The Culture of Cruelty: What being bullied taught me about power, bystanders, and social bravery
When I was twelve years old, I was the most academically successful student in my classroom for a long while.
Getting into our school was kind of a big deal. In Turkey’s high-stakes education system, we had all spent two grueling years — from nine to eleven years old — studying for a nationwide standardized test. We spent our weekdays, weekends, and endless hours at school, in cram schools and at home with private tutors to earn our seats. Everyone in that building was ambitious. Everyone had paid their dues.
I wasn’t a genius, but I genuinely loved English and languages in general (still do), and our first year curriculum was heavily built around learning English. So I studied like a maniac with love, and I excelled.
For a couple of twelve-year-olds in my class, seeing someone at the top was hard to swallow. They started picking on me, specifically targeting my sense of humor. I’ve always used humor to stay lighthearted — it’s in fact something people have always complimented me on — but back then, they turned it into a weapon. What made it worse was a Turkish literature teacher who joined in, mocking me alongside them. Looking back, he was probably grasping for power or control in the room by tearing down a top student.
I was twelve. It hurt deeply. I had no idea who to talk to, and no one had ever taught me what to do.
Instead, I put up a shield. I told myself that if I pretended not to care, if I showed zero reaction, they would get bored and stop. I instinctively relied on an idea I didn't yet have the words for: the best revenge is success. I focused on my studies, on learning, on progress. Looking back, I’m proud of that twelve-year-old. My strategy actually worked — eventually, they stopped bullying me. They got no reaction - I wasn't fazed, so it was no longer fun. was relieved, and I moved on. But I never forgot how vulnerable and isolated I felt. Nor did I ever forget the one classmate who got furious on my behalf, stepping up to defend me and telling them to go f*** themselves — risking her own neck just to stand by mine.
(Now, when I walk through my daughter's school and see posters on the wall explaining what bullying looks like, with step-by-step instructions on what to do if it happens to you or if you watch it happen to someone else, I feel genuinely heartened)
Many years later, when I joined Google, a version of the same thing played out. Google is a place people work extremely hard to get into, and it fills up with high achievers who are used to being the best in whatever room they walk into. Put enough of those people together and being at the top stops being available to most of them. At that point there is a choice. Work harder, or try to reduce the person who is performing - a.k.a. go bully on them. Google used to have a motto: “Don’t be evil.” This is what evil looks like.
Despite joining after another peer, I quickly achieved the best performance numbers on the team. Predictably, the bullying started. A couple of people initiated it, others joined in for status, and most turned a blind eye - a silence that made them just as complicit.
Then one day a colleague who had more status and seniority than all of us pulled me aside and said: "I see what's happening. You’re not talking or complaining about it, but they are talking about you all the time. They are spreading blatant lies about you behind your back."
I knew they were. And make no mistake: it bothered me deeply. They were lying. They were deliberately excluding me. They were deliberately trying to hide my work and discredit me.
And I was angry. Hurt, too. But I remember looking at my colleague and saying:
“I think — and hope — justice will serve in the end. The truth will come out. I can let them consume my energy, or I can put that energy into what actually matters: my work, my career, and the people who genuinely care about me. And if someone is willing to believe them, or give them credit for something they didn't earn, then they probably aren't someone whose friendship I need anyway.” I couldn't control what they said about me. I could control how much of my life I allowed it to take. Haters hate. You just need to shake them off.
I got promoted in that team despite all of it. And then I left. I had had enough. Not because they had 'won', but because I no longer wanted to spend my energy surviving a toxic environment.
I survived both experiences by out-performing the hostility and putting my head down. But as I look back at them now, especially as a coach, I realize something critical:
Targets shouldn't have to rely on sheer endurance to survive cruelty.
It's not always possible to put your head down and keep performing. You don't always have the confidence, support system, seniority, financial security, personality, or sheer stubbornness to absorb months or years of being undermined. Some people leave. Some lose their confidence. Some stop speaking up. Some lose opportunities they deserved. And some develop serious mental health problems.
We shouldn't romanticize resilience when what someone really needed was for the bullying to stop - and for the people doing it to be held accountable.
Amy Cuddy: The Rise, The Attacks, and the Research
My story is far from unique. In fact, it mirrors the exact machinery that caught Amy Cuddy.
In 2012, Amy Cuddy gave a TED talk on "power posing" that turned her into a global icon. Watched over 75 million times, it remains the third-most-viewed TED talk in history.
Then came the aftermath. Cuddy became the target of a sustained, highly public, and deeply personal campaign aimed at discrediting her work and dismantling her professional reputation. The dynamic was vicious, but the professional behavior inside her own academic field was worse. She quietly stepped back from the public eye.
She didn't disappear to hide. She disappeared to study the exact machine that had rolled over her.
Now, Cuddy has emerged with answers. Ahead of her major new book — Bullied: The Culture of Cruelty and the Surprising Power of Social Bravery — she took the stage at TED2026 to deliver a grounded talk: "How bullying spreads, and how social bravery stops it."
Instead of delivering a dry academic lecture, Cuddy uses research and experience to diagnose a modern epidemic: adult bullying has become a self-sustaining cultural mechanism — one where public humiliation is rewarded with clout, status, and institutional power.
What a Bully Actually Is
A useful definition comes from Dan Olweus, the pioneer of bullying research: bullying is repeated aggressive behavior against a target who cannot readily defend themselves.
Three elements must be present simultaneously:
Repetition
Intent
A Power Imbalance
Remove the power imbalance, and you have a conflict between equals. Remove the repetition, and you have a single bad day.
Cuddy’s central point is that adult bullying has escalated sharply over the last fifteen years. Public degradation has morphed into social entertainment. Cruelty now earns attention, status, belonging, and power.
The data confirms this shift. The Workplace Bullying Institute’s national surveys show the share of American adults reporting direct experience with abusive conduct at work rising from 30% in 2021 to 32.3% in 2024 — representing roughly 52.2 million workers.
What Bullies Want, and How They Think
Bullies operate from a zero-sum worldview: another person doing well is experienced as a direct loss to themselves.
Confidence gets misread as arrogance.
Competence gets framed as showing off.
Someone else's success feels like an implicit accusation about their own standing, and tearing that person down feels easier than improving themselves.
Crucially, bullies don't want what you have nearly as much as they want you not to have it.
This distinction matters because it explains why appeasement fails. Working harder, being nicer, or shrinking your presence will never satisfy a bully, because there is no reasonable threshold to reach. Your diminishment is the goal, and it is also the reward.
Because sitting alone in that bitter worldview is uncomfortable, bullies recruit accomplices. On TED's Fixable podcast, Cuddy detailed how this recruitment works: bullies rarely lead with explicit aggression. Instead, they frame the target as a "threat to the group's standards" or "culture" first. They then confer status on anyone who validates or amplifies their attacks, delegating the hostility until a small group carries out the agenda for them. The primary bully gets to play the role of a righteous guardian of standards rather than an aggressor.
It Is Cruelty, and It Is Deliberate
We need to say this plainly, because corporate language is consistently too soft. We call it a "personality clash," a "communication style issue," or a "difficult stakeholder dynamic." HR labels it "interpersonal friction." Bullying routinely gets translated into the vocabulary of process problems — which protects the institution while isolating the person on the receiving end.
What is happening is cruelty, and it is entirely deliberate:
The sudden exclusion from a meeting is a decision.
The subtle tone shift when the target speaks is a decision.
The credit reassigned in front of peers, the unanswered email, or the public correction that could have been delivered privately — all deliberate decisions.
The precision gives it away. Bullies are careful about who is in the room. They rarely behave this way in front of people with more power than them, proving the behavior is under full control.
Cuddy’s account of how a campaign begins highlights a dynamic most people miss: it starts with a small test. A remark that could be read two ways, delivered in front of others — nothing that would survive being formally reported. The point of the test is to gauge the room's reaction, specifically whether anyone objects. Silence is taken as permission, and the next boundary push is slightly larger. By the time the behavior is obvious enough that people agree it's a problem, the norm has already shifted.
In her writing, Cuddy is direct about self-doubt: most people who feel they are being bullied are, in fact, being bullied.
Bullying Is a Group Activity
The core thesis of Cuddy's work is that a bully acting alone has almost no power. Bullying requires recruits and an audience; it spreads because the people standing around stay quiet. Every silent person makes the next act of cruelty cheaper to execute.
School-based research illustrates this clearly. In the Finnish research underpinning the KiVa program, bystanders are sorted into four roles:
Assistants who help the bully directly.
Reinforcers who laugh or watch.
Outsiders who disengage and look away.
Defenders who step in and intervene.
When bystanders reinforce or stay neutral, bullying increases. When they defend, it drops sharply. Observational research on school playgrounds found that when a bystander intervenes, the abusive behavior stops within 10 seconds in over 50% of incidents.
This puts the leverage on everyone else in the room rather than the bully. Cuddy calls this necessary intervention social bravery: the willingness of ordinary people to refuse to go along, to move toward someone when everyone else is pulling away, and to act before cruelty hardens into culture.
The Banality of Evil
In her research, Cuddy addresses the question that haunted her during her own experience: How do ordinary, well-meaning people become passive or active participants in extraordinary cruelty?
Drawing on psychology, sociology, history, and ethology, the book outlines five core insights:
Bullying is never just one person's doing. Neutrality is not a passive stance; it is an active choice with real consequences.
The escalation arc is predictable. Cruelty follows a distinct path, from the initial quiet test to the target's eventual disappearance or resignation.
Denial hands power to the aggressor. We naturally struggle to believe what we are seeing, and that hesitation buys the bully time to solidify their narrative.
Culture is shifted by small minorities. You don't need the entire room to take a stand; you only need a few people willing to disrupt the pattern.
Social bravery is a collective practice. Reframing courage from an isolated individual risk into a coordinated group effort makes intervention actionable and safe.
Three Practical Strategies
There are plenty of different opinions about how to respond to bullying. For me, three things consistently matter:
1. Break the secrecy early.
Bullying thrives in silence. Tell someone you trust. If you're a child, tell a parent, teacher, counselor or another adult. At work, tell someone who has the credibility and authority to help — a manager, HR, a trusted senior colleague or mentor. They have a responsibility to take it seriously, not tell you to “just be strong.”
And if you see it happening to someone else, don't wait for them to come forward. You can be the person who says, “I've noticed what's happening. Are you okay?” You can also be the person who escalates it.
I learned this later in my career. Once I'd experienced bullying myself, I became much quicker at spotting it. And when I saw it happening, I called it out. I talked to people. I also talked to the people trying to start bullying me or others around me. And every time I addressed it, I was very direct: Nice try. It's not going to work. Cut it.
And it stopped. Immediately. The bully was called out - power was taken before they could claim any. That matters. You don't always have to wait until the situation becomes unbearable before doing something about it.
2. Build a factual record.
Don't rely on memory when you're dealing with a sustained pattern of exclusion, intimidation or undermining. Keep a contemporaneous record of what happened, when it happened, who was present, what was said or done, and what the impact was. Keep relevant documentation and communications where appropriate and within the rules of your organization or school. Patterns are much harder to dismiss when they are documented.
3. Decide your line in advance.
When you're in the middle of it, it's surprisingly difficult to know when enough is enough. So decide in advance what your line is.
What would make you escalate? When would you move your child to another class or school? When would you leave a team or organization? What support would you need to do that?
Resilience does not mean tolerating unlimited harm. Sometimes the most resilient decision is to leave.
4. Lead by example.
This might be the most important one. Don't be a bully yourself. And don't stand by while someone else bullies another person. One of the things I've learned is that bullies aren't necessarily horrible to everyone. Sometimes they're perfectly pleasant to you. They may even be charming, helpful or funny. If you're not the target, you can convince yourself that what you're seeing isn't really happening.
That's part of how the dynamic works. You may also be tempted to stay quiet because the bully is useful to you, senior to you, popular, or simply nice to you. But you don't get to separate the person from the behavior when someone else is being harmed.
And don't confuse their aggression with strength. Bullying is a way of gaining power without earning it. Instead of competing through competence, contribution, relationships or performance, the bully tries to reduce the person they perceive as a threat.
Once you see that for what it is, some of the mystique disappears. It isn't strength. It's a social strategy built on putting someone else down. And it only works when other people allow it to work.
That is why leading by example matters. Give credit. Don't join the gossip. Don't laugh along. Don't pile on. Interrupt the joke. Ask the uncomfortable question. Stand beside the person who has been isolated. You don't have to be a hero. You just have to refuse to become part of the evil-doing.
What Social Bravery Looks Like at Work
Social bravery doesn't usually require a dramatic confrontation. Often, it looks like very small acts:
Giving credit to the person whose idea was just repeated by someone else.
Asking, “Can we let her finish?” when someone is interrupted.
Refusing to participate in gossip designed to undermine someone.
Asking why someone has been left out of a meeting or project.
Checking in privately with the person being targeted.
Saying, “That's not how I experienced it,” when someone is being unfairly described.
Telling a manager when you see a pattern rather than waiting for the target to complain.
None of these actions is heroic on its own. But collectively, they change the social environment in which bullying can thrive. Because bullying doesn't only depend on the person doing it. It depends on the audience.
What We Can Learn From This
If cruelty spreads through social permission, it can be broken the exact same way. Watching Amy Cuddy’s TED talk didn't just give me language for what happened to me; it gave me a sense of relief I didn't know I still needed. I am deeply thankful for her work because it dismantles the shame targets carry. If you’ve been through this: you weren't imagining it, you weren't "too sensitive," and the silence of the room was never your fault.
For anyone managing people, the takeaway is stark: your team's culture isn't in your values statement. It exists entirely in the thirty seconds after someone gets degraded in front of others:
Who steps in? Who looks at their phone? Who laughs? Who follows up later in private, and who has the guts to say "that's not okay" right there in the room?
We don't always get to choose whether someone targets us. But we have full control over how we respond when it happens to someone else. That is where the actual leverage sits.
If this is happening to you
If you’re being bullied at work, let’s talk.
You don’t have to figure out how to navigate it alone. I work with executives, business owners and professionals through difficult workplace dynamics, career transitions and the messy situations that don’t always have a playbook.
And if you’re wondering whether what you’re experiencing is “really” bullying, we can talk about that too. It’s not okay. You don’t have to simply become more resilient so someone else can keep behaving badly.
