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 When it comes to mean or destructive social behavior, Pamela Orpinas says “so much of the research has focused on girls.” “We’ve had papers and books and qualitative analyses and focus groups” about the ways girls mistreat one another socially, the professor of health promotion and behavior told Op-Talk, “but we don’t know that much about boys.” 
 
 Dr. Orpinas may be helping to close that gap, with a new paper comparing “relational aggression” in boys and girls. She and her co-authors, Caroline McNicholas and Lusine Nahapetyan, define relational aggression as “harming others through damaging or manipulating peer relationships.” In order to measure the quality, they relied on a survey asking students how often in the past 30 days they had done things like spreading false rumors, ostracizing people or making mean comments about someone to turn other kids against that person. Six hundred and twenty students took the survey regularly from 6th grade through 12th grade. 
 
 The result: Significantly more boys than girls exhibited a pattern of high relational aggression in the early years of the study (overall, such aggression declined with age, a finding the authors expected). Specifically, the group of students reporting high aggression was 66.7 percent male. 
 
 “People say, ‘well, boys are physically aggressive, but girls are aggressive in their relationships,’” said Dr. Orpinas, “and it just does seem to be a myth.” 
 
 Others, too, are questioning whether girls really have a monopoly on social nastiness. A 2012 study of kids from nine countries found no significant difference between boys and girls when it came to relational aggression. And Rosalind Wiseman, whose book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” gave rise to the movie “Mean Girls,” turned her focus to the social lives of boys for her 2013 book “Masterminds and Wingmen.” 
 
 “Boys don’t demand our attention in the same ways that girls do,” she wrote. “We don’t give them a language for talking about their worries and experiences like we do with girls. And we really don’t think enough about what our culture — and ourselves by extension — demands and expects of boys and how it frames their emotional lives, decision-making, self-esteem, and social competence.” 
 
 This, she argued, needs to change: “The reality is that most boys’ days are filled with many of the same social challenges that girls face, and what they learn from those experiences matters now and for their futures, as it does for girls.” 
 
 Dr. Orpinas believes schools need to recognize relational aggression isn’t a single-gender phenomenon: “It’s really important to think about boys and girls when we do prevention programs,” she said. Parents, too, “need to pay attention to what both boys and girls are doing.” And “they need to model the positive behavior, including not being relationally aggressive themselves.” 
 
 Ms. Wiseman offered similar advice in her book: “Don’t lay down your values, expect your son to follow them, and then act differently yourself. If you talk badly about other people (especially other children he knows), it’s only reasonable to assume that he won’t do anything different.” 
 
 As for kids themselves, Dr. Orpinas told Op-Talk, “we need to make it cool to be positive and caring about other kids.” 
 
 The way adults talk about kids’ aggression, she added, may even be contributing to the problem. “We don’t talk as much, for example, about how kids do really cool things for each other.” Most kids aren’t aggressive, and “we do need to emphasize the positive,” she argued. “We have many examples of kids saying good things and kids helping each other, but that doesn’t sell very much so we don’t talk about it.” ||||| In an undated interview, the author of the book, William Golding, who died in 1993, said he was often asked why he wrote about boys instead of girls. He said that it was partly because he grew up as one, but that gender was also crucial to the larger point of the novel. 
 
 “If you land with a group of little boys, they are more like scaled-down society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say, because I’m going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality. This has nothing to do with equality at all. I mean, I think women are foolish to pretend they’re equal to men — they’re far superior and always have been. But one thing you cannot do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilization, of society.” 
 
 Gender reversals in reboots are not new for Hollywood: A “Ghostbusters” with a cast of women was a critical and box office success last year, and women will be the outlaws in the upcoming “Ocean’s 8.” And teenage girls have long been awful to one another on screen, as seen in “Mean Girls” and “Heathers.” 
 
 What remains to be seen is whether the new “Lord of the Flies” will offer largely a mirror image of the novel, subbing in girls without changing the central plot points and behavior of the characters, or if it will wrestle with how girls would approach their fate differently. 
 
 “It could be problematic if all they’re doing is switching out girls for boys and saying, ‘Well, girls would do this too,’” said Pamela Davis-Kean, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies children and families. 
 
 Though many differences between boys and girls tend to be overstated, boys do tend to be more physically aggressive, she said. Some of the novel’s scenes of physical violence probably wouldn’t align with how girls would settle their issues, especially in the era of the book, she said.
– A journal called Aggressive Behavior has published research disputing the widely-held theory that boys will beat you up, whereas girls will talk behind your back. Actually, the study suggests, boys do both: In scientific terms, they are both "physically" and "relationally" more aggressive than girls. The study followed 620 students of both sexes through middle school and high school in six Georgia districts, Time reports. Results came from regular surveys asking students about their behavior over the past 30 days. Unfortunately, "almost all of the students surveyed, 96%, had passed a rumor or made a nasty comment about someone over the course of the seven-year study," a researcher says. But physical and relational aggression were both more common in boys. Middle school, the study says, is the worst for meanness both physical and relational: It's most common between sixth and eighth grade. But middle schoolers can look forward to high school, when it begins dropping toward a senior-year low. The researchers aren't the first to point to boys' emotional cruelty, the New York Times reports: The author of the book on which the movie Mean Girls is based wrote a sequel focusing on boys. "The reality is that most boys’ days are filled with many of the same social challenges that girls face, and what they learn from those experiences matters now and for their futures, as it does for girls," writes Rosalind Wiseman. (That advice could be handy for this family, whose first 12 kids were boys.)