Insults R Us
Having passed through an election that was fought, and won, on the basis of insults, the time has come for an epidemiology of the put-down. What is their underlying psychology? Why are they currently so thick in the air?
Motive: Anger?
Chickens are famous for their pecking order where the bottom chicken in the hierarchy gets pecked by everyone else and the top chicken is not picked on by anyone. The chicken hierarchy is settled by physical aggression.
In a verbal society, such as the human one, physical aggression is rarely used to settle issues of status: these are mostly deferred to verbal interactions. An insult can thus be interpreted as an attempt to reduce the social status of the recipient and thereby raise the relative status of the insulter.
If that logic is correct, then insults are often motivated by anger surrounding issues of status insecurity. Many insults are reactive: they are a response to real, or imagined, slights from others, such as a person accidentally cutting in front of someone else in a line.
We live in a period of extreme concern about how we are perceived by others and social psychologists document a steady increase in narcissism of college students from decade to decade. There is little consensus about why this is happening but some scholars believe that the more children are measured on evaluative scales from aptitude tests and IQ scores to GPAs, the more sensitive they are to threats to their social rank.
Of course, the narcissism trend c...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news
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