Being Sarcastic Indicates Something Very Wrong With You
If you often identify as the “sarcastic friend,” you might want to take a deeper look at your own issues, according to new studies conducted by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology at UC California.
Saracasm is now being referred to as a pattern of behavior which stems from “contemptuousness,” and can lead to scary behavior including bullying your co-workers, sabotaging your relationships, and becoming a terrorist. Yep, that’s correct, terrorism is involved.
How’d they come up with this? The scientists constructed a Dispositional Contempt Scale, which they’d use to interview participants based on whether they agreed with statements like, “I often lose respect for others,” “I would never try to make someone feel worthless,” and “I often feel like others are wasting my time.”
They offered this test to upwards of 800 people for this study, and also tested for levels of dispositional anger, disgust, envy, perfectionism, pride, self-esteem, and narcissism, as well as the 5 big personality traits. And their findings showed some pretty crazy shit: “contemptuous people are disagreeable — they couldn’t care less about making you happy — yet they also feel like others are unfairly imposing their standards on them.”
While more studies need to be done in order to get to the bottom of contemptuous personalities, so far, doctors have linked low self-esteem and contemptuousness pretty directly.
“A history of perceiving caretakers as unavailable in times of need, for example, may predispose one to seeing others as generally unreliable in their roles and responsibilities,” Roberta Schriber, the study’s lead researcher added.
If you’re bitter with abandonment issues, like myself, you’ll probably want to focus on ways to get better. Why not try some compassion for yourself? Here’s one way to do it:
NY Mag claims you should try to remember that, “the perception and classification of one’s experiences as part of mankind rather than an interpretation that is separate from others.”
As in, your shitty life is no worse than anybody else’s. So check yourself, sarcastic people, before you wreck yourself.
