The genetic roots of bullying

Whether it's Bullying Awareness Week or Pink Shirt Day... It's hard to miss the message: the conventional thinking is that bullying is learned behaviour that needs to be unlearned. 

But Jennifer Wong has another theory. An assistant professor of Criminology at Simon Fraser University in BC, she led a recent study that concluded bullying is genetic -- and might actually do some good, evolutionarily speaking. 

Her small study of a middle school population in Vancouver looked at the origins of bullying in order to better understand how to deal with it. She tested the evolutionary psychology theory -- the idea that species evolve to display certain traits which help them survive.

Historically, human aggression has been instrumental in helping humans survive, to defend against predators, protect territory, to secure attractive mates, and produce offspring. So bullying may be an adaptive behaviour that is more of a contemporary way of expressing this.- SFU Criminology Professor Jennifer Wong

Wong argues that if bullying is part of our genetic makeup, we need to do more to channel these aggressive urges constructively. It's not enough to simply label bullying as "bad."