# data[].attributes.headline
"A Letter From the Fringe" by Joan Bauer

# data[].attributes.subject
"A Letter From the Fringe" by Joan Bauer

# data[].attributes.body
"Every kid at the fringe table has been a victim of cruel remarks from the 'in crowd,' and Dana, who has been their target too often, wants to change things. But does she have the courage to tell the kids in school how they've made her feel? And will telling them change things?"

# data[].attributes.body
A teacher reads this story aloud while sharing their screen.

# data[].attributes.headline
"Tuesday of the Other June" by Norma Fox Mazer - 610 lexile

# data[].attributes.subject
"Tuesday of the Other June" by Norma Fox Mazer - 610 lexile

# data[].attributes.body
A young girl is bullied by another girl who has the same name.

# data[].attributes.body
The author explains his fear after being beat up as an adolescent.

# data[].attributes.body
The problem in dealing with bullying, as in this story from Susan Cooper, is the power gap that often exists between perpetrator and victim. Set during the Blitz of World War Two, the story’s protagonist (a persecuted schoolgirl) tries striking back. As is often the case, this only makes things worse. A kindly old lady witnesses an assault and offers to help. When the poor woman dies in the bombing, an unlikely friend becomes the girl’s protector.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.body
When Franky notices another student on the playground being bullied he wonders if he did the right thing. Enjoy this bullying video for students (elementary or middle school), where Mrs. Day helps Franky decide if he did the right thing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Educational Videos for Students (Cartoons on Bullying, Leadership & More)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bullying Videos for Kids: Did I Do The Right Thing? What to do when others bully | Educational Video

# data[].attributes.headline
Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent by Safwat Saleem

# data[].attributes.subject
Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent by Safwat Saleem

# data[].attributes.body
"Artist Safwat Saleem grew up with a stutter -- but as an independent animator, he decided to do his own voiceovers to give life to his characters. When YouTube commenters started mocking his Pakistani accent, it crushed him, and his voice began to leave his work. Hear how this TED Fellow reclaimed his voice and confidence in this charming, thoughtful talk."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Safwat Saleem: Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Artist Safwat Saleem grew up with a stutter -- but as an independent animator, he decided to do his own voiceovers to give life to his characters. When YouTube commenters started mocking his Pakistani accent, it crushed him, and his voice began to leave his work.

# data[].attributes.headline
Bullying- It's not what it used to be | Blake Fields | TEDxYouth@MBJH

# data[].attributes.subject
Bullying- It's not what it used to be | Blake Fields | TEDxYouth@MBJH

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bullying- It's not what it used to be | Blake Fields | TEDxYouth@MBJH

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When people get together in groups, unusual things can happen - both good and bad. Groups create important social institutions that an individual could not achieve alone, but there can be a darker side to such alliances: Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group.

"Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts, people's priorities change when there is an 'us' and a 'them,'" says Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. "A group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into 'mobs' that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality."

Several factors play into this transformation. When people are in a group, they feel more anonymous, and less likely to be caught doing something wrong. They may also feel a diminished sense of personal responsibility for collective actions.

Saxe and colleagues recently studied a third factor that cognitive scientists believe may be involved in this group dynamic: the hypothesis that when people are in groups, they "lose touch" with their own morals and beliefs, and become more likely to do things that they would normally believe are wrong.

In a study that recently went online in the journal NeuroImage, the researchers measured brain activity in a part of the brain involved in thinking about oneself. They found that in some people, this activity was reduced when the subjects participated in a competition as part of a group, compared with when they competed as individuals. Those people were more likely to harm their competitors than people who did not exhibit this decreased brain activity.

"This process alone does not account for intergroup conflict: Groups also promote anonymity, diminish personal responsibility, and encourage reframing harmful actions as 'necessary for the greater good.' Still, these results suggest that at least in some cases, explicitly reflecting on one's own personal moral standards may help to attenuate the influence of 'mob mentality,'" says Mina Cikara, a former MIT postdoc and lead author of the NeuroImage paper.
Group dynamics
Cikara, who is now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, started this research project after experiencing the consequences of a "mob mentality": During a visit to Yankee Stadium, her husband was ceaselessly heckled by Yankees fans for wearing a Red Sox cap. "What I decided to do was take the hat from him, thinking I would be a lesser target by virtue of the fact that I was a woman," Cikara says. "I was so wrong. I have never been called names like that in my entire life."

The harassment, which continued throughout the trip back to Manhattan, provoked a strong reaction in Cikara, who isn't even a Red Sox fan.

"It was a really amazing experience because what I realized was I had gone from being an individual to being seen as a member of 'Red Sox Nation.' And the way that people responded to me, and the way I felt myself responding back, had changed, by virtue of this visual cue - the baseball hat," she says. "Once you start feeling attacked on behalf of your group, however arbitrary, it changes your psychology."

Cikara, then a third-year graduate student at Princeton University, started to investigate the neural mechanisms behind the group dynamics that produce bad behavior. In the new study, done at MIT, Cikara, Saxe (who is also an associate member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research), former Harvard University graduate student Anna Jenkins, and former MIT lab manager Nicholas Dufour focused on a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex. When someone is reflecting on himself or herself, this part of the brain lights up in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans.

A couple of weeks before the study participants came in for the experiment, the researchers surveyed each of them about their social-media habits, as well as their moral beliefs and behavior. This allowed the researchers to create individualized statements for each subject that were true for that person - for example, "I have stolen food from shared refrigerators" or "I always apologize after bumping into someone."

When the subjects arrived at the lab, their brains were scanned as they played a game once on their own and once as part of a team. The purpose of the game was to press a button if they saw a statement related to social media, such as "I have more than 600 Facebook friends."

The subjects also saw their personalized moral statements mixed in with sentences about social media. Brain scans revealed that when subjects were playing for themselves, the medial prefrontal cortex lit up much more when they read moral statements about themselves than statements about others, consistent with previous findings. However, during the team competition, some people showed a much smaller difference in medial prefrontal cortex activation when they saw the moral statements about themselves compared to those about other people.

Those people also turned out to be much more likely to harm members of the competing group during a task performed after the game. Each subject was asked to select photos that would appear with the published study, from a set of four photos apiece of two teammates and two members of the opposing team. The subjects with suppressed medial prefrontal cortex activity chose the least flattering photos of the opposing team members, but not of their own teammates.

"This is a nice way of using neuroimaging to try to get insight into something that behaviorally has been really hard to explore," says David Rand, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University who was not involved in the research. "It's been hard to get a direct handle on the extent to which people within a group are tapping into their own understanding of things versus the group's understanding."
Getting lost
The researchers also found that after the game, people with reduced medial prefrontal cortex activity had more difficulty remembering the moral statements they had heard during the game.

"If you need to encode something with regard to the self and that ability is somehow undermined when you're competing with a group, then you should have poor memory associated with that reduction in medial prefrontal cortex signal, and that's exactly what we see," Cikara says.

Cikara hopes to follow up on these findings to investigate what makes some people more likely to become "lost" in a group than others. She is also interested in studying whether people are slower to recognize themselves or pick themselves out of a photo lineup after being absorbed in a group activity.

The research was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Packard Foundation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Being in a group makes some people lose touch with their personal moral beliefs, researchers find.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ohio woman starts anti-bullying organization to empower youths

# data[].attributes.subject
Ohio woman starts anti-bullying organization to empower youths

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

# data[].attributes.headline
Students' Work Ethic Affected By Peer Groups, Desire To Be Popular

# data[].attributes.subject
Students' Work Ethic Affected By Peer Groups, Desire To Be Popular

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Students’ Work Ethic Affected By Peer Groups, Desire To Be Popular

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teachers can become frustrated when students don’t seem to try hard when it comes to schoolwork. There’s a surprising explanation of why some students might not be putting their best effort forward.

# data[].attributes.headline
Social Influence: Crash Course Psychology #38

# data[].attributes.subject
Social Influence: Crash Course Psychology #38

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Social Influence: Crash Course Psychology #38

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Podcast Episode · This Teenage Life · 05/30/2022 · 21m

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Unique Bullying Prevention Model for Students with Disabilities
Did you know that students with disabilities are bullied at a rate of 2 to 3 times more than their nondisabled peers? It's true. Statistics show that bullying happens to almost 75% of students with disabilities.

Many students with disabilities have few or no friends, and it makes it easier for someone to bully another student who is all alone or who doesn't have someone looking out for them.

What is a "Peer Advocate?"

A student who looks out for other students who are being bullied or who are isolated from other students and helps them out by making sure that they are included and protected from harm.

Most students don't like to see bullying, but they may not know what to do when it happens. Peer advocacy-speaking out on the behalf of others - is a unique approach that empowers students to protect those targeted by bullying. It works for two reasons: Students are more likely than adults to see what is happening with their peers, and peer influence is powerful. A student telling someone to stop bullying has much more impact than an adult giving that same advice.
"I learned that even though I am only one person I can change society." "Being a peer advocate makes me more aware when someone is not being included and it is a lot easier to include them and still have them feel comfortable. I have learned that there is so much more to me than just who I was before."
How do I get my school involved?

Encourage the adults in your school, such as your principal, school counselor, or teacher to consider a "Peer Advocacy" project at school.
Share with your school Peer Avocacy Guide "Before I saw people give the kids with disabilities bad looks and didn't stand up for them, now I will stand up for them." "Before Peer Advocacy, kids were eating alone, now we are sitting with them and hanging out." "Peer advocates should spread around the world." "Later in life I'll be able to say I was a peer advocate, I made a difference! Will you?" "I love being a Peer Advocate, it's so much fun. I love it and am happy I joined. Before it was not as fun being in nothing then I heard about Peer Advocates and then that inspired me and I did it for the kids with disabilities and they rock!!" "I think it's important to be a Peer Advocate to let kids know they're not alone and that others really do have their back. Even through some treat them differently, they are just like everyone else. They should be treated the same too. From this experience I learned all that. I think others should consider this too."
What else can I do?

Be a friend! Watch out for those students, with and without disabilities, who might need your help and have their backs. To be a friend, you can:

Sit by them at lunch

Talk with them in the hallway

Include them in group activities

Invite them to spend time with you

Listen to their concerns

Provide advice and support

If you know that someone is being teased, hurt, or harmed in any manner, you can:

Get them away from the situation.

Ask the person bullying to leave them alone (only if it feels safe to say something)

Let them know that everyone deserves to be safe.

Help them talk with adult.

Report it to an adult.

Students who have been peer advocates said, "when I saw bullying happen, I..."

took action, instead of just doing nothing

told them to stop being so mean

told someone saying "that's so retarded" hurts people with disabilities and is not acceptable

stepped in and told them to stop

privately told the person bullying that what they did wasn't cool

told our mentor, who helped me know what to do the next time

stood up for myself when it was me who was bullied

What Should You Do? Peer Advocacy | PACERTalks About Bullying Episode 24
Insights and advice from students as they think through how to respond to real life bullying situations. In this video middle school students from a "peer advocacy" group explore how to handle a scenario in which a student with down syndrome is being bullied.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Unique Bullying Prevention Model for Students with Disabilities Did you know that students with disabilities are bullied at a rate of 2 to 3 times more than their nondisabled peers? It's true. Statistics show that bullying happens to almost 75% of students with disabilities.