How Bullying Spreads — and How Social Bravery Stops It | Amy Cuddy | TED

My talk begins where my life nearly ended. In 2012, I stood in the red circle, and I gave a TED talk on social psychology. I was a junior professor at Harvard, and I spoke about feeling like an outsider. I spoke about how we lift our self-confidence and how our bodies affect the way we feel. The talk went viral online quickly and became one of the most viewed TED talks of all time. And that cracked my world open. In some beautiful ways. (Applause) I saw the most luminous parts of people.

And then I saw the darkest parts. When I became the target of a sustained bullying campaign. Not by trolls on the internet -- I learned to dismiss them quickly -- but by colleagues, by tenured professors, department chairs and journal editors who used their names -- their real names -- to attack me relentlessly, for many years. They publicly declared that I had no serious conception of the term science. That what I'd proposed was stupid and unintuitive. That I'd abandoned academia for a lucrative career selling pseudoscience to a mostly women audience. They created a narrative about our work on power posing that it had been debunked.

But here's the thing. Our work on power posing hadn't been debunked. In fact, the central finding, the most important finding, was that our posture, how expansive or contractive it is, affects the way we feel, how powerful [and] confident we feel. It was replicated dozens of times in independent studies by labs all over the world, using better methods than those that we used, and even by our skeptics. In multiple meta-analyses, including one with 88 studies in nearly 10,000 participants, they landed on the same conclusion: Expansive versus contractive posture affects how powerful or powerless we feel. The behaviors and the hormones were more complicated, and there were non-replications.

In the science that I was trained in by my dear advisor, that would have led to constructive and friendly inquiries, collaborations, to figure out what was different about these studies. Were there moderators that affected why you got this effect and we got this effect? Science should interrogate itself. That is how knowledge advances -- that should happen. But that's not what happened in my case. Science didn't interrogate itself. It stopped itself. And it silenced a scientist, a junior scientist, who also had a lot of other research on stereotyping and prejudice and intergroup relations. Two tenured Ivy League professors told a "New York Times" reporter that they would have defended me publicly had they not been afraid of becoming targets themselves.

Friends wrote privately, "I'm so sorry this is happening to you. These guys are horrible." But wouldn't look at me publicly. I couldn't eat, I didn't sleep, I worked all the time defending myself from constant incoming attacks, non-stop, relentless. It was very hard to be present for my son and my husband. I'm sorry. And I chose to walk away from my job at Harvard a year before going up for tenure. Not because I was forced to, but because I knew that staying meant certain death. And so ... Eventually, I tried to take my own life twice, because this kind of bullying is simultaneously this horrible public spectacle of shame where you're in a spotlight.

And at the same time, it's a total erasure of who you are and what you've done. Many targets don't survive. And I do want to say, before I go forward, to the targets: I understand. I see you, and I know that what seems incredible -- happened. But. This is not a talk about despair. This is a talk about earned hope. I've been a social psychologist for 25 years, studying the forces that affect how we treat each other and judge each other. But I've spent the last eight focused on how cruelty becomes collective. How truth becomes distorted.

How people decide that one person should be pushed out of the group. But also, more importantly, what are the things that we can do to prevent those cultures from taking hold before they harden. And what I've learned is this. First, bullying is not conflict. It's not a debate, it's not criticism, it's not humor that you're too sensitive to take well. It is a deliberately targeted, serial, escalating pattern of attacks carried out by multiple people, and it's intended to destroy a person's reputation and their ability to contribute. It unfolds in predictable stages. And it usually ends with someone being completely silenced or disappearing completely.

This is really important. Bullies are rare. They're rare. Most of us are not bullies. Bullies share one thing: a worldview. In their worldview, the world is hostile, people are fundamentally bad, everything of value is scarce, it’s all zero-sum. Your achievement is their loss. They have an insatiable need for recognition and status and dominance, and they prove their dominance by publicly demonstrating that they can force a target, a valuable target, to fully submit. That's what bullying is. Bullying has been on the rise among adults for the last 15 years. Digital platforms make bullying faster, easier, louder.

And the bullies' lies last forever now. So ... What do we do? The first thing to understand is that bullies need us. Bullies need an audience. They need people to carry out their agenda. When we just watch and remain silent, we're what I call passive bystanders. When we join in and amplify and share an attack, we're what I call accessory bullies. But if we refuse our participation, a lone bully is impotent. Without us, a bully is impotent. (Applause) Second, we need to learn to spot the opening.

When we get in early, we can totally derail this. It starts with what I call a “bully test.” The bully tests the audience to see if they can get away with bullying that person. It might be a really inappropriate comment in a professional setting, or it might be an accusation against someone that’s reputation-destroying, but not backed by evidence. When we hear those things and we stay silent or we laugh, we're just saying to the bully, "Go forward." And that's when they launch their attack. We also need to practice social bravery. These small risks that we take to defend each other, to support each other interpersonally. And social bravery is risky. So we need to distribute the risk across people. We need to do it together. It is so much easier for two people to do it than for one person to do it. When one bystander steps in, in a way that’s noticeable, others step in.

And we know from research on changing social conventions that when about 25 percent of people step in, they can flip a social norm completely. Bullying is not a personal problem. It's a collective problem. And we can fix it. So after eight years of writing this book, I turned it in a few months ago. Right after that, I traveled to Greeley, Colorado, a small city in the High Plains that was raw, politically divided, on edge. I could feel the vigilance in the air when I looked at them. I spoke about personal power and trust, and at the end the moderator said her last question to me was this. She said, "Is there one piece of leadership advice that you haven't really shared?" And I said, “Yeah. We'll never win by bullying the bullies.

We cannot validate their worldview. As soon as we tell them that the world has to be brutal, they say, ’See? That’s why I have to behave this way.“’ I told them you don’t have to show how much you can hate to prove how much you care, or to prove that you belong. And I looked out and I saw their shoulders relax. I saw a flicker of hope in their faces. I felt them collectively exhale. And the next day a woman wrote to me. And she said, "I was at your talk. And I noticed something interesting as I left the venue. The crowd was unusually cheerful and courteous. Several drive aisles wove together toward the exits, and everyone was alternating and letting each other in. No one was saying with their actions that they were more important than another person.

I just wanted to share the observation that you made an immediate, positive and tangible difference." (Applause) We want to be neighbors again. We want to go to our kids' friends' birthday parties and not worry about an explosion. We don't want to have to show how much we hate to prove how much we care. Bullies' power is borrowed power. And we can refuse to give it to them. We all have access to personal power, and with that personal power, we can commit small acts of social bravery, supporting each other, challenging bullies. So I invite you please, to join me. Let's find that collective power and turn bullying around. And one more thing.

(Cheers and applause) Thank you. Thank you so much. (Applause)