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Comment by feistypharit | Hacker News Reader

Children are bullies too! Why do we need to extrapolate from chickens.

I've worked in offices with full grown adults that are bullies, on a few occasions. I don't mean physical. But small minded people talking and sneering in groups, or managers taking credit or lying or blaming staff. Can take months of dropping positive metaphors, analogies, idioms like "I don't care who did it I just want it fixed" etc.. while turning the cheek or forgiving their ignorance/stupidity until they're reprogrammed to have more decency or be nice. Also takes a lot out of you. But worth it in the end. Especially if you join an office where it's coming from the top down and it's miserable and full of blame, then months later people are smiling and working together. I agree with you here, why extrapolate specifically from chickens?. There are many types of abuse; discriminatory, psychological, financial, hierarchical, neglect, sexual, modern slavery, domestic, physical, verbal. Chickens are not complex enough to understand much more than the obvious. Any threat to our needs will be fought off however we instinctively know how or have learned. Sounds strange but many people are unaware they are bullying and if you call out the behavior they will feel bad and amend it. I doubt you could do that with a chicken.

I wonder to what extent this is a manifestation of a lack of growth opportunities in the environment.

In my experience, when a company is growing quickly, customers are abundant, there are more new projects than people to do them, and everybody's stock options go up each year, people tend to be cooperative, energetic, and generally delightful to work with. Once growth slows, promotions & raises stop coming, exciting new projects are scarce resources, and customers don't really care what you do, the office politics gets insufferable. It's like as soon as people run out of worthwhile things to do, they invent oppressive status games to pass the time.

My recollection of middle & high school was similar. When kids are engaged, learning things, able to pursue their interests, and have adequate adult attention, they're cooperative and well-behaved. When they're all corraled into the same track and have to compete for grades & attention, they get nasty.

My experience has been that while companies are relatively small or unknown, people tend to work happily together. As soon as they start to make money, they are targeted by people who primarily just want a slice of the action. Quite a lot of these people tend to be bullies. From that point, the company either dies a horrible death or some kind of balance emerges. You never really get rid of the bullies/gold diggers, though, unfortunately.

Completely agree. It's founded in needs and resources. Also it's not all about the bully. Hierachies exist. There's not much we can do about that, it's nature. No one calls a shark a bully. All we can really do is try and make them less abusive. The 'victim' can also bring a lot of it on themselves by being a 'snowflake'. A victim can quite quickly become a bully when their aloofness pays off and everyone turns on the person that was 'bullying'. I guess when it's really 'bullying' is when it's unnecessary? If someone is being assertive or pushing you to see you evolve, is that bullying? nope. not in my book. But can be percieved that way.

The OP states that this specific line of inquiry was an exercise in lateral thinking for a project on adolescent bullying.

"So, rather than starting off my research with the deep dive into research papers, think pieces, and news articles that’s all too familiar to me from past endeavors, I decided to embrace lateral thinking."

Thanks for your comment! Did you read the article?

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