflict in the family." /. mod squad.
Good description of
Carry a licensed pistol to school.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Lemon believe herself to be a victim, but in s3e5 "Reunion" she turned out to be both a bully and a nerd.
I wonder how often this happens in real life?
Someone give Fuzzy Fuzzy Fungus a medal and make sure this AC gets nowhere near a handgun.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
When you are forced to attend school, it's because someone assumes a doctrine onto the population they regard as unable to assert any counter-dominance against that forced association.
I always went to libraries to learn, I contemplated what I studied while gardening or hunting. All my nerd problems occured around 1st grade when I was bullied about my reddish-orange hair all through 4th grade; I assumed the bully traits of the bullies and they accepted me into their lock where I placed entomology as secondary and stopped going to the library at my young age. Then the teachers started humiliating me because I wasn't getting the grades they wanted me to get, so I reverted back to a nerd. Then upon entering public "High Scruel" I endured something worse than bullying; assault by bullies.
I couldn't just leave school becuase the same bastards threaten you with juvenile hall and Social Services, while offering the remedy as a push of their psychological studies to fulfill their career. All you can do is fade away with the auspice of "lazyness", but now it's worse; they don't accept lazyness as a reason to not complete curriculum: they are looking to rebrand you with all kinds of court-domineering phenomena as to destroy any further independent accredation processes you prefer to entertain other than the coerced school system accredation. It's a monopoly effect now.
Forced association is like how durring the American "Civil" war of Northern federal Aggression could never get the Union Army to fire upon the Confederate Army and likewise, so they would all march in parallel until those loudmouthed bastards in each group start hurling insults to the point where one fires a shot that starts everyone returrning fire. Government education is the same way in the school system and it's intervention policies to force the association of "vulnerable youth" into one-another rather than pursue studies in all the customary means of book collections. The more they push everyone around into one-another, then the more fake economy and fake jobs they can draft into the school system to make everyone get along just as planned.
"Failure is not allowed because you must obviously have mental issues if you decide otherwise than what is chosen for you." Enjoy the indoctrination, the endless school system lackies that take-up curriculums that address their attempt to yield student thoughts into abating religious arguments they bring into the verry classroom (State humanism vs Creationism) rather than make no assumptions in teaching the Scientific Method. Whoever gets the money, pushes the agenda, and writes the history books: all assumptions.
The greatest assumption I ever heard was "Government is a necessary good." The worst assumption I ever heard was more a class of assumptions where some 'tard always uses the word "evolve" or "evolution" to describe his policy of "moving forward" in a company's operations when it is nothing more than their bias'd perspective they want unchallenged.
That's the same reason I didn't join spors when I went to school: buttsecks in the showers.
I just say, to hell with sports, and "get a realy job" to the Physical Education and Sports teachers employed.
of'course, they aren't verry honest on the grades they give you.
Didn't the Simpson's prove it to be nerd sweat?
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Careful, you might end up working for one of them.
I'm afraid that I'd have to question this research. Would the researchers kindly like to stop by their local highschool and then spend some time observing the jocks, cheerleaders and the rich kids who typically have highly developed social skills, and who (apart from the football players) are often of at least average intelligence (Contrary to what you see on TV, most cheerleaders and jocks aren't idiots), picking on the Geeks and nerds.
It's not about intelligence, or poor social skills, or poor self esteem. It's about pack mentality. Think Hyena
Gangs of popular kids who have strength in number picking on smaller weaker kids who don't have strength in numbers. And who often don't have the rigt kind of sneakers or the newest cell phone.
Look at all the comments here too and you can weed them out.
That, right up there? Not a troll.
You can't take the sky from me...
Wait, isn't this a bit of a generalisation? I'm pretty sure a large part of the bullying population consists of 'popular' kids like cheerleaders who are supposed to be the most socially well adjusted people available. If the people at the top of the high school food chain are "socially inept" then what does that say about the rest of the students? I guess they should probably "leap" back a few years and revisit high school
in my school nerds are the bullies.... they give you the eye and you faint on the spot.
try beating them in math...