Adults bully for the same core reason children do: to establish or maintain power over someone else. But the adult version is more complex, shaped by personality traits, workplace dynamics, personal insecurity, and environments that let aggressive behavior go unchecked. An estimated 46% of U.S. workers have been affected by bullying, according to a 2024 Workplace Bullying Institute survey, making this far more common than most people realize.
The Drive for Power and Control
At its root, adult bullying is a strategy for creating and reinforcing social hierarchies. Researchers who study social dominance orientation, a personality trait reflecting how much someone prefers inequality between groups, have found that bullying is essentially a behavioral expression of that preference. Bullies are opportunists who create or confirm social hierarchies to maintain their position over others.
This isn’t always conscious or calculated. Some adults genuinely believe that social pecking orders are natural and should be enforced. They draw on cultural beliefs about who deserves authority and who doesn’t, treating inequality as a fact of life rather than something that can change. When someone threatens their position, whether through competence, popularity, or simply being different, the bully responds by pushing that person down.
Personality Traits That Predict Bullying
Not every stressed or insecure person becomes a bully. Specific personality patterns make someone far more likely to target others. Psychologists group these into three overlapping traits, sometimes called the “dark triad,” and there’s significant overlap between all three and bullying behavior.
- Narcissism: A tendency toward grandiosity and excessive need for attention and affirmation. Some people with strong narcissistic traits are willing to inflict harm, physical or emotional, to get the validation they feel entitled to.
- Psychopathy: A lack of empathy or remorse, combined with boldness and impulsivity. People high in this trait are inclined toward antisocial behavior because they simply don’t register other people’s pain the way most of us do.
- Machiavellianism: The tendency to lie, manipulate, and strategize to gain power. People with these tendencies understand what morality is but don’t value it. They’re often cynical and emotionally detached.
A 2019 study on workplace bullying found that people with Machiavellian and psychopathic traits were “major” offenders. This means the coworker who seems to bully strategically, choosing targets carefully and covering their tracks with management, isn’t just difficult. They may have a fundamentally different relationship with empathy and social rules than you do.
Environments That Enable It
Personality alone doesn’t explain everything. Certain environments actively breed bullying by removing consequences or rewarding aggressive behavior. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has identified several workplace conditions that increase the risk.
Workplaces with significant power disparities are a breeding ground. Supervisors feel emboldened to exploit lower-ranking employees, and those employees are less likely to know how to report problems or feel safe doing so. Similarly, organizations that protect “high-value” employees (top salespeople, star performers, senior leaders) often look the other way when those people mistreat others. The high-value employee starts to perceive themselves as exempt from workplace rules, and management is reluctant to jeopardize their economic contribution.
Decentralized workplaces create another risk. When managers operate without much oversight, they may feel genuinely unaccountable for their behavior and act outside normal boundaries. Even monotonous or low-intensity work environments carry risk, because harassing behavior becomes a way to vent frustration or relieve boredom. When there’s nothing productive to focus on, some people focus their energy on a target instead.
How Bullying Looks Different by Gender
Research consistently shows that men and women tend to bully in different ways, though both are equally harmful. Men are more likely to engage in overt aggression: direct confrontation, intimidation, public humiliation, or physical posturing. Women are more likely to use relational aggression, which includes social exclusion, gossip, reputation damage, and undermining someone’s relationships with others. These patterns emerge in adolescence and carry into adulthood. Relational bullying can be harder to identify and report because there’s no single obvious incident, just a steady campaign of isolation.
Why the Internet Makes It Worse
Online spaces add a layer that doesn’t exist in face-to-face bullying: anonymity. A study of over 1,000 adults who engaged in cyberbullying found that heavy social media use combined with anonymity creates conditions that foster aggressive behavior. When you can’t be identified, and when you can’t see the impact of your words on another person’s face, normal social restraints weaken. Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect. People say things online they would never say in a room with the same person.
This isn’t just teenagers on social media. Adults engage in cyberbullying across platforms, from comment sections and review sites to professional forums and group chats. The combination of perceived anonymity and distance from consequences makes it easier for someone with even mild aggressive tendencies to escalate into repeated, targeted harassment.
What Bullying Does to the Target’s Body
The effects of being bullied aren’t just emotional. Sustained bullying changes your body’s stress response at a measurable, biological level. A systematic review of 22 studies found that victims of repeated interpersonal aggression, including bullying, show a disrupted cortisol pattern. Cortisol is the hormone your body produces in response to stress. Normally, levels are highest in the morning and drop throughout the day.
In people experiencing ongoing bullying, that pattern flips: morning cortisol levels are slightly lower than normal, while evening levels are significantly elevated. This means the body’s stress system is essentially stuck in the “on” position at night and sluggish when it should be ramping up in the morning. Over time, this kind of chronic stress dysregulation is linked to sleep disruption, weakened immune function, anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular problems. The damage isn’t imagined. It’s physiological.
Why They Don’t Just “Grow Out of It”
A common assumption is that bullying is something people leave behind after high school. The reality is that the personality traits driving adult bullying, low empathy, a preference for social hierarchies, a willingness to manipulate, tend to be stable over time. Without intervention or strong external consequences, most adult bullies have no reason to change. The behavior works for them. It gets them compliance, status, or emotional relief.
The environments around them often reinforce this. A bully who gets promoted, who dominates a friend group, or who controls a family dynamic is receiving constant feedback that their strategy is effective. Roughly 32% of the working population reports being a bullying target, yet formal accountability remains rare. Until the cost of bullying outweighs the benefit for the person doing it, the pattern continues.