Every high school year group features the token bully, if not several. If you think back to the nostalgic ‘glory days’, their looming figures are present in the shadows. If this does not strike a chord with you, perhaps you were the one turning people upside down to harvest their lunch money. According to science, this indicates you were more sexually active than your kind-hearted comrades.
It is popular belief that the motivation behind bullying stems from insecurity. If that is actually the case, this new study indicates that it does not seem to influence the productivity of their sex lives in the slightest. The research was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychological Science proposes that mean-spirited individuals have more sexual partners than their kinder counterparts. Time to start slinging insults at your co-workers!
Scientists hailing from the University of Windsor in Canada explored the personality variances that lead individuals to be more likely to intimidate other people when searching for potential hook-ups. The researchers enlisted 144 older teenage participants, with a median age of about 18, and 396 more youthful volunteers, with a median age between 14 and 15.
Individuals were instructed to complete a survey regarding their character traits, which entailed queries about their ability to collaborate with other parties and their inclination to take advantage of and act hostile towards others. This method of questioning was how the researchers determined how friendly, emotionally intelligent, truthful and modest the subjects were. This relied on the volunteers being capable of self-analysis, of course. It is possible they altered their answers to make themselves sound more good-willed than they actually were.
Participants with low marks were determined to be bullies, and were more liable to use intimidating methods to chase after people they were sexually intrigued by. In addition to this, people more prepared to behave this way were discovered to engage in more sexy times in comparison to their wholesome comrades.
“Younger adolescents lower in ‘honesty-humility’ may therefore strategically manipulate others in a variety of ways to obtain more sexual partners,” relayed Daniel Provenzano, the lead researcher of the survey. “Our findings indirectly suggest that exploitative adolescents may have more sexual partners if they are able to strategically use exploitative behaviour like bullying to target weaker individuals.”
It was determined that individuals on the negative end of the honesty-humility gauge could use harassment as a method to demonstrate their superiority and authority, Provenzano commented. They may discover it’s an effective technique to make their competitors appear feeble in comparison, giving them the upper hand.
“Our results suggest that both research and intervention efforts with older and younger adolescents need to recognise and respond to the relationships between personality, sex and bullying,” the lead writer continued.
There you have it folks, people who are more willing to exploit others for personal gain benefit from a sexual overload. That means it’s time to put yourself out there and start undoing all those years of kindness and paying it forward. If you wish to read the study for yourself, it is available here.