Mean girls: University of Ottawa researcher probes the mechanics of bitchiness

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University of Ottawa bullying researcher Tracy Vaillancourt’s latest published study was based on a complicated experiment that involved 87 female university students who were led to believe other women were excluding them.

Vaillancourt and her colleagues were tracking P3 brain waves in the research subjects, who were unwittingly playing with fictitious competitors in Cyberball, a virtual ball-throwing game.

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The subjects could see photos of four kinds of “competitors,” which had been chosen from a database. One competitor is attractive, but friendly, with a smile. Another was attractive, but unfriendly, without a smile. The third was smiling, but unattractive. The fourth was both unfriendly and unattractive. The game was rigged so that competitors would stop throwing the ball to the subject.

That “rejection” registered instantly — the subjects were being monitored using electroencephalography (EEG) — sparking a P3 wave in the brain, the same distress as a sudden, sharp injury, such as stubbing a toe, Vaillancourt says.

“They all had the same reaction. They were very put out by being rejected. It’s done in milliseconds. We are so attuned to it.”

The participants were randomly grouped to experience exclusion from women from each of these groups. The researchers expected that the women would be most hurt by being rejected by the attractive, but unfriendly competitors — essentially the equivalent of high school queen bees. To their surprise, the rejection that hurt the most was the one from the unattractive, unfriendly woman.

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“Perhaps it’s the pain of feeling rejected by someone you think is your social inferior,” Vaillancourt says.

However, the participants “punished” the mean queen bee more by rating her as more rude and competitive, and less attractive, happy and nice. Bottom line: they back-stabbed the alpha girl, not the girl expected to be at the bottom of the social ladder.

Vaillancourt is a professor in counselling psychology in the uOttawa faculty of education and a Canada Research Chair in school-based mental health and violence prevention. For more than 20 years, she has been studying bullying, particularly what has been called “indirect” or “relational” aggression among girls. She wrote her PhD dissertation on the 2004 Tina Fey film Mean Girls, which chronicled the byzantine machinations in a clique ruled by a duplicitous queen bee.

Girls are finely tuned to the rolled eyes, the contemptuous up-and-down glances, the expressions of disgust, the minuscule slights. They can perform the calculus for what those tiny gestures mean to relationships within a millisecond, Vaillancourt says.

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Why study the almost imperceptible nuances of aggression among girls and women? Because female aggression has been ignored almost forever, says Vaillancourt, who is writing a book called Mean, to be published in 2025.

“It was mostly men who were writing about aggression, and they were writing about men’s aggression to each other: the bloody nose, the black eye,” she says.

“Even Darwin ignored the fact that women were aggressive.”

Research going back more than 50 years has shown that six-year-old girls exclude newcomers, she says. Children as young as two practise a kind of social aggression called “love withdrawal” when they don’t get what they want.

The research speaks to the complexities of women’s interactions. Social signals have served an evolutionary purpose, Vaillancourt says.

The “neural alarm” of the pain of rejection has helped humankind to survive by encouraging our ancestors to co-operate. The problem is that women are far more sensitive to these cues than men. They feel distress when they feel or even anticipate being excluded, she says.

“You can’t say, ‘You’re being too sensitive,’ just because there’s not a bloody nose or a black eye.”

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Meanwhile, being excluded leads the target to retaliate, such as denigrating the character of the woman who has slighted them.

“If you get treated poorly, you can handle it by getting mad or getting sad. For your own well-being, mad works very well. But, in the big picture, it doesn’t work,” Vaillancourt says.

Her research has come from a different angle as well. Vaillancourt is a provincial head coach and scout with Ontario Soccer.

“I always joke I can see rolled eyes behind my back,” she says.

Girls’ need to belong is more pronounced than boys’. Groups of males are more hierarchical than groups of females. With the boys, a team’s best player is the alpha and bullying is tolerated. The queen bee might rule her clique ruthlessly, but her spot at the top of the heap is always tenuous.

Girls spend more time ruminating, which means they take a long time to let go of a slight, Vaillancourt says. With girls, jealousy is repaired by cutting down a “tall poppy” teammate. When a girl is succeeding, there is no tolerance for it. That girl, for all of her ability and competence, becomes vulnerable to becoming bullied.

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In another experiment, Vaillancourt and a colleague found that young women were particularly nasty to other women they considered sexual rivals. The study videotaped female undergraduates’ responses to the same attractive young woman named Lisa, who was playing a role for the experiment. In one scenario, Lisa entered the classroom to ask a question while wearing a miniskirt and a tight pink T-shirt. In the other, she was dressed conservatively. Lisa said the same things and acted exactly the same way in both scenarios.

The undergraduates’ reaction depended on how Lisa was dressed. When she dressed provocatively, they rolled their eyes and stared at her when she was in the room. After she left, many of the participants laughed at her, ridiculed her appearance or suggested she was sexually available. Another group of undergraduates was asked to assess the bitchiness of the comments in the videotape.

Vaillancourt says there have been two kinds of responses to her research. On one side, she’s been thanked for saying these kinds of things happen. Others have argued she is part of the problem.

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The Lisa study was published in the science journal Aggressive Behavior and was reported in the mainstream media. Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick called the Lisa study a “sadistic experiment.”

“Feminism has changed us. So who are these nasties the study uncovered?” Mallick wrote. “And where did the profs get the sick idea of presenting three head-to-toe bodies for judging?”

For her part, Vaillancourt says it’s hard to change behaviour if you don’t think it’s happening.

“If you are aware of your biases, you are less likely to commit them,” she says. “At the end of the day, we can’t address what we don’t acknowledge. We have to address this.”

The brain was wired to react to scarcity, whether it’s food or mates, Vaillancourt says. Conditions may have changed, but the wiring remains the same. Her research has also found that women who are excluded from social media groups are more likely to feel anxious and depressed. A future direction for research would be to probe the mechanisms linking jealousy in friendships with depression and anxiety.

The fact that social exclusion is commonly used as an aggression tactic by women and that it has an emotional and physiological impact means it needs to be studied and understood, Vaillancourt says.

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“Society won’t change overnight, but women can be more generous with each other and recognize that just because you win doesn’t mean I lose,” she says. “We aren’t going to change our brain. But we can change our perception that life is a zero-sum game. That’s not true all the time.”

Part of the answer to reducing bullying behaviour is to make sure young people are not morally disengaged from their actions.

“People don’t think they’re bad people. Most people think they’re justified in what they do. They blame the other person for their behaviour,” Vaillancourt says. “If someone does you wrong, it does not justify your bad behaviour. Someone has to take the high road.”

The tendency to feel slighted by social aggression also tends to get blunted as women age. It’s hard for a woman to feel slighted when she just doesn’t care, she says.

“I always tell my students that you know you’ve made it when you buy your pants at Costco and you don’t care.”

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