Understanding Bullying: Exploring Human Perception

Although we only occasionally exchange words through posts, and I don’t know how difficult your life is, I still want to talk about how I understand bullying. I’m not saying these things out of pity, and I don’t think you want to be pitied, either. I want to discuss people’s likes and dislikes and how they lead to bullying.

First, likes and dislikes are subjective. Whether one person likes or dislikes another is a result of mental processes; the same goes for whether someone likes themselves. So, discussing how the mind works is an important part of understanding relationships, which was one purpose of my previous article, “Thinking, Attention and Decoding.” I interpreted mental processes through selective attention and decoding in that earlier article.

Since selective attention is important, what do people usually pay attention to? I believe that comparisons are important to a group of people. People often easily discuss who is “better” in terms of popularity. However, the objects of attention and the effects are likes and dislikes, and this self-referential loop lacks information. There is fundamental randomness when we use others’ opinions as a reference to perceive ourselves.

Our self-awareness will be somewhat uncertain based on decoding and thinking with noisy information. When the groups of people we interact with allow more speculation to fill in the missing information, the feedback we receive becomes more chaotic and crazy. As a countermeasure, being rational about things is a stable strategy for maintaining self.

Sometimes, trying to find order in chaos to soothe oneself can be perceived as cold or numb. This is easily seen in groups of people who are good at speculating. Although I don’t know if you call yourself cold-blooded in this context, that’s been my experience.

This article is for you as much as it is for me. Even though I’m unsure if being prone to reflection is innate or acquired, since reflection brings peace of mind, I will share my entanglements and reflections with my friends.