Why Are Bad People Bad?
Last week I wrote about bullying. I shared my own experiences of being bullied at school and later at work, and talked about Amy Cuddy's recent work on bullying and social bravery.
I wasn't expecting the response I got. I received a lot of private messages. Some were from people telling me what had happened to them. Some were from people who had witnessed bullying and never stepped in, and were still thinking about it years later. Some were genuinely disturbing. A few turned into long and fascinating conversations.
One question kept coming up on all the conversations and reflections:
What makes a bully a bully?
Why does one child become the kid who picks on everyone while another becomes the kid who says, "Leave her alone"?
Why does one person steal while another, with exactly the same opportunity, doesn't?
Why do some people repeatedly lie, manipulate, exploit, or hurt others?
Why are bad people bad?
I am a coach, not a criminologist, so I went looking for what the research says. Much of it surprised me.
We Like the Idea of a Bad Person
The idea of a bad person makes the world easier to understand. There are good people and bad people, and if we can identify the bad ones, we can stay away from them, punish them, and move on.
Human behavior is rarely that tidy. Criminology, psychology, and developmental research point toward a messy combination of factors: genes, temperament, parenting, trauma, peer groups, education, poverty, social norms, opportunity, stress, impulsivity, substance use, what was modeled at home, what was rewarded by the people around us, and the choices a person makes.
Two people can go through the same adversity and respond very differently. A meta-analysis of prospective studies found that childhood maltreatment is associated with a higher risk of later violence, and also found wide variation between studies. A child who is abused has a higher risk of becoming violent. Most don't.
Risk is not destiny, and an explanation is not an excuse. I'll come back to that.
Bullies Usually Think Highly of Themselves
When we explain bullying, we often reach for one sentence:
"They must be insecure."
For decades that was the accepted wisdom, and Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman set out to test it. Their work found that aggressive people typically hold high opinions of themselves, and that narcissism and unstable self-esteem predict aggression far better than low self-esteem does.
In a 1998 study, they measured both self-esteem and narcissism and then gave participants a chance to retaliate against someone who had insulted or praised them. Self-esteem on its own made no difference. Narcissism combined with an insult produced very high aggression toward the person who delivered it. The researchers describe high self-esteem as thinking well of yourself, and narcissism as badly wanting to think well of yourself without being convinced you have earned it.
Baumeister calls this threatened egotism. It fits what I wrote last week about bullies being haters. Someone else's competence lands as a threat to a self-image that was never very stable, and the bully's response is to try to reduce that person.
Empathy Comes in Two Parts
Psychologists separate empathy into two things. Cognitive empathy is understanding what another person feels. Affective empathy is feeling something yourself in response.
A systematic review by Tirza van Noorden and colleagues of 40 studies found that bullying was linked to lower cognitive empathy and, more strongly, to lower affective empathy. A larger meta-analysis covering 53 reports found the same pattern and added higher callous-unemotional traits to the picture, while children who defended victims tended to show higher empathy.
In plain terms, many bullies can read you perfectly well. They know exactly what will hurt. They simply don't feel much when it does. If you have been targeted with real precision at work, you will recognize this. It also explains the people who are warm and loyal toward their own family or inner circle and remarkably cruel to everyone outside it.
A recent meta-analysis of 23 longitudinal studies adds another layer. Empathy predicted less bullying later on, and bullying predicted lower empathy later on. It can become a loop. I hurt you, I get used to hurting you, your suffering starts to matter less to me, and the next time is easier.
This is one reason early intervention matters. Most difficult children don't grow into cruel adults, but behavior that goes unchallenged gets practiced, and people get better at what they practice. The same is true of kindness.
How Ordinary People Talk Themselves Into It
Low empathy explains some bullies. It doesn't explain the colleagues who joined in, laughed along, or looked away. Most of those people know cruelty is wrong.
Albert Bandura called the gap between knowing and doing moral disengagement, meaning the mental moves that let people set aside their own moral standards and behave badly without feeling guilty. He identified eight of them:
Moral justification, telling yourself the behavior serves a worthy purpose
Euphemistic labeling, making it sound harmless through softer language
Advantageous comparison, making it seem minor next to something worse
Displacement of responsibility, putting it on whoever was in charge
Diffusion of responsibility, telling yourself everyone was doing it
Distorting consequences, deciding it didn't really hurt anyone
Dehumanization, seeing the target as less than fully human
Attribution of blame, deciding the target brought it on themselves
Across studies, moral justification and dehumanization show the strongest links to bullying and aggression.
Euphemistic labeling is the one I see most in organizations. Last week I wrote about how bullying gets renamed a personality clash or a difficult stakeholder relationship. That renaming is one of Bandura's mechanisms in action.
Researchers have also developed a way to measure collective moral disengagement, where a whole group runs the same mechanisms together. This is Cuddy's argument in research language. The group quietly agrees the target deserved it, and each person feels less responsible because everyone else is going along too.
People Learn Cruelty, and They Learn Kindness
We spend a lot of time teaching children what not to do. Don't hit, don't steal, don't lie, don't bully.
Children also learn from what they see. They watch how adults talk about people who are different from them, how parents behave when they are angry, and how a teacher responds when the popular child humiliates the quiet one. They notice who gets protected, who gets laughed at, who gets believed, and who gets another chance.
Decades of social learning research show that aggression can be learned through observation and modeling, and the American Psychological Association summarizes that work as evidence that nonviolence can be learned too. Children are watching all the time, and most closely when we aren't trying to teach them anything.
What Makes a Thief a Thief
We tend to talk about criminals as though they were a different species. A person who steals a phone isn't necessarily fundamentally different from you or me. That doesn't make stealing acceptable. It means criminal behavior can't be explained by one personality type. The motives vary widely, from financial desperation and addiction to peer pressure, status, impulsivity, greed, and simple opportunity.
Criminology offers two ideas I found clarifying.
The first is about people. Terrie Moffitt, who helps lead a study that has followed around a thousand people born in Dunedin, New Zealand, since the early 1970s, proposed two main types of offenders: adolescence-limited offenders, who behave antisocially only as teenagers, and life-course-persistent offenders, who start in early childhood and carry on into adulthood. Most of the young offenders she followed eventually grew out of it. The persistent group is thought to be small, around 5% of the population, yet responsible for a disproportionate share of offending.
The second is about circumstances. Routine Activity Theory holds that crime becomes more likely when a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of anyone capable of stopping it come together in the same place and time. So alongside asking what is wrong with a person, it helps to ask what was happening around them. That doesn't remove responsibility. It gives us more to work with.
The Childhood Behind the Crime
Researchers use the term adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, for things like abuse, neglect, and growing up with violence, addiction, or a parent in prison. The numbers in prison populations are striking:
In a Welsh study, 84% of male prisoners had at least one ACE and 45.5% had four or more, compared with 46.3% and 11.9% of men in the general population
In Minnesota, 46% of incarcerated men reported four or more ACEs against 9% of men in the original CDC-Kaiser sample, and 57% of incarcerated women against 15% of women
The finding that stayed with me most comes from a 2025 study in BMC Medicine. Among people with four or more ACEs, the rate of ever being arrested or incarcerated fell from 14% when there was no trusted adult in their childhood to 8% when there was one. One reliable adult nearly halved the risk. It also shows that even in the highest-risk group, most people never ended up in the justice system.
Education Does More Than Make People Smarter
We often talk about education as though its purpose is to make people smarter. I think it does something much bigger. School teaches you how to exist alongside other people. How to lose, how to wait, how to disagree, how to deal with frustration, how to cooperate with people you don't particularly like, and ideally, how to recognize that other people matter too.
The evidence on education and crime is strong. Economists Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti used changes in compulsory school attendance laws, which force some young people to stay in school longer than they would choose, to estimate the causal effect of schooling. They found that finishing high school significantly lowered the probability of incarceration, and that a one-year rise in average schooling cut arrest rates by about 11 percent, across both property and violent crime.
The picture in Ireland is very similar. An Irish Prison Service survey of more than 800 people between 2015 and 2017 found that 80 percent had left school before the Leaving Cert, 52 percent before the Junior Cert, and 26 percent had never attended secondary school. Only one in five prisoners had completed the Leaving Cert, compared to three in five people in the general population.
Education isn't a magic shield, though. A longitudinal study following people from preschool into adulthood found that educational success was associated with people moving away from chronic offending, but it didn't erase the link between childhood maltreatment and later offending. There is no single lever.
Understanding Is Different From Excusing
This is where the "they had a difficult childhood" explanation reaches its limit.
Plenty of people have difficult childhoods and become extraordinarily kind adults. Plenty of people grow up in loving families and still hurt others. Plenty of people know exactly what they are doing. As I wrote last week, the bullies I encountered were careful about who was in the room, which tells you they were in full control of their behavior. Bandura's whole framework rests on the idea that people make choices and then build stories to live with them.
A person can know something is wrong and do it anyway. They can apologize and repeat it. They can be given another chance and exploit it. Understanding someone's history doesn't mean minimizing the harm they cause. We can hold two ideas at once: something may have happened to you, and you are still responsible for what you do to other people.
Maybe "Bad People" Is the Wrong Question
I don't think people divide neatly into good and bad. Human beings are capable of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty, sometimes within the same person. There is a small group whose problems start very early and last. There are many more ordinary people who, in the right conditions, switch off their conscience for a while.
So perhaps a more useful question is how people become capable of hurting others, and what makes that more or less likely. That takes us into parenting, education, leadership, community, social norms, and consequences. It also takes us to the small moments when someone could intervene and decides not to.
The research on bullying contains a clue here too. The person who stands up for the target tends to have higher empathy. The girl at school who says "That's enough." The colleague who says "That's not okay." The manager who notices that one person is always being interrupted, the teacher who sees who is being left out, and the friend who doesn't laugh along. Bad behavior always happens somewhere, in a family, a classroom, a workplace, or a friendship group, and the people around it often have more power to change it than they realize.
What We Can Do
Be the trusted adult. The drop from 14% to 8% came from a single reliable person. For your own children, their friends, a niece, or a young colleague, you can be that person (showing up consistently matters more than saying the perfect thing).
Keep children in school, and make school somewhere they want to be. The evidence on leaving school early is about as clear as social science gets. Parents, teachers, and employers who sponsor mentoring or apprenticeships all have a part in this.
Teach children to feel, and to read feelings. Bullies often understand perfectly well and feel very little. When your child describes a conflict, ask how the other child felt, and then ask how your child feels knowing that (the second question is the one that builds affective empathy).
Pair empathy with boundaries. Empathy on its own can be used to manipulate. What we want to build in children and in teams is empathy alongside self-control, responsibility, and the confidence to say no.
Call things by their names. Euphemism is how cruelty survives in organizations. If you are on the receiving end, write down what happened in plain language, with dates, and use the word "bullying" when you raise it. If you manage people, don't let it be filed as a personality clash.
Listen for the justification. "She had it coming," "It was just banter," and "Everyone does it" are Bandura's mechanisms in real time. That is the moment to interrupt, before the group settles on its story.
To everyone who wrote to me last week, thank you. Some of you shared things you had never told anyone, and I don't take that lightly.
I'll leave you with the questions your messages left me with.
Who was the trusted adult in your own childhood, and who are you that person for now?
When you last watched something unkind happen, which of Bandura's stories did you tell yourself?
What does your team, your family, or your children's school reward, tolerate, and quietly excuse?
And what would it take for defending someone to feel ordinary?
👋 Hi, I'm Merve! I coach executives, leaders, and senior professionals through high-stakes career transitions, structural change, and the messy middle of what comes next. I write about leadership, people, careers, business, and the things we don't always talk about at work.
If you're experiencing bullying at work and want a thinking partner, let's talk. It's not okay, and you don't have to navigate it alone.
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