Jennifer Hancock and Ken and this is unit three, how to get boys to stop using science. Now there's a variety of different scientific lenses we can use to view the phenomenon of bullying. There's, you know, behavioral psychology, regular psychology, psycho analytics, sociology, economics, there's all different ways we could look at it. I happen to like behavioral psychology and the reason I like looking at going through the lens of behavioral psychology is because it not only helps us really clearly see the dynamics that are playing out, but it also provides us with a solution on how to get it to stop. Right, and that's really, really important. Once you understand how once you're looking at the dynamic of bullying dynamic as the bullies seeking some sort of reward, and they may or may not be getting that reward from the victim, they may be getting it from other people.

It's a lot easier to see the dynamic playing out and also to see why it escalates. Like when someone tries to get it to stop, why does it escalate? behavioral psychology has an answer to that. But it also tells us how to get to stop, right? And how you get unwanted behavior to stop using behavioral psychology is to remove removes the reward. Right.

That's how we do it. And there's a technique it's called extinguishing and behavior. And it really does work. Now, I'm not going to go into the science on this because this is like a short overview program. But what you can do is behavior during extinction operant conditioning, you will find like 800,000 articles going back to the 30s on this all right, behavioral psycho. The neat thing about behavioral psychology is what I'm about to teach you is not been invalidated by any research ever done.

All right, everything points to the same thing and this is considered Establish science now. All right, but if you want to look it up, look up extinguishing behavior or behavior during extinction. And you will find hundreds of thousands of academic articles on Google Scholar to help you understand what it is I'm talking about. Alright. So for now, what I want you to understand is that to get a behavior to extinguish to stop, we have to stop rewarding it. So to do that we have to understand reinforcements, and rewards and scheduling.

So I'm going to help you with this. There's three types of reinforcements or rewards, right? There's the positive reinforcement reward, there's the negative or punishment form of response, and then there's a neutral response where neither negative or positive happens. Right now our understanding of what happens when something positive happens is pretty instinctual, right? You have ice cream, it tastes good. You're gonna want more ice cream.

That's how it works. If something good happens when you do something, you're going to want to do it more. Right? This is why when I say bullying is learned or bullies do it because it works. It means that when they do this, something happens that they like, and that makes them do it more. Right?

Now a second way to respond to behavior. The second thing that can happen is negative or punishment. And that means that you do something and then something bad happens that you don't like. So imagine if you've been into ice cream, and you'd had a lick of ice cream and it tasted like dog food. Right? You would never want ice cream again.

It would, it would be horrible. You wouldn't want it again, that's negative or punishment, right? Where you do something and the response or the results is negative to you. Right? The third option is that you do something and nothing happens. Right?

This is a neutral response. So you have positive responses, negative responses and neutral responses. Now we do know that a positive reinforcement is going to reinforce the behavior. What most people don't know. What the scientists know is that negative rates enforcement is still reinforcement. And this is one of those counterintuitive things.

If you want behavior to stop punishing, it doesn't make it stop, it actually makes the behavior stronger. And and that's completely counterintuitive. The only time negative reinforcement works is it's the very first time you do something. For instance, I have I've had one hot dog in my life, and I threw up as a seven year old. And I've never had hot dogs since I had a negative experience when they first hot dog never wanted another one. can't even get me around the smell of them.

Right. But I've had really good ice cream my whole life. And when I went to China, I got some really crappy ice cream, but it did not turn me off of ice cream. It actually strengthened my desire to find the good stuff, right? It's like a junkie looking for a hit. So if the behaviors established and it's been doing going for a while it's been rewarded for a while.

If you start negatively reinforcing or punishing it, what you're doing is actually strengthening the behavior. You don't want That's not what you want to do you want to get to stop, right? So the first thing you need to understand is to get a behavior to stop, you have to remove the reward. And you do that in most cases, by responding neutrally, right, we're not going to reward it, we're not going to punish it, we're just going to do nothing. And again, that's really counterintuitive. The idea that you would do nothing.

And it would work is very counterintuitive. But that's this is the advice behind ignore them and they'll go away, right is don't reward them, ignore them. And they'll go like now that the ignore them advice isn't quite right, because what you're trying to do is to remove the reward. And you're doing that by responding neutrally. You're not ignoring them, you're responding in a neutral way. And that's a very different concept.

Okay, the next thing you need to understand on how to get behaviors to stop is how often you respond to a police behavior. So it turns out that variable reinforcement Like sometimes the bully does something and you respond to them and other times you ignore them. And then they do something else and you respond to them again, that's called variable. I mean, sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't. That variable reinforcement is going to strengthen the behavior you don't want. And we have decades of research on that.

You can type in variable reinforcement, behavior extinction and find hundreds of thousands of articles about this in Google Scholar, right. And every study shows the same thing. Variable reinforcement strengthens the behavior you don't want. What kind of schedule works consistent schedule, which means every single time you respond the exact same way. Right. So you want a neutral response, you want to respond in a neutral way.

Remember, remove the reward, respond in a neutral way, every single time. And that's how you get unwanted behavior to stop. Now, that seems very simple, except that it's not because of what happens next. So let's say you've got to blame who's calling you And you respond to them by saying thank you very much for that information. That's very helpful. Meaning you acknowledge what they said you're not ignoring them, you're acknowledging them and basically telling them that they're being an idiot for calling you stinky.

Right? And that removes their social reward, and you're not upset so they haven't managed to make you upset. So again, you've removed that reward. What's going to happen when you do that? Well, anybody who's ever done that will tell you, the bully escalates, they get worse they up their ante and up their game and try to get to you and insult you more or threaten you or do whatever that escalation of behavior is predicted to occur. Right?

Again, we have decades of research on this. When you remove the reward on an established pattern of behavior. The animal will respond by increasing their behavior. That's to be expected and we see that with bullying. They retaliate. Almost all the time.

Alright, that's to be expected. Now. What you need to undertake Yeah, it's expected. How do you ride that out and get two things stopping? Like, if doing this makes it worse? Why would you do it at all?

And the answer is because extinction apryl extinction is a process, it's not a one time thing, you're gonna, they're gonna hassle you, you're going to respond neutrally, take away the rewards, they're going to escalate, you're going to respond naturally take away the rewards and continue to not give them the rewards. So you can do this every single time. And eventually they stop, right. And if it gets bad enough, like if they're threatening you, or they're actually engaging in violence, not only do you have to respond eventually, but you have to report them because you want to increase the cost associated with them behaving badly. Alright. I always like to give people if it's verbal, an opportunity to be nice, but if they don't take it, yeah, report them every single time.

The key to this is to do it every single time. Don't want to get away with it even once because if you sometimes do it and sometimes stop, that's variable and it's actually going to make things worse for you because what you're doing is internal In the extinction process, and the bullies learning, oh, if I'm just more obnoxious, I get my reward. You don't want them to learn that you want to learn, you want them to learn, it doesn't matter how obnoxious I get, they're not getting the reward, period. That's what you want them to learn. Alright, so what you're looking for is a consistent neutral response every single time. You want to be consistent every single time.

And you want to understand that doing this, it's not a one time thing. You don't report people once and have it done. You have to be consistent about this over time as the other person escalates, which is predicted to occur, you're making them escalate by doing this, which is fine, it's unpleasant, but it's fine. And then eventually, if you're consistent at this, they will stop How long does it take it, it depends on how long it's been going on and how consistent you are, and whether or not you bring all the resources you can to the table on this. Um, now I'm going to go more into like different scenarios and the next unit. All right, of how this actually works.

But for now, if you are a parent, what I want you to understand, and you're watching this is that your child needs your support over time. You can't just say, oh, tell them to do this, and then assume that the child's fix the problem. They might actually need your help. They're gonna need your help to stick with it over time. They're going to need your help Lyons awning with the school if it's bad enough, and if they can't get it resolved, because what ends up happening is the behavior escalates, and you need to help your child keep at it and maybe tweak what they're doing so that they keep at it. And some of that is yes, you reporting to the teacher?

What's going on? For the administrator? What's going on? All right. So your role in this as the parent is to teach this to your kid and to cheer them on and keep on them so that they keep on it because the worst thing that could happen is you start this and then you stop and you allow the behavior to escalate and now you've got a new norm of really obnoxious behavior and we don't want that for the kids. We don't want that for any victim.

If they start this, we want them to finish it and get the pavement stop. And that's what's so hard. Alright, so in the next unit we're going to talk about specific sorts of examples of how we do this in real life with real bullies. And then if you have any questions, ask them in a discussion forum.