A Response to the Ideas Presented in

“ Bullying, Forgiveness, and Submissive Behaviors

in Gifted Students”

Aidan Lynch

Chandler-Gilbert Community College

A Response to the Ideas Presented in “ Bullying, Forgiveness, and Submissive Behaviors in
Gifted Students”
2
The Academic Journal Bullying, Forgiveness and Submissive Behaviours in Gifted

Students was written by researchers Uzeyir Oglurlu and Hakan Sarıçam, was published June 16,

2018, and was accessed through Academic Search Premier. Bullying, Forgiveness and

Submissive Behaviours in Gifted Students was written with the pursuit of further researching

bullying in public school systems as the authors claim it is an under researched topic that should

have more light shed on it. In the article the authors discuss results taken from a state funded

after school program providing special education for gifted students. 284 students (142 gifted

142 non-gifted) were used in the research with students having an average age of 13.28 years.

Demographics included 45.07% of gifted students being female (n=64) and 54.93% (n=78) being

male. Non-gifted demographics included 55.52% (n=76) females and 46.68% (n=66) were

males. The researchers took looked into five different traits of the pool of 284 students: Bullying,

Victimization, Forgiveness, Submissive Behavior, and whether they were gifted or not. Bullying

included: direct, indirect, physical, verbal, relational, reactive bullying, and cyber bullying.

Victimization was measured by students who identified as being victims of one of these forms of

bullying at one time. Forgiveness was measured and compared with bullying rates of students

along with which group was more likely to be forgiving. Submissive behaviour was investigated

to see which group (gifted vs non-gifted) were more likely to harbor such behaviors and how it

affected the likeliness of bullying.

1.) “ Social rank theory (Gilbert 2000) claims that emotions and feelings are significantly

affected by the perception of one’s social status. So this understanding determines the

degree to which one feels inferior to others. If an individual who sees oneself as lower in

status thinks that others underestimate his or her. “ (Oğurlu & Sarıcam, 2018) I was

interested to learn about Social Rank Theory, it’s very simple and is absolutely relatable
A Response to the Ideas Presented in “ Bullying, Forgiveness, and Submissive Behaviors in
Gifted Students”
3
to myself. In middle school and early highschool I saw some students as better than

myself and it made me feel very pressured when talking to those students as if I was

being viewed under a microscope and it would often cause me to react poorer than when

compared to when I dropped this belief later on.

- “gifted children that may be related to forgiveness and submissive behaviors in gifted

children such as high sensitivity, better emotional adjustment, tending to be very

idealistic, more sensitivity to values and moral issues, understanding good behavior,

empathy, sensitivity to the feelings and rights of others, more independent and less

conforming, more dominant, more forceful, more competitive and high social status.”

(Oğurlu & Sarıcam, 2018) I was not surprised that this was a discovery in the research as

typically higher education is associated with more American liberal ideas and there is a

strong correlation with feelings such as “sensitivity to values and moral issues”,

“empathy” and “sensitive to the feelings and rights of others” would be traits of students

more likely to pursue higher education.

I think that educators overall should be more aware of typical traits of their students and this is

just another medium to more accurately perceive the student body. I think being able to identify

traits like this in groups of people can be dangerous if this information is utilized to influence

students similar to how social network sites sells user data to companies who can better target

their demographic in malicious style (like elections).

A Response to the Ideas Presented in “ Bullying, Forgiveness, and Submissive Behaviors in
Gifted Students”
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Resource

Ogurlu, U., & Sarıçam, H. (2018). Bullying, Forgiveness and Submissive Behaviors in Gifted

Students. Journal of Child & Family Studies, 27(9), 2833–2843. https://doi-

org.ez1.maricopa.edu/10.1007/s10826-018-1138-9