“You’re ugly!” she shouts.
“That hurt my feelings!” Gibbs exclaims.
“Yeah, like I care,” she responds quickly. Whatever he says just gives her more ammunition to throw back with something meaner and nastier. After a while, Gibbs congratulates her and admits defeat.
“I tried to stop you, and I couldn’t. You did a great job. I want to play one last time. Same rules, you can call me an idiot, I’m going to try and stop you. Don’t let me stop you, okay? You keep being mean to me.”He asks audience members if they believe he’d be able to stop her insults on his second attempt. To which a “no” can be heard resounding from the crowd.
This time, when the girl calls Gibbs an idiot, he responds differently. Instead of responding to the verbal aggression, he says, “Yeah, sometimes I do stupid things. It’s true,” which momentarily disarms the girl, although she keeps trying to insult him.
Then he proceeds to compliment her: “I know, you’re so smart, you’re so lucky. You’re awesome,” he tells the now-baffled aggressor.
As attempts to insult him become weaker with each line exchanged, Gibbs explains, “Look, my happiness is not based on whether you think I’m cool or not. I’m gonna be happy even if you hate my guts.” In response, all the confused girl can say is “Okay,” before he proceeds to serenade “Isn’t She Lovely” to her. Even more bewildered, all the former bully can say is “Thank you.”
Incredible! Fighting nastiness with kindness worked!
At the end of the video, Gibbs explains that the technique he used is based on something called “dominance behavior,” which has been studied by sociologists for years. He goes on to say that understanding why bullying occurs in the first place is essential to tackling it.
“It’s just like the animal kingdom,“ he says. ”You know, the alpha male mentality, that’s what’s happening on campus. So when we understand it in terms of dominance behavior, people are trying to have power over another, that helps us understand what to do about bullying. When we really understand what it is.”
“Instead of teaching everyone to be nice, I teach students how to respond to kids who are not nice. This is a backdoor approach to the subject of bullying. In my opinion, it gets to the heart of the issue—curing children from becoming victims.”
