MoMA R&D
Salon 50 The Age of the Bully
Introduction: Paola Antonelli
Simon DeDeo
Betsy Levy Paluck
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Damian Norfleet
Steven Donziger
Alex Gibney
Q&A
Video Contribution: Cassie McMillan
Video Contribution: Robert Faris
Video Contribution: Mary Anne Franks
Video Contribution: Robert Bilott
We live in the Age of the Bully. No longer memories confined to our childhood schoolyards, they are all around us. Bullying is not a phenomenon that plagues children or humans alone, but is a fact of all social life across species, ages, and cultures. At its core, it is an exercise in power—a method to elevate one’s rank by diminishing further that of other, much less powerful, individuals. Bullies display force and dare others not to flinch. They become the arbiters of inclusion and exclusion, setting and solidifying social and political norms to the detriment of those that do not conform to their vision or interests. They can be CEOs, presidents, mean girls, or hedge fund managers.
Though the trope of standing up to a bully makes for a compelling narrative, substantive change requires dismantling the systems that got them there in the first place. This is no simple task. Today we face bullies that have come to occupy, control, and often even subvert the institutions that traditionally existed to protect us.
Some of the questions that we ask include: How do you spot a bully? How do you stand up to them? Why does our social system reward this kind of behavior? Do bully-proof societies or places exist? Are there bully stereotypes? Are the bullies that evade those stereotypes more dangerous? Does gender play a role? Are female bullies less common, or do we notice them less? Does the detection of bullying behavior change across cultures? Is there bullying in the animal world? Is bullying an active choice or an inescapable psychological trait? Can you hide it? Is there such a thing as a good bully? Can there be an upside? How has our understanding of and opinion toward bullying changed over time?
This Salon took place on September 30th, 2024.
Speakers
-
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and other fellowships, an advisor to Protect Democracy, and an MSNBC opinion columnist. She appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other networks. Her latest book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020; paperback with a new epilogue, 2021), examines how illiberal leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century. She is also a consultant for businesses, civil society organizations, and television and film productions, including Guillermo del Toro’s Academy Award-winning 2022 movie Pinocchio and the 2024 Netflix docuseries Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial.
-
Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the research strategies of Charles Darwin, the insurgency of modern-day Afghanistan, the emergent bureaucracy of Wikipedia, the creation of power hierarchies among the social animals, and the collusions and conspiracies of petrol stations in the American Midwest. They combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve.
-
Steven Donziger
Steven Robert Donziger is an American attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador.
-
Alex Gibney
Alex Gibney is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning writer, producer, and director. His works include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2007, among many others.
-
Betsy Levy Paluck
Two basic ideas motivate Betsy Levy Paluck’s research. The first idea is that social psychological theory offers potentially useful tools for changing society in constructive ways. The second idea is that studying attempts to change society is one of the most fruitful ways to develop and assess social psychological theory. Much of my work has focused on prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction, using large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions. Levy-Paluck is a professor in the department of psychology and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she also serves as deputy director of the Center for Behavioral Science & Policy.
-
Damian Norfleet
Damian Norfleet is an interdisciplinary performer-composer-improviser. Damian has performed at Lincoln Center, Roulette, National Sawdust, New York Society for Ethical Culture, Kaufman Music Center, The Times Center, and multiple Off-Broadway theaters.
Video Contributors
-
Robert Bilott
Robert Bilott is an American environmental attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio. Bilott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs injured by chemical waste dumped in rural communities in West Virginia. He is a partner at Taft Law Firm.
-
Robert Faris
For the past decade, Robert Faris has been using social network analysis to figure out why teens bully each other, drink and do drugs, and engage in dating violence. Two of these projects led to Emmy-winning collaborations with Anderson Cooper 360, with one focusing on bullying (with Diane Felmlee in 2011), and the other on social media (#Being13, with Marion Underwood in 2015). Much of his research is based on the Contexts study, a North Carolina-based panel survey of adolescents and their social networks that followed over 8,000 adolescents from middle school through high school, with seven waves of data collected between 2003 and 2007.
-
Mary Anne Franks
Dr. Mary Anne Franks is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at the George Washington University Law School. She is an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. Her other areas of expertise include family law, criminal law, criminal procedure, First Amendment law, and Second Amendment law.
-
Cassie McMillan
Cassie McMillan’s research applies a social networks perspective to disentangle how our connections both reproduce and challenge systems of social inequality. She is interested in developing statistical and computational methodologies that can better address these questions and applying these techniques to study adolescent delinquency, health, and immigration. In a current research project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she is examining how network ties that persist from adolescence to adulthood shape trajectories of tobacco, alcohol, and substance use across the life course. Results from this work will uncover new insight about the ways social network structures inform disparities in substance misuse and recovery. Other recent projects consider how normative school transitions impact youth friendship and crime, as well as the connection between adolescents’ networks and their experiences with bullying and interpersonal aggression.
Reading List
BULLYING IN NATURE
Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. (Available online)
Brosnan, Sarah F. “A comparative perspective on the human sense of justice.” Evolution and Human Behavior 44, no. 3 (May 2023): 242-249. (Available online)
DeDeo, Simon and Elizabeth A. Hobson. “From equality to hierarchy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118, no. 21, (May 25, 2021). (Available online)
Hobson, Elizabeth A., Dan Mønster, and Simon DeDeo. “Aggression heuristics underlie animal dominance hierarchies and provide evidence of group-level social information.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118, no. 10 (March 3, 2021). (Available online)
Kish, Stacy. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T in the Animal Kingdom.” Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. March 22, 2021. (Available online)
de Waal, Frans. “The surprising science of alpha males | Frans de Waal.” TED. July 9, 2018. (Watch online)
BULLYING AMONG CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
Bennett, Jessica. “‘Mean Girls’ Has Lost Its Bite. Girls Haven’t.” The New York Times. February 1, 2024. (Available online)
Blow, Charles M. “The Bleakness of the Bullied.” The New York Times. October 14, 2011. (Available online)
Faris, Robert. “With Friends Like These: Aggression from Amity and Equivalence.” American Journal of Sociology Volume 126 Number 3 (November 2020): 673–713. (Available online)
The Learning Network. “What Students Are Saying About Bullying Today.” The New York Times. March 21, 2024. (Available online)
Paluck, Elizabeth Levy, Shephard, Hana, and Peter M. Aronow. “Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113, no. 3, (January 4, 2016): 566-571. (Available online)
Reeve, Elspeth. “The Most Popular Kids Are Like Benign Dictators.” The Atlantic. February 15, 2011. (Available online)
Seligson, Hannah. “When Mean Girls Grow Up.” The New York Times. January 24, 2024. (Available online)
(Forthcoming) Taylor, Jonathan. A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons. Goldsmiths Press: 2024.
DICTATORS, TYRANTS, AND AUTOCRATS
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. (Available online)
de Benedetti, Francesca. “Giorgia Meloni is Orbánizing the European Union.” Jacobin. February 29, 2024. (Available online)
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Ritual Humiliation: The Favorite Sport of Autocrats.” Lucid. February 14, 2024. (Available online)
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Introduction” & “Conclusion.” Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. W.W. Norton & Company: 2020. (Available here)
Elliott, Philip. “Donald Trump Has Only One Debate Mode: Bullying.” Time Magazine. June 26, 2024. (Available online)
Gerhardt, Michael. “Trump’s Constitutional Bullying Is a Threat to Our Democratic Safeguards.” Time Magazine. February 11, 2024. (Available online)
McGann, Paul, host. Real Dictators. Podcast. 2020 - ongoing. (Available to stream)
Riaz, Ali. “The Remarkable Downfall of Bangladesh’s Iron Lady.” Foreign Affairs. August 6, 2024. (Available online)
Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960. (Available online)
Schmitt, Carl. Dictatorship. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013. Originally published 1921. (Available online)
Wood, James. “It’s Still Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain.” The New Yorker. November 25, 2019. (Available online)
Yapparova, Lilia. “Putin is Doing Something Almost Nobody is Noticing.” The New York Times. September 23, 2024. (Available online)
Zhisui, Li. The Private Life of Chairman Mao. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. (Available online)
OTHER BULLYING TYPES
Chiu, Rowena. “I Was a Celebrity Assistant. The Power Imbalance Is Very Real.” The New York Times. August 21, 2024. (Available online)
Dias, Isabela. “The Bureaucrat Who Could Make Trump’s Authoritarian Dreams Real.” Mother Jones. November + December 2024. (Available online)
Farrow, Ronan. “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories.” The New Yorker. October 10, 2017. (Available online)
Fazal, Tanisha M. “The Power of Principles.” Foreign Affairs. July/August 2024. (Available online)
Gessen, M. “The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar.” The New Yorker. April 15, 2019. (Available online)
Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accussers for Decades.” The New York Times. October 5, 2017. (Available online)
Rawlinson, Kevin. “‘A monster’: lawyers for Mohamed Al Fayed’s alleged victims liken case to Savile.” The Guardian. September 20, 2024. (Available online)
Vesoulis, Abby. “Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover.” Mother Jones. January + February 2024. (Available online)
Yarhi-Milo, Keren. “The Credibility Trap: Is Reputation Worth Fighting For?” Foreign Affairs. June 18, 2024. (Available online)
TOO BIG TO FIGHT (AGAINST)?
Caldwell, Christopher. “The U.S. Has a New Set of Tools for Bullying the World.” The New York Times. October 4, 2023. (Available online)
Chang, Agnes, Elemia, Camille, and Muyi Xiao. “China’s Risky Power Play in the South China Sea.” The New York Times. September 15, 2024. (Available online)
Cooper, Sean Patrick. “Noisy, Hungry Data Centers Are Catching Communities by Surprise.” The New York Times. September 15, 2024. (Available online)
Horton, David. “Accidental Arbitration.” Washington University Law Review 102, (forthcoming 2025). (Available online)
New York City Bar Association. “Report on the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk Policy.” April 30, 2013. (Available online)
Palma, Stefania, Morris, Stephen, and Daria Mosolova. “Can anyone stop Google’s illegal monopoly?” Financial Times. August 9, 2024. (Available online)
Reed, Rachel. “Does signing up for Disney+ mean you can never sue The Walt Disney Company?” Harvard Law Today. August 19, 2024. (Available online)
Roberts, Nina. “‘Trademark bully’: Momofuku turns up heat on others selling ‘chili crunch.’” The Guardian. April 4, 2024. (Available online)
Toobin, Jeffrey. “Rights and Wrongs.” The New Yorker. May 20, 2013. (Available online)
Vitug, Marites Dañguilan. “America and the Philippines Should Call China’s Bluff.” Foreign Affairs. September 18, 2024. (Available online)
Weiser, Benjamin, and Maria Cramer. “N.Y.P.D. Unwilling to Impose Discipline for Stop-and-Frisk, Report Says.” The New York Times. September 23, 2024. (Available online)
Xiao, Muyi and Agnes Chang. “China’s Great Wall of Villages.” The New York Times. August 10, 2024. (Available online)
CLIMATE JUSTICE AND CORPORATE BULLIES
Bragman, Walker and David Sirota. “The Government Gave Big Oil the Power to Prosecute Its Biggest Critic.” The American Prospect. July 14, 2020. (Available online)
Brockovich, Erin. “This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron – but he’s in jail.” The Guardian. February 9, 2022. (Available online)
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin: 1962. (Excerpt available online)
Donziger, Steven. “First Days of Freedom: Deep Emotions, Heartbreak, and an Outpouring of Support.” Donziger on Justice. May 6, 2022. (Available online)
Guha, Ramachandra. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. University of California Press: 2000. (Available online)
Harr, Jonathan. A Civil Action. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: 1996. (Available online)
Lerner, Sharon. “The Teflon Toxin: Part 1, How DuPont Slipped Past the EPA,” “The Teflon Toxin: Part 2, The Case Against DuPont,” “The Teflon Toxin: Part 3, Dupont and the Chemistry of Deception.” The Intercept. August 11, 2015. (Available here)
Rich, Nathaniel. “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.” The New York Times Magazine. January 6, 2016. (Available here)
Taylor, Dorceta. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. NYU Press: June 2014. (Available online)
BULLYING GONE VIRAL
Franks, Mary Anne. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape: Deep Fakes and Free Speech Delusions.” Maryland Law Review 78, no. 4, (2019). (Available online)
“Monica Lewinsky and Jon Ronson on How Social-Media Shaming Turns Us All into Bullies.” Vanity Fair. March 31, 2015. (Available online)
Monin, Benoît and Takuya Sawaoka. “The Paradox of Viral Outrage.” Association for Psychological Science 29, no. 10 (August 2018). (Available online)
Patel, Vimal. “At UChicago, a Debate Over Free Speech and Cyberbullying.” The New York Times. July 5, 2023. (Available online)
Ronson, Jon. “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life.” The New York Times Magazine. February 12, 2015. (Available online)
Ronson, Jon. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2015. (Available online)
STANDING UP TO BULLIES
Anonymous and Labarre, Susanne. “Why I started A ‘Shitty Architecture Men’ List.” Fast Company. March 3, 2018. (Available online)
Baker, Katie J. M. “How a Trump-Beating, #MeToo Legal Legend Lost Her Firm.” The New York Times. June 28, 2024. (Available online)
Brown, Anna. “More Than Twice as Many Americans Support Than Oppose the #MeToo Movement.” Pew Research Center. September 29, 2022. (Available online)
Frankel, Jay. “The Narcissistic Dynamics of Submission: The Attraction of the Powerless to Authoritarian Leaders.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 82, (2022): 384-404. (Available here)
Fry, Naomi. “Nan Goldin’s Art, Addiction, and Activism in ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.’” The New Yorker. December 3, 2022. (Available online)
Gessen, M. “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” The New York Review. November 10, 2016. (Available online)
Gessen, M. Surviving Autocracy. London: Granta Publications, 2020.
Nicas, Jack. “How Do You Topple a Strongman?” The New York Times. August 4, 2024. (Available online)
Onabanjo, Oluremi C. “The Storyteller.” LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity. Museum of Modern Art, 2024. (Available here)
Rosin, Hanna. “Laughing at Trump.” The Atlantic. August 29, 2024. (Available online)
FILMS AND SERIES –– JUST A SMATTERING…
Armstrong, Jesse, creator. Succession. HBO. June 3, 2018 – May 28, 2023.
Berlinger, Joe, director. Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. Netflix. 2024.
Dinklage, Peter, narrator. How to Become a Tyrant. Netflix. 2021.
Gibney, Alex. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Magnolia Pictures, 2005. 1 hr., 50 min.
Gibney, Alex. Taxi to the Dark Side. ThinkFilm, 2008. 1 hr., 46 min.
Gibney, Alex. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. Magnolia Pictures, 2010. 1 hr., 58 min.
Gibney, Alex. Steve Bartman: Catching Hell. ESPN Films, 2011. 1 hr., 42 min.
Gibney, Alex. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Jigsaw Pictures, Global Produce, Universal Pictures, 2013. 2 hr., 10 min.
Gibney, Alex. The Armstrong Lie. Sony Pictures Classics. 2 hr., 4 min.
Gibney, Alex. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. HBO Films, Inc. and HBO Documentary Films, 2015. 2 hr.
Gibney, Alex. Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Magnolia Pictures, 2015. 2 hr., 8 min.
Gibney, Alex. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. HBO, 2019. 1 hr., 59 min.
Gibney, Alex. The Forever Prisoner. HBO, 2021. 1 hr., 59 min.
Haynes, Todd. Dark Waters. Focus Features, 2019. 2 hr., 6 min.
Koppelman, Brian, Levien, David, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, creators. Billions. Best Available! And TBTF Productions Inc. January 17, 2016 – October 29, 2023.
Larraín, Pablo. No. Participant Media, 2012. 1 hr., 58 min.
de Palma, Brian. Carrie. Metro-Goldwin-Mayer and United Artists, 1976. 1 hr., 38 min.
Poitras, Laura. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Neon, 2022. 2 hr., 2 min.
Soderbergh, Steven. Erin Brockovich. Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, 2000. 2 hr., 11 min.
Stevenson, Mark, director. The Dictator’s Playbook. PBS. 2019.
Tracy, Will, writer. The Regime. Directed by Stephen Frears and Jessica Hobbs. Aired March 3 to April 27, 2024.
Waters, Mark, director. Mean Girls. Paramount Pictures, 2004. 1 hr., 38 min.