Why do some teenage and college student group members become mean? What impacts does the toxicity have on other group members? And what can a student do if they have been exiled from their toxic friendship group?
To explore these questions, I phoned Len, a high school fellow whom I highly respect. While Len is a handsome and likable teenager, he recently was exiled from his friendship group, a group he described as popular but also gossipy and often mean, with much teasing and taunting of each other and others.
These days, Len’s former friends get up and leave the table if he sits down to join them. The former friends no longer speak to him, even if he approaches them in his usual friendly and likable manner.
Why Do Members of an Unkind Group Stay In It?
Len explained that he had originally been drawn to his ex-friends because they were bright, fun, attractive, and capable classmates. At the same time, he gradually came to see them as surprisingly limited: insecure, prone to meanness, and with a tendency to talk too much about others—that is, to gossip.
Len’s understanding was that most of this group lived in families lacking warmth, affection, or interest in them. They also tended to have few to no close friends or community outside of their school world.
As a result, Len surmised, they felt basically insecure. Nowhere, other than in their group at school, did they experience a sense of belonging. The friends group therefore was likely too important for them to risk objecting to the meanness—even if, as he sometimes suspected, hurting others felt against some of their values.
Len felt quite different in this dimension. He and his older brother were best friends, and he was close with his parents, who he describes as “the best.” He could rely on his family to listen any time he faced a troubling dilemma, and he loved that they often enjoyed dinners and weekends together.
Len also enjoyed warm friendships with his church youth group, and similarly with his soccer team. Thus, for Len, the friendship group at school had been just one of multiple sources of belonging.
What Caused Len’s Friend Group to Turn Toxic?
Len described the fellow whom he regarded as the leader of their group as “sometimes fun, sometimes really mean.” I thought immediately of Freud‘s remarkable insight: “Groups take on the personality of the leader.”
Len believed that by being mean, the leader, as well as the followers, experienced a sense of power. Taunting and teasing others enabled them to feel bigger.
Two major sources of feeling secure in life are the sense of belonging to a “herd” and a sense of empowerment. In this case, Len believed that this particular friend group had offered its members both.
At the same time, Len felt that his friends’ capacity for meanness also made individual members feel vulnerable: “What if they were to turn on me that way?” By joining in on the meanness, he believed, they feel more like a central part of the group, and therefore safer.
Putting others down, winning, or attacking in any way can, for some people, lead to feeling higher up on the social ladder or like they have won where others have lost. Losing, by contrast, often creates a feeling of smallness. Being mean thus likely enabled Len’s old friends to feel at least momentarily embedded safely in a group—and at the same time bigger and hence more secure.
What If a Group Member Becomes a Victim?
When the group turns on an individual member, the outcome can go in either direction.
In the past, if his friends in the group teased him, Len would tease them back. It was like boxers enjoying a sparring match. More recently, though, his friends’ hurtful criticisms and taunting barbs felt too intense, too painful. At that point, he told me, he began wanting less and less to do with his former friends.
At a party one weekend, Len spoke out harshly against something particularly mean that one of his friends had done to another. “I didn’t just say something,” he told me. “We were at a party with too much drinking. I also had been drinking and consequently acted in a way that normally I would not. I got really mad at the mean friend; I shouted at him and called him nasty names.” As a result, he recalled, he was cut off completely.
“Yet by getting exiled from the group, in a funny way, I was relieved,” Len explained. “I knew all along that what we were doing—our meanness—wasn’t right. But I had suppressed my moral beliefs in order to stay in the group. By contrast, once they rejected me, I felt free to be who I really was: a nice guy who cares about not hurting others.”
He went on to say, “I have my church and sports friends, and my family, too. So, for now at least, when I’m at school, I mostly focus on learning. If my old friends are mean to me, I see it as sad for them instead of taking it personally. Meanwhile, I am happy to be scouting among our relatively large class for a new and hopefully nicer friendship group.”
I applaud Len for turning an apparent curse into a blessing. You will do well in life!