The pain of being excluded: animal hierarchy and school bullying

Biologists have long recognized that all animals, including humans, undergo physical and behavioral changes between infancy and adulthood. Human adolescence is rooted in our unevolved past, and the joys, pains, passions, and drives that fill it are not gratuitous; they make exquisite evolutionary sense.

This article is reproduced with permission from "More Critical Than Adolescence" (China Textile Press), and the title is added by the editor.

By Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers

Translated by Su Yanjie

One study found that in the United States in the 1950s, five people fell into extreme depression, including a widow, a retired police officer, a company executive, a housewife, and a university professor. Experiencing depression was not unusual in the United States at the time, but the medical conditions of these five people showed that their depression had nothing to do with mental health. They fell into depression while being treated for high blood pressure, and they were all taking the drug reserpine. Reserpine lowers blood pressure by reducing the level of monoamine neurotransmitters, but this way of reducing the level of monoamine neurotransmitters also seems to have made the five patients depressed. When reporting these cases in the New England Journal of Medicine, it was also pointed out that when the patients stopped taking reserpine, their depression symptoms would be relieved and their mood would return to normal. This study gave rise to a very influential, although not entirely correct, monoamine hypothesis: depression is caused by, or at least related to, low levels of monoamine neurotransmitters.

Over the next 60 years, multiple studies have further investigated and refined the relationship between depression and monoamine neurotransmitters, but the basic conclusion remains: Although depression is complex and cannot be reduced to the effects of a single group of molecules, it is clear that monoamines play an important role in the many factors that affect human mood. The most famous monoamine is 5-hydroxytryptamine, also known as serotonin, which is regulated by drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). This class of antidepressants includes Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil, and Zoloft. People still use these drugs today because of evidence that increasing serotonin levels in certain parts of the human brain can improve mood.

Serotonin: A chemical involved in brain mechanisms including those controlling emotional states.

Now consider another kind of knowledge from the field of animal behavior. When a lobster is born, this free-swimming larva looks nothing like the giant clawed warrior it will one day become. But within three months, it has grown into a juvenile version of its adult form. Over the next few years, as they grow larger and larger, adolescent lobsters learn to hide themselves. At 6 to 8 years old, they are close to adult size. At this time, lobsters, like hyenas and humans, begin to classify themselves. Like chicks establishing a pecking order, the hierarchy of wild lobsters is rarely established through fighting. Lobsters can recognize and remember who is above them and who is below them by observing the behavior of other lobsters and smelling their urine. The high-ranking lobsters will attack the low-ranking lobsters with their legs and tentacles, driving them out of their burrows, while the low-ranking lobsters retreat obediently with their tails flipped. Lobsters are ancient animals, their ancestors appeared about 360 million years ago when fire raged on the earth. Even after all these years, they still fight for status.

But there is one substance that has the power to change all that. Scientists studying the hierarchical relationships among these crustaceans have found that if low-ranking Norway lobsters are given this substance, they are less likely to display the typical behaviors of low-ranking lobsters. 5 When challenged, they no longer back down, but are more willing to fight bravely, which is not common in low-ranking lobsters. They even adopt the posture of high-ranking lobsters, the most typical "meral spread", a threatening posture in which they raise their front half of their bodies and wave their large claws in a demonstrative manner. In fact, the lobsters' environment has not changed at all, except for the addition of this new substance, but they behave as if they are no longer low-ranking lobsters.

A similar study on crayfish came to the same conclusion: when low-ranking crayfish were given the substance, they no longer retreated, but threatened or fought. This behavior indicated that they were rising in status. They did not need to actually fight and win, their posture and behavior were enough to establish dominance. The crayfish's peers also treated their offspring as if they had actually been promoted. The perception of rank became the reality of rank. We can also see this phenomenon in fish and mammals: after treatment with this substance, low-ranking animals began to behave like high-ranking animals, and their peers began to treat them like high-ranking individuals.

That substance, of course, is serotonin. Serotonin affects the parts of the animal brain that process social hierarchies, especially those related to status. Likewise, it plays a key role in the ups and downs of human emotions. Putting these two conclusions together, we can see an important connection between the work of animal behaviorists and human psychiatrists, that there is a connection between emotion regulation and status in animals.

Helplessness and despair

As we've seen, falling from a high position is common in social animals, since no individual can stay at the top forever. We already know how brain systems like the social brain network and transitive hierarchical reasoning detect changes in status and send neurochemical messages (status signals) that prompt animals to behave in ways that increase their chances of survival. But what do these signals actually "feel" like? Nonhuman animals can't tell us. But scientists have learned from observing the behavior of lower animals that if these animals could talk, they would probably say "it doesn't feel good at all."

In the early 20th century, Tolliver Sheldrup-Ebey, in his bird observation reports, used a free combination of anthropomorphism and objective observation to describe birds that had fallen from their "unlimited authority" as "extremely depressed, humble, with drooping wings and heads in the dust." These "deposed" birds "were paralyzed, though physically intact." Sheldrup-Ebey further pointed out that this reaction would be more severe if the bird "had long been an absolute ruler," and this extreme social decline was "almost fatal." Other ornithologists have confirmed this finding. In the 20th century, British zoologist VC Wynne-Edwards observed that after the Scottish red grouse lost a competition for territory with other red grouse, it would "become depressed and even die of depression." In human society, these birds show depression. And the trigger for their depression is the decline in social status.

Forty years ago, Belgian ornithologist and psychiatrist Albert Demaret saw similarities in the behavior of his patients and the birds he loved to study. He noticed that the proud struts of territorial birds reminded him of the hubris of his high-spirited patients, while other depressed patients behaved more like birds lurking in someone else's territory. These birds were evasive, timid, and quiet, afraid to sing loudly.

While we cannot possibly ask these birds how they feel about being dropped from a coveted position of privilege and pushed to the brink of danger, we cannot ask fish, lizards, or nonhuman mammals either.

But we can ask humans. Being insulted, humiliated, suffering financial loss, or experiencing a breakup can make us sad and depressed. Just the thought of a potentially embarrassing comment or situation can be enough to make us feel bad for a while. In extreme cases of status loss, the pain can be so severe that some people take extreme measures to relieve the pain, such as substance abuse and self-harm.

The emotional experience of human life may be unique to us, but the emotional brain is not. Many of the brain processes and chemicals that drive human emotions are also found in many species that have brain reward systems. We share these reward mechanisms with them. This mechanism works in a classic way of using rewards and punishments. Simply put, when we do something that is conducive to survival, we feel good. Our bodies release neurochemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins to tell us, "Well done! You just did the right thing. Keep doing it, and you will feel even better."

Down mood, in turn, is caused by a host of toxic neurochemicals, such as cortisol and adrenaline. The withdrawal of pleasure-producing neurotransmitters makes unpleasant feelings worse. We don’t know what other animals feel, and we may never know. But among us humans, we call these feelings down, or sadness. This chemical punishment motivates animals to regulate their behavior, to do things that restore and enhance their status.

In short, status enhancement increases an animal's chances of survival. When an animal's status rises, it in turn gets a chemical boost. In short, status enhancement produces pleasure.

Demotion does the opposite, which reduces the animal's chances of survival. When animals are demoted, they are punished with chemicals. In short, demotion produces pain.

Recent studies of the relationship between status and serotonin in species such as lizards, blue-spotted gobies, lobsters, crayfish, and rainbow trout, especially more studies on the relationship between serotonin and status, also suggest another possibility: serotonin levels do not control an animal's emotions. Serotonin, in conjunction with other neurotransmitters, is a signal of a change in an animal's status.

We can better understand adolescent and young adult behavior, mood swings, anxiety, and depression from the perspective of the status-emotion connection. For adolescents and young adults, public humiliation and other forms of social status loss can even increase the likelihood of suicide. Losing status is painful, as is living at the bottom of the social ladder when you are young.

During the wild growth period, adolescents become more sensitive to social status and experience more and more social difficulties, which may cause them to suffer from depression. 12 Social pain is extremely painful and should not be underestimated. Therefore, if you wonder why adolescents care so much about what others think, you are not only indifferent, but also ignorant. Because as a social animal, whether it is a human, a hyena or a lobster, during adolescence, the individual must be most concerned about understanding his or her social class through clues and paying close attention to what he or she can learn from it. When social status changes, experience intense feelings that are sometimes exciting and sometimes painful.

Social pain

Social pain: The unpleasant feeling that results from social exclusion or loss of social status.

This unpleasant feeling that accompanies a loss in social status is called social pain, and it has been studied extensively by Naomi Eisenberger, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the relationship between physical pain and the emotional pain that occurs when people are excluded.

In one study, her team performed brain imaging on adolescents as they played an online game that simulated social exclusion. The results showed that the neural pathways for physical pain and social pain are the same, and that adolescents feel particularly painful when facing social exclusion, but parents do not feel this. Therefore, adolescents may do things that their parents cannot understand because being excluded from the group is too painful.

Eisenberg has also linked social pain to opioid addiction and overdose. Of particular note, substance use and abuse are among the top health risks for adolescents and young adults, often beginning when adolescents first enter the high-stakes arena of social pecking order. When adolescents’ social brain networks are most sensitive to social status decline and social pain, they may use narcotics to suppress social pain.

In a related study, Eisenberg also noted that acetaminophen relieves not only physical pain but also social pain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) shows that social pain activates essentially the same brain regions and pathways as physical pain. One of the ways acetaminophen relieves pain is by activating mu-opioid receptors, which respond to THC, the active molecule in marijuana.

In addition to using drugs to relieve social pain, smoking and drinking are another way for teenagers to feel that their status has improved, because smoking usually means that the person is older in the group, and as mentioned above, social hierarchies tend to favor older group members.

Given the social pain caused by a decline in social status, adults who care about teens might consider talking openly about social status. Class and status are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and also trouble many teens. Therefore, asking questions about popularity and friendships may be more likely to elicit information about social pain than asking directly about emotions.

Target Animals

After about eight months in the communal den, Shlink, his twin sister, Prince Merigesh, and the rest of the pack enter the next, more independent stage of development. They begin to forage for their own food and form bonds with the other adults in the pack. You might think that as the adolescents get older, they'd have a little more autonomy in defining their rank, but on the contrary, this is a time when matriarchal intervention becomes more intense.

Even when their offspring are old enough to fight on their own, high-ranking mothers continue to intervene in conflicts between their offspring. Dominant females will push subordinates aside to let their offspring enjoy the kill first. They will also rush to their offspring's side when they are fighting with older hyenas to help them win.

Queen Mafuta's maternal intervention ensured that Merigeshe got everything he wanted. He ate well, slept well, and made the most popular friends, essentially avoiding the dreaded loser effect. The loser effect is something that hyena mothers instinctively know to be terrible. Once a winner wins, it tends to keep winning; likewise, once it loses, it tends to keep losing. Therefore, one way to train adolescents to consolidate their status is to promote the formation of the winner effect while avoiding the loser effect.

Winner effect: Animals that win in one fight are more likely to win in the next, and specific brain changes associated with increased competitiveness promote this tendency.

This ability is developed little by little. In the process, adolescents are vulnerable to becoming what is called a target animal, a person chosen by a dominant person for bullying. Low-ranking adolescents are especially likely to be targeted first because of physical or behavioral differences. Without allies to help, these low-ranking adolescents are almost inescapable of being bullied. Targeted adolescents experience frequent and sometimes brutal social defeat.

Target animal: An individual animal, usually a low-ranking or unsociable individual, that is singled out for bullying.

Scientists studied social defeat in mice. They found that losing a fight made them less aggressive and more likely to lose in subsequent fights. Over time, the loser effect caused lower-ranking animals to give up completely. They would not fight or socialize with animals of the same rank. Studies on lobsters have yielded similar results.

Being the target of bullying puts low-ranking teenagers like Shlink in a state of constant fear and danger. Without status, they can’t make friends, but without friends, they have a hard time moving up or keeping their status. A 13-year-old low-ranking hyena might say, “I’m depressed.”

In humans, severely depressed adolescents and young adults often feel helpless and hopeless, with little to no purpose in life. This phenomenon is actually the loser effect we have found in fish, birds, mammals and crustaceans.

Like humans, if lobsters and hyenas who have suffered successive social failures could express their feelings in words, they might use descriptions such as "low status and lack of worth," "no companions, isolated and helpless," and "the despair of never being able to win."

One of the criteria for major depression in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a loss of worth, and other sources on depression mention despair. The same is true for birds. In 1935, Kjeldrup-Ebe described the state of subordinate birds as "numbed by despair," while the state of dominant birds was "satisfied with extravagance."

Unlike adults, adolescents and young adults are often trapped in extremely toxic hierarchies. Legally, they must go to school, where they are teased or bullied. Socially and economically, they are tied to communities and families, where they are often ignored. There is really no escape for adolescents, or at least that’s how they feel.

Even though teenagers or young adults appear to be doing well, they can still be sad or even truly depressed. A person’s internal self-perception is likely to be very different from how others see them. Social experiences during adolescence shape an individual’s sense of their place in society, which sometimes carries over into adulthood. Even if they achieve success in life as adults, their happiness can be undermined by the lasting effects of the social failures of adolescence.

Yet some behaviors do seem to cause shifts in animal hierarchies. This should be of interest to parents, teachers, mental health professionals, and children themselves. In experiments on the stability of hierarchies, scientists have found that removing a subset of fish or monkeys from their native group and returning them to their group after a period of time can lead to a reordering of the community, a reshuffling of social hierarchies. A human analogy might be a student returning from a summer break to find their position in the group changed. This can be beneficial for a teen struggling at the bottom of the group because when they return they find themselves in a better position. But at the same time, teens who miss out on group activities can sometimes be pushed to the bottom. Almost anyone who has had this experience can attest to this.

Moreover, the expansion of physical space can sometimes break up fixed hierarchies. In late 2014, while traveling to Saskatchewan and spending the summer on the open pastures of Prince Albert National Park, we had the opportunity to observe a herd of Canadian bison being led into a large corral. We walked among these huge, beautiful animals, listening to their deep moans as they struggled through a muddy paddock. Suddenly, they all began to walk toward the water trough, quietly and obediently lining up.

The order in which they drank from the trough was not random. The dominant buffalo drank first, and then the dominant ones drank first. This linear hierarchy, which was not formed through violent struggle, was also seen when we visited the veterinary school and the dairy farm. There, the cows walked in groups to the milking stalls, and the dominant ones always went first.

Veterinarians who care for Saskatchewan bison tell us that watering hierarchies only emerge when the weather turns cooler each year and the animals are kept in high sheds. But in the spring, across the vast expanses of the national park, the hierarchy is no longer set in stone. Cattle of different hierarchies drink from the same lake. It seems that breaking up a rigid hierarchy may be as easy as walking out the door. The point is that when resources are scarce, hierarchies become rigid. Therefore, having enough personal space is a precious resource.

But even if the physical space can be improved and the teen successfully escapes a toxic group, a low-class self-perception can linger. The self-assessed hierarchies of school-age children are often accurate, but studies of adolescents with depression show that their perception of their own status is far lower than that of their peers. Many of them internally believe they are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The loser effect may begin with a physical contest with another person, but it stays in the mind of the loser, feeling defeated before even trying. The loser effect creates an identity, a lasting imprint. The effects are particularly strong during the wild formative years, a time when intense hierarchies are established, social experiments begin, and the brain is reorganized.

Feeling like a loser: Bullying

Bullying: Repetitive, aggressive behavior toward another individual.

Bullying is one of the most common triggers of depression in adolescents. Several studies have shown a strong link between being bullied and depression or anxiety. A 2005 study compared bullying rates among 11-, 13-, and 15-year-olds in 28 countries. The results showed that the data varied widely, with Lithuanian boys having the highest rates of bullying and Swedish girls having the lowest rates. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), about 20% of students in grades 9 to 12 in the United States report being victims of bullying. The institute has set up a special anti-bullying group as part of its Youth Health Task Force. According to the institute's definition, bullying is "unnecessary aggressive behavior toward another person or group." It can be physical, such as punching, kicking, and pushing, or behavioral, such as hiding, stealing, and damaging other people's property. Bullying can also be verbal, such as name calling, teasing, and spreading rumors or lies. Bullying can also be coercive, such as refusing to talk to someone or making them feel left out, or indirect, such as encouraging others to bully someone.

Although we have learned a lot about bullying in the past decade, we may not fully understand the complexity of human bullying without studying how it works in animals. We found that applying what animal behaviorists have long known about hierarchy in other species to understand human behavior can enhance our thinking about bullying and even potentially intervene in it. In our interdisciplinary research, we found three types of bullying in animals that are related to human behavior: dominance bullying, conformity bullying, and transference bullying.

◎ Dominant bullying

Dominance bullying is repetitive, aggressive behavior by high-ranking individuals in a group toward lower-ranking individuals in the group in order to demonstrate and strengthen their own high status and power.

The main reason animals bully is almost always to improve and maintain status. High-ranking animals are desperate to maintain their rank. Their bullying behavior is a display of dominance, a public performance in front of the community, the purpose of which is to reaffirm the bully's high status. Remember, status is a perception that requires the approval of others to gain and maintain, so bullies need an audience. If bystanders approve of the individual or group's dominance display, the bully will continue to be dominant. And usually, bystanders approve.

Bullies carefully select their victims. They do not choose their peers or rivals of equal power, but deliberately pick on individuals of lower rank. Compared with animals, there is one major difference in human dominance bullying: human attacks are not necessarily physical. The mental damage caused by humiliation and the fear caused by threats may be the weapons of human bullies.

Dominance displays are behaviors or behavioral signals that some individuals perform to demonstrate or strengthen their superior status over other individuals in the group.

As we’ve seen before with hyenas and primates, these dominant bullies, male or female, are sometimes groomed by bullying parents. They are trained from a young age to seize power. If another individual resists, they threaten, growl, or overreact. This early bullying learning is self-reinforcing: the more domineering an animal behaves, the more it is perceived as higher-ranking. Attacking the target animal not only provides practice experience for the young bully, but also a platform for education for the rest of the group. They can see firsthand how their status has fallen compared to this rising young elite.

Dominant bullies are scary and unpredictable because they need to constantly demonstrate their power. If the group does not give them enough attention, the bully will not hesitate to punish a weaker person in order to benefit from the audience effect, similar to killing a chicken to scare the monkey.

Audience effect: The attention of other group members influences the behavior of individual animals, especially in displays of dominance and dominance bullying.

Without community support, intergenerational bullying in tribes or ethnic groups is difficult to eradicate. But what is more noteworthy is that sometimes the behavior of the community allows genetic bullying to continue. For example, older, lower-ranking animals usually form alliances. They are eager to win the favor of the dominant group, and sometimes they win recognition by doing hard work or deliberately making things difficult for younger members of the same status. Most bystanders are reluctant to confront bullies, one reason being that they are afraid of becoming targets of bullying. But it is also possible that some unique characteristics of the bullied individuals pose a danger to the group and lower the group's status. Therefore, bystanders' reluctance to intervene may also be due to the consideration of avoiding abnormal individuals and avoiding being implicated by strange effects.

◎ Herd bullying

Conformer bullying: Repetitive, aggressive behavior by group members toward peers who appear or behave differently from the norm in order to avoid potential danger to the group and to avoid drawing unnecessary and harmful attention to the group.

We wondered if Shlink’s low-ranking status was affected by his “special” ear, which was bent to make him look a little different from the other hyenas. We asked Hener about this. He said Shlink’s “special” ear certainly had no effect on his status in the group, but it might have affected his personality or even his hearing. But since there hadn’t been any studies on this, he couldn’t say for sure. But Hener did say, to our surprise, that he had found a correlation between hyena status and the condition of their ears. “The highest-ranking females had much better ears than the lower-ranking ones,” he told us. He explained that hyenas go for their ears when they fight, and it’s not uncommon for ears to be shredded or bitten off completely during a fight. At critical moments, hyenas can get into dangerous situations if they don’t use their ears to show submission in time. Hener also mentioned that he had found a correlation between the number of scars on a hyena’s ears and status, but not a causal relationship.

Animals in a dominant position will choose to bully target animals with different appearances, and humans are no different. Appearance-based bullying is common among human adolescents, who will exclude, humiliate, and avoid individuals with certain physical or behavioral abnormalities. A 2018 report released by the nonprofit YouthTruth showed that 40% of middle school students said they had been bullied, with appearance-based bullying being the most common. This type of bullying is usually a way for dominant people to try to maintain power and status.

But there is another type of bullying that targets deviant individuals, namely conformist bullying. Conformist bullies often use social exclusion as a weapon of their threats. This type of bullying is fundamentally different from dominant bullying. Conformist bullies do not want to show off and improve their status by bullying others, but rather they try to protect themselves and the group by eliminating individuals who are different from the norm. Because being with the "weird member" will attract unwanted attention.

Like dominance, conformity has a strong and ancient evolutionary basis. As we saw in Part I, schools of fish, birds, and mammals are at greater risk of predation if they have members who look or behave unusually. You may remember that the oddball effect is the avoidance of a group member by an oddball, stemming from anti-predator behavior. Animals are particularly at risk when they are around other individuals who are oddly colored or behave strangely. They may learn that staying away from an oddball animal is a matter of life and death, fearing that they will become an easy target simply by getting close.

As social animals, humans, like sheep, cows or fish, also have some behavioral characteristics of other social animals. The strange effect may lead to herd bullying because individuals always try to avoid those who will bring them a risk of losing their social status.

Middle and high school bullies may exploit the group's instinctive tendency to conform by pointing out differences in the target individual, whether real, exaggerated, or fabricated. The most common is the spread of sexual rumors. Emphasizing the differences between the target individual and others in order to lower their status and alienate them is a process sociologists call alienation. Once an individual is alienated, most people are unlikely to support them and may even join the bully. The fear of being alienated further exacerbates conformity, which is real in adolescent groups and adult society.

Just like teenagers bullying, some political leaders will label certain groups to achieve the purpose of alienation. There are many similar examples in history. Nazi Germany portrayed Jews as pests that spread typhus, and Rwandan Hutus described Tutsis as diseased cockroaches. The target group is alienated into a threat to group security.

◎ Transfer bullying

Redirection bullying is aggressive behavior by the bullied toward other peers in order to divert the aggression.

Another view of bullies is that these intimidating people are actually victims themselves. Perhaps they have low self-esteem and take their frustration out on others. However, since most animal bullying is a display of dominance by higher-ranking animals over lower-ranking ones, and it is very rare for lower-ranking animals to attack higher-ranking ones, we think this type of victim-bullying may be a third type, called displacement bullying.

Unlike dominant bullying, which is based on confidence, diversionary bullying is based on anxiety and fear. To better understand how it works in human society, we can first look at how it works in dogs.

James Ha, an animal behaviorist at the University of Washington and an author with more than 40 years of experience interpreting animal behavior and helping clients understand their pets' puzzling behaviors, tells us that pet dogs sometimes launch unprovoked attacks. These unprovoked attacks are often launched by dogs that are otherwise well-behaved, but who have extremely anxious and have a history of being severely punished, sometimes even by human family members. These dogs are fearful, especially when faced with fearful humans, and sometimes bark, pounce, and bite. But these dogs never attack what they are truly afraid of. Instead, they attack innocent bystanders, usually the youngest member of the family or a smaller animal.

This aggressive behavior can become more intense when a dog's common anxiety triggers begin to accumulate and the dog feels it has no choice but to attack, a phenomenon James calls "trigger-stacking." A dog's anxiety triggers can be commonplace fireworks or thunder, or they can be unpredictable times or odd smells. But as the triggers stack, the dog may become more and more anxious until it starts to attack someone.

Displaced bullies do not adapt well to coercion, and overly strict training increases their fear and anxiety, which in turn makes them more aggressive. "We don't punish fear" is a phrase from equine behavior expert Robin Foster, because animals in fear not only cannot digest punishment, but it also strengthens the association between fear and aggression in their minds. In particular, when displaced bullying pops up during the sensitive developmental window of adolescence, it can become the default way for animals to cope with the anxiety of daily life. For example, dogs who are conditioned to associate fear with aggression will mistakenly believe that "if I act aggressively when I'm afraid, the scary thing will go away."

James believes that for dogs, a lack of socialization and not being around other dogs or people during a critical period of development is a major factor in the development of this behavior. The dogs most prone to anxiety aggression are those placed in shelters, and adolescent dogs are the most at risk. Especially when they are attacked by another dog there, they will develop symptoms that James calls "kennel syndrome." These dogs have their fear-based stress aggression ingrained, making them difficult to adopt. Dogs that are isolated, attacked, or severely punished during their teenage years will struggle with behavioral problems throughout their lives and have difficulty integrating into group life. With the help of medication and optimistic and patient owners, they can still recover, but they will never be able to live a truly happy and peaceful life.

The key point is that if anxiety begins during a critical period of development, such as adolescence, its effects may be more severe, last longer, and be more profound, and may even lead to changes in the brain or genes.

The brain of lower animals

In addition to emotions, status also affects learning ability. Bullied animals not only suffer a decline in status, but also suffer damage in other aspects. A study on mice demonstrated how a decline in status affects learning ability. The researchers first tested the maze learning ability of 18 mice, and then locked them up in pairs for 3 days. As a result, one mouse became the dominant one and the other became the subordinate one. When retested, the ability of the dominant one improved, but the opposite was true for the subordinate one. This result may be due to the fact that the performance of the dominant one was enhanced by higher testosterone levels, which is what we call the winner effect, or that the learning ability of the disadvantaged mice was impaired by higher stress hormone levels. In any case, this may be of great significance to teenagers who are working hard to study in a fierce competition. Because being in a disadvantaged position will affect their learning ability and test scores.

Another study on rhesus monkeys showed how status interferes with talent and learning performance. The researchers divided the monkeys into two groups, one consisting only of high-ranking maternal members and the other consisting of low-ranking members, and tested them separately. First, they were asked to pick peanuts from unfamiliar boxes, and the researchers would assess their ability to adapt to the environment and learn to pick peanuts. At the same time, some of these colored boxes contained peanuts and some contained stones, and the researchers would assess the monkeys' speed and ability to make the correct judgment, measured by the total number of peanuts recovered.

The monkeys were tested under two different conditions: one in the presence of only peers of the same rank, and another in the presence of a mix of higher- and lower-rank peers. Monkeys from high-ranking families performed well in both conditions, but low-ranking monkeys performed well only when the high-ranking monkeys were not present. The researchers suggest that the low-ranking monkeys may have been intentionally suppressing their performance, a conscious act of "dumbing down." This may be an extension of classic subordinate behavior, which helps to de-escalate conflict and avoid aggression from dominant individuals. However, this response is likely embedded in our social brains as well. For example, think about how it feels to concentrate on a conversation when you are in the same room with a celebrity or a bully, or when a competitor is staring at you while you are doing a mental task. If you have ever experienced this, you can understand how powerful this effect can be.

It is critical for educators and students to recognize that differences in status can undermine learning and academic achievement. For example, an elementary school teacher may understand why some children are smart but cannot understand a concept, and a middle school teacher may understand why some students cannot write on a test even though they have learned it. In addition, clubs and societies in schools should also recognize that when clubs and societies exclude people of different races, genders, and socioeconomic levels, they create a social hierarchy that affects the learning ability, academic achievement, and future opportunities of those excluded group members.

About the author and translator

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, a visiting professor at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and an authority in the field of evolutionary medicine research.

Katherine Powers is an editor at The Atlantic, a writer and producer at CNN International, and a licensed animal behavior trainer.

Su Yanjie is a professor at the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Peking University, a fellow of the American Psychological Association, and the leader of the expert group for the "Adolescence Education" project of the China Children and Teenagers' Foundation.

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