The Capacity to Intervene: Bullying,Social Pain,and Bystander Empathy

This article is an interdisciplinary exploration of social pain (rejection, exclusion, and humiliation) and its effect on bystanders. It dives deeply into social theory, only to surface and become expository around current neurological research on pain and mirror neurons. It seeks to broaden and advance scholarship around bullying dynamics in order to inform interventions that privilege bystander response. Significantly, the article grounds bullying in intersubjective dances of identity construction, launching it at the very edges of Goffman's social critique: the neuropsychological implications of failed impression management. Does witnessing social pain give rise to empathic responses? This central question leads to an explication of the functioning of mirror neurons as they relate to empathy. Understanding their working bridges to the theorizing of George Herbert Mead and raises the following sociological questions: (1) Do mirror neurons function on the level of Mead's “gestures”? (2) Do cultural realities—for example, social media and narcissism—impair a bystander's capacity to perceive pain/respond to it in others? Exploring the interface between cultural dynamics and neurological capacities paves the way for more effective responses to bullying. What can we expect of bystanders, and what it might take to prompt their intervention in socially aggressive situations?