How Might Arrogant and Impulsive Adolescents Achieve Social Dominance? Bullying!

• In Event: 3-154 - The Adaptive Nature of Adolescent Aggression

Integrative Statement

Adolescents are keenly aware of the importance and utility of social power (Cillessen & Rose, 2005), leading some adolescents to seek social dominance over their peers (Kiefer, & Ryan, 2008; Vaillancourt et al. 2003). Certain personality traits appear to be predictive of individuals’ desire for social dominance (Johnson et al. 2012; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). Personality traits associated with Honesty-Humility on the HEXACO personality scale are believed to motivate individuals to pursue social dominance and popularity in Western cultures (Book et al. 2012), while low Conscientiousness may be an equal or more important factor in collectivist cultures (Volk et al. 2018). In this context, bullying may represent a desire for gaining social resources at the expense of another (Pouwels et al. 2016; Volk et al., 2014). These associations between bullying and impulsive/arrogant personality traits support the idea that bullying can be a short-term strategy that emphasizes a preference for obtaining immediate gains (Hawley, 2015; Volk et al. 2014). We therefore examined whether the relationship between personality and social dominance was mediated by bullying across two culturally distinct samples of Canadian and Chinese adolescents.
Participants included 440 Chinese adolescents who were recruited from two separate schools in the city of Baoding China. This group was comprised of 293 boys and 147 girls (age M = 14.59, SD = 1.53). We also recruited a total of 350 Canadian adolescents from southern Ontario extracurricular clubs. This group was comprised of 147 boys and 203 girls (age M = 14.65, SD = 1.51). Participants were administered self-report measures of bullying, victimization, social dominance, and the HEXACO scale of personality. Separate path analyses were then conducted for the Canadian and Chinese samples to examine whether there were direct associations from the HEXACO personality traits to bullying perpetration and social dominance, and also whether there were indirect associations from the HEXACO personality traits to social dominances through bullying perpetration.
In both samples there was a significant direct association from lower Honesty-Humility and lower Conscientiousness to higher levels of bullying perpetration (see Table 1). Higher Extraversion also had a direct association with higher perpetration in the Chinese sample. Also as expected for social dominance, both samples reflected a significant direct association from lower Honesty-Humility, higher Extraversion, and higher bullying perpetration to higher levels of social dominance. As predicted, in both samples lower Honesty-Humility was linked to higher bullying perpetration, which, in turn, was associated with greater social dominance. We also found a significant indirect effect (Figure 1) in both samples of lower Conscientiousness on higher social dominance through greater bullying. For Chinese adolescents, we observed one additional indirect effect: higher Extraversion was associated with more bullying which was, in turn, linked to greater social dominance. Finally, there was no difference between boys and girls in either sample.
Overall our results offer cross-cultural support for the adaptive nature of bullying, particularly with respect to social dominance. However, the presence of some cultural differences does emphasize the potential importance of environmental/cultural factors that may help inform future intervention efforts.

Authors

• Anthony Volk, Brock University
  Presenting Author

• Daniel Provenzano, University of Windsor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ann H. Farrell, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrew Dane, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Shulman, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author