Yeah no shit. Who the fuck is still hittin' helpless children? (I know where it comes from, but still...)

Transference has been known for decades, at least

guys seriously ... Science literacy is important. That especially goes for the incompetent editors at the guardian. This is NOT a study. This is a blog post describing that the particular UCL research group got a research grant accepted. In other words, they got grant money, so they can produce research on this topic IN THE FUTURE. Notice, that everything in that post is written in future tense except for the paragraph called "Research to date" and there is NO RESULTS.

Yes of course, this correlation is obvious. That is why there has been an abundance of research done on this topic already. But of course, as is the case with pretty much every field in science, this topic remains incredibly important and doing more research there will always remain important. Research is an ongoing process and most scientific publications are minute incremental improvements in understanding. So everyone who is saying "hurr durr this is obvious, so much money wasted on such nonsense", please shut the fuck up and LEARN TO READ

Sorry for the profanity. Having worked in research, i am quite disillusioned by the common misunderstanding of the scientific process.

We've known that for decades... that was the whole point of pushing to get rid of spanking in the 90s; kids model that behavior.

The article doesn't mention how they're ruling out the standard "bad behavior causes physical punishment" interpretation.

Mirror neurons gonna mirror neuron

I thought this was going to be an onion article

Hurt people hurt people. It's a phrase I've heard since forever. Nice to see scientific research is catching up to this bit of common wisdom.

To paraphrase Darkmatter: "what being hit for stealing a candy bar taught me wasn't that it's immoral to steal, it's that violence is how you solve your problems."

Makes sense. If an adult hits a kid to get a desired outcome, then the kid is going to learn to hit others to get a desired outcome.

I guess the question that remains is: how much of that is due to being hit and how much due to having the genes of parents who hit their children?

Physical punishment (such as smacking and hitting) is the most common form of violence against children.

Quality start, these researchers have clearly never visited a daycare or preschool.

There is a severe lack of effort in ruling out correlation and an assumption of causation with physical punishment and negative outcomes for education and antisocial behaviour.