Does your status need a boost? Beat someone up on YouTube.

When colleagues and I study aggression among girls, it’s often of the social/relational kind—gossip, exclusion, the cold shoulder—not because relational aggression is solely the domain of girls, but because rates of more physical kinds of aggression among girls are comparatively very low. (There is plenty of research on physical aggression and violence among girls; some of it is presented in this excellent book edited by Martha Putallaz and Karen Bierman). But researchers (among others) are documenting increasing rates of physical violence perpetrated by girls, and girls, while not exactly closing in on boys’ levels of aggression, are definitely narrowing the gap.

So when I hear a story like this, which was reported on CBS and has been heating up the blogosphere over the past couple of days (like this post on Jezebel), I’m not particularly surprised by the girls’ actions. Girls whaling on each other just isn’t as rare as it used to be. But this case is unusual in its violence, and it’s extremely creepy in that the girls reportedly lured their victim to the scene of the beating with the express purpose of videotaping it and posting it on YouTube.

The thing that struck me as most interesting about this story was who the perpetrators were—cheerleaders, presumably popular girls. Plenty of recent research on adolescent popularity has shown that the most popular students can also be the most aggressive. Beyond that, Toon Cillessen and I will publish a study later this year showing that the combination of being popular and knowing that you’re popular predicts the very highest levels of physical and relational aggression in a given high school grade. It may be that being popular and knowing it (or caring enough about popularity to rate yourself really highly on it) means that you’re also extremely protective of your status—protective enough to hurt other kids who challenge or threaten that status. That’s pure conjecture; we really don’t know why kids who are popular and know it can be so mean. It could be simpler than status maintenance. Maybe popular kids who know their power just feel entitled to kicking people around a little when they feel like it. Maybe they know they won’t really get into trouble for it. Maybe they figure other kids will like them even more when they act like jerks.

But popular kids’ aggression doesn’t usually go as far as it did in this story—in fact, one common assumption about popular-aggressive kids is that they use aggression in savvy, hard-to-detect ways that allow them to manipulate or threaten without being discovered (and punished). The girls in this incident clearly wanted to be discovered: They wanted to create a YouTube sensation! I’m fascinated by this. Do some popular teens feel that they have to show such extreme expressions of physical dominance in order to gain or maintain their status (and if so, why?)? Or is it even bigger than that—Are kids using social media like Facebook and YouTube as vehicles for gaining respect or power, by promoting their mean behaviors on a worldwide scale? I’ll admit it, this scares me a little. The potential for one-upsmanship seems enormous.

I may be overthinking this entire thing; it’s possible that these are just some dumb kids who didn’t think their plan through very well. The six girls involved in the incident (and two male accomplices who acted as lookouts during the assault) have been charged with third-degree felonies. Something tells me this story is being told and retold among their high school peers with a level of awe and respect that would make us cringe.