An Evolutionary Perspective on Bullying and Social Power: The Roles of Cooperation and Manipulation

Abstract

Bullying has been shown to have adaptive functions, and some research has suggested this may be partly due to perpetrators making flexible use of both coercive and prosocial strategies. The current study probes this possibility further by examining whether bullying is differentially associated with two distinct affiliative strategies—genuinely cooperative affiliation and manipulative affiliation. Our study also examines whether bullying and the two affiliative strategies have differential relations with cooperative and competitive aspects of social power. A sample of 477 adolescents (45.5% girls; M_age = 15.50) completed peer nomination measures assessing direct and indirect bullying, cooperative affiliation, manipulative affiliation, and three facets of social power: social dominance (dominance and popularity), peer affection (likeability and number of friendships), and dating popularity. Multigroup path modeling by gender indicated that both direct and indirect forms of bullying were significantly associated with manipulative affiliation but not cooperative affiliation. Path analyses examining bullying and the two affiliative strategies in relation to social power found that bullying was positively associated with social dominance and dating popularity (direct bullying only), but these links depended on the level of manipulative affiliation. Manipulative affiliation had significant positive relations only with competitive aspects of social power (social dominance and dating popularity), whereas cooperative affiliation had significant positive associations with all three aspects of social power, and most strongly with peer affection. These findings underscore the importance of understanding how bullying may be combined with manipulative affiliation and highlight the potential of promoting genuine cooperation as an alternative to bullying within anti-bullying interventions.