tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post6470762401075455035..comments2024-03-18T10:05:26.015-07:00Comments on The Splintered Mind: The Phenomenology of Being a JerkEric Schwitzgebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-46031179446545353032010-12-17T15:58:26.809-08:002010-12-17T15:58:26.809-08:00Of course, Snuze! Thanks for the kind comment.Of course, Snuze! Thanks for the kind comment.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-27590152706405236632010-12-16T02:14:37.450-08:002010-12-16T02:14:37.450-08:00I like how you quantify the jerk characteristics; ...I like how you quantify the jerk characteristics; the rest of us would only have qualitative description.<br /><br />I hope you don't mind that I blog on this post of yours and share it with some of my friends.Snuzehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09712374144317934980noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-70770890998356617242010-12-02T16:55:23.225-08:002010-12-02T16:55:23.225-08:00Interesting set of questions! I think that probab...Interesting set of questions! I think that probably does somewhat capture the phenomenology of being a <br />"difficult person". Thanks for the link, Jordan.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-43008074748199286672010-12-01T03:54:40.227-08:002010-12-01T03:54:40.227-08:00Another way to assess whether you're being a j...Another way to assess whether you're being a jerk, perhaps?<br />http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2008/12/relationships-q.htmlJordan Bellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17488069546633876880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-78405271116943889702010-11-29T16:00:40.484-08:002010-11-29T16:00:40.484-08:00Here's perhaps another aspect of the phenomeno...Here's perhaps another aspect of the phenomenology: an acute sense of the need to redress perceived injustices to oneself.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-88798875084832241182010-11-24T18:46:45.340-08:002010-11-24T18:46:45.340-08:00Very interesting comments, Ruth! I'm not sure...Very interesting comments, Ruth! I'm not sure about liberalizing "jerk" to include all people who fail to take others' perspectives (with the consequence that most children are jerks) -- but this might be a vague matter of where to draw the lines for mushy folk-psychological terms. I'm inclined to think that simply failing to take others' perspectives (or to take into account others' welfare), when it's not *otherwise* culpable is mere thoughtlessness, and although many jerks are often thoughtless, one can be merely thoughtless without consequently being a jerk.<br /><br />I'm inclined to agree with you, too, that the gender typing of "jerk" is accidental and should be abstracted away from philosophical usage. "Bitch" has a somewhat different flavor. Aaron James at UC Irvine has been doing interesting work on "assholes" and "bitches" -- but I don't know if any of it is in print yet.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-54357316374742350192010-11-23T17:04:40.385-08:002010-11-23T17:04:40.385-08:00I'm sorry that my comment got posted FOUR time...I'm sorry that my comment got posted FOUR times! I feel like a jerk.<br /><br />I would also add that jerky kids are often called brats; a spoiled brat is a jerky kid who has been taught to be a jerk by indulgent parents that do not push back when the child refuses to treat other people as people OR is just a young Class I Entitled Jerk. I think spoiled brats are always self-consciously manipulative; ordinary brats are just habitually manipulative.<br /><br />Someone mentioned that only men can be jerks; I don't think this is true. Sometimes jerky women get called "bitches", but that connotes meanness, which I do not think is a prerequisite for being a jerk. I do think the term tends to get applied more to men though.Ruthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13896185855308028393noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-58671675701336205722010-11-23T15:44:39.541-08:002010-11-23T15:44:39.541-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.Ruthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13896185855308028393noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-4387964945738697192010-11-23T15:44:13.104-08:002010-11-23T15:44:13.104-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.Ruthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13896185855308028393noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-89058927293331643272010-11-23T15:43:41.182-08:002010-11-23T15:43:41.182-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.Ruthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13896185855308028393noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-35960582086886941062010-11-23T15:43:11.073-08:002010-11-23T15:43:11.073-08:00I think condition 1 might be too strong. I think ...I think condition 1 might be too strong. I think someone can be a jerk simply by failing to take the perspective of other people. In other words, you might treat other people a little bit more like objects than like the people they are. This is not the same as thinking you are especially important, although I agree that that is a particularly offensive form of jerkiness. There are two ways this could go wrong; you could be bad at attending to other people, or you could fail to be motivated by other people when you do attend to them. If you are truly unable to take perspectives or be motivated by them, then I would say you are a non-culpable jerk. If you simply refuse to attend to other people's perspectives, or if you know perfectly well how they feel but don't care at all, you are a culpable jerk. I think there is a big grey area in between, and I hypothesize that it is non-empty.<br /><br />A good example of this is the author of Look Me In the Eye, who self-diagnoses (with some help from his friend) with Asperger's. If you read the book, you'd see he knows full well the effects of say, digging a deep pit in the front yard and tossing in his brother. He does not have deficits in mind-reading. (Aversion to eye-gaze is very common and is not by itself evidence of Asperger's.) He simply is not motivated by his brother's suffering. He finds it funny, and believes it is wrong, but the suffering doesn't bother him enough to not do it. I would say that this more like sociopathy; his risk-taking behavior is more consistent with that. And sociopaths are, for very small values, jerks. For larger values, they become psychopaths who don't mind even very large amounts of suffering on the part of others if it suits the psychopath's needs.<br /><br />Most children would be classified as jerks, by the way, to the extent to which you could hold them responsible for attending to others and being motivated by their perspective. They don't have to have a sense of entitlement to be jerks; they simply have to be at the age where they can recognize that other people have a perspective, a set of interests, capacity for suffering, but fail to take it into account, the way that lots of people who are being initiated into a moral code. You know when your kid is being a jerk.<br /><br />Jerks, like kids, are often impulsive people; I would say this is a sub-type of jerk, a type susceptible to guilt more than Class A Entitled Jerks or Class B Indifferent Jerks. Class C Impulsive jerks experience regret frequently; I think they are also more remediable.<br /><br />There are a lot of dudes in this conversation. I do not know what this means.<br /><br />RuthRuthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13896185855308028393noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-37276480705770548662010-11-19T18:05:28.283-08:002010-11-19T18:05:28.283-08:00You are describing a narcissist, aren't you? S...You are describing a narcissist, aren't you? Sounds like it to me. Nice article. :)Jenna Ryan, SelfLoveU https://www.blogger.com/profile/06426210071911294397noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-60938317738947700362010-11-16T01:20:15.679-08:002010-11-16T01:20:15.679-08:00Not bad. I will be able to use these early intuit...Not bad. I will be able to use these early intuitions in my own work which finds its inspiration in the logoi of Heraclitus. Reference to you will be buried in remote footnotes. That will curdle the milk of your sweetness, bud.nonnynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-61353823123207504862010-11-15T20:21:40.082-08:002010-11-15T20:21:40.082-08:00These tests are seriously flawed, as they too easi...These tests are seriously flawed, as they too easily produce false positives. For example, my research is so important that by any reasonable, objective measure, I am actually more important than most people - for me to deny this would be nothing more than false modesty. And since I have a genius-level IQ, it's natural that I would consider most people I meet to be idiots - after all, compared to me, they are. So your tests would actually classify me as a jerk! <br /><br />However, if you can fix this problem of false positives, your tests could be useful. It turns out that a lot of the people I work with are not only jerks, but actually get angry when I point out that they're jerks. It would definitely be useful if there was a clear test that could actually demonstrate to people with such stunning lack of self-awareness that they are, in fact, jerks.Autumnal Harvestnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-83748378157695180082010-11-12T18:40:02.053-08:002010-11-12T18:40:02.053-08:00Thanks, Randy! Clearly, I will have to think thro...Thanks, Randy! Clearly, I will have to think through the sweetie-doormat-sucker side of the equation a bit better; the positive side of the story has been secondary to my thoughts about jerks, but clearly a full account of jerkhood is going to involve more detail about the one or more opposites.<br /><br />As for the empirical test you mention, I'm inclined to think that it would be a fairly good first-pass measure, especially if the respondents were people of lower social status than the jerk. However, the jerk will probably just think they are a bunch of idiots! (Or otherwise rationalize away the results.)Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-12793360654181551862010-11-12T12:31:39.922-08:002010-11-12T12:31:39.922-08:00Eric, I agree about the tension. I wonder why you ...Eric, I agree about the tension. I wonder why you think of a sweetie as being the opposite of a jerk. I like the opposition you create in the other post between a jerk and a sucker, though perhaps the best opposition is between a jerk and a doormat. Sweetiness may not be a virtue in the sense of capturing the mean between those two extremes, but it does seem to me to lie somewhere between them on the continuum. The sweetie seems to me to be more the opposite of the cynic, who will share some phenomenological traits with the jerk, but often not exhibit jerkish behavior and ultimately finding egoistic rationales to behave decently. <br /><br />Also, given your empirical orientation, it surprises me that you expressed doubt about the ability to produce evidence of jerkhood. It seem to me that all you need to do is ask 20 or so people who know him well to rate the subjects jerkhood on a Likert scale and take the average. Maybe want you are dubious of is that this evidence would convince a jerk that he is a jerk. <br /><br />Anyway, great topic!G. Randolph Mayeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18285281186698499962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-77653047200522223992010-11-12T11:29:12.273-08:002010-11-12T11:29:12.273-08:00@ Randy: I am inclined to agree with your second p...@ Randy: I am inclined to agree with your second point, though perhaps there are rare exceptional cases. You're entirely right about how that fits with my own general perspective on the mind, as reflected in the blog's title.<br /><br />Your first point seems somewhat in tension with your second point, though: Just as (almost) everyone has the inner jerk, almost everyone has the inner sweetie which sometimes comes out. Someone who is never a sweetie probably doesn't really have the capacity for sweetieness -- and is probably, then, already a sociopath or near enough.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-28632669904328050892010-11-12T11:24:54.432-08:002010-11-12T11:24:54.432-08:00@ Kapitano: Nicely put. I'm inclined to think...@ Kapitano: Nicely put. I'm inclined to think that the underlying psychology of it is fairly unified, perhaps along exactly the lines you suggest -- which is why "jerk" is a unitary term. But the phenomenological manifestations of that psychology are variable, e.g., "I'm important" (positive and primarily self-directed, even if implicitly comparative), "those idiots" (negative and primarily other-directed, even if implicitly comparative).Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-30519820571007660122010-11-12T11:21:54.600-08:002010-11-12T11:21:54.600-08:00@ Matt: Interesting thought! I think there's ...@ Matt: Interesting thought! I think there's a tension, but you're right there are odd cases where they can come together. (So I should probably not think of it as a "spectrum".)Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-79854965361944938652010-11-12T11:20:26.945-08:002010-11-12T11:20:26.945-08:00@ Andy: I think that you can't be entirely wro...@ Andy: I think that you can't be entirely wrong about that -- but I also think that this utilitarian-style reasoning is really ripe for self-serving rationalization. I'm inclined to think that unless the utilitarian justification is extremely obvious and compelling, we're better off disregarding it.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-58169636406050994872010-11-12T11:02:48.486-08:002010-11-12T11:02:48.486-08:00@ Paul, cont.: For your second two comments, I wil...@ Paul, cont.: For your second two comments, I will go dispositional. It's a question of how much of a tendency there is in that direction, across circumstances.<br /><br />Emergency room doctors (esp. in third-world countries) are an interesting case. One wants to give them a free pass, but also one wants (I think) to give them a pass for taking a day off even if that means two people will die who otherwise wouldn't. Giving them a pass on the second is, I think, somewhat in tension with giving them a pass on the first.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-39992332988397435762010-11-12T10:59:18.324-08:002010-11-12T10:59:18.324-08:00Thanks for all the comments, folks!
@ Paul: On 1:...Thanks for all the comments, folks!<br /><br />@ Paul: On 1: yes. But we need to be cautious about this in our own cases, because we are apt (I think) to have self-serving biases regarding the importance of our own work. On 2: The difference, I think, is whether you feel angry on behalf of others as well as yourself. I agree that our introspective self-knowledge of this is not likely to be especially good (especially if our introspective judgment issues in a self-flattering result) On 3: I tend to be something of an intellectual egalitarian, looking broadly at what counts as intelligence. Although some of us might be better at the abstract logic of the Wason selection task than others, (a.) we are probably stupid in lots of other ways, and (b.) try parsing in real time an abstract, context-less sentence with three negatives or with a conditional, a negation, and a disjunction, and you'll probably feel the pull of how few abstract operations you can reliably string together.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-42444244988747018512010-11-12T09:49:49.981-08:002010-11-12T09:49:49.981-08:00I agree with Kapitano's reduction. Possibly t...I agree with Kapitano's reduction. Possibly there is something midway between the jerk and the sociopath- call him (and jerks are always male aren't they?) the 'real jerk' who simply doesn't think about other people at all. So, like Nietzsche's ubermensch, it's not that he thinks he's better than others, because he doesn't even have any inclination to recognize the existence of other people's perspectives in the first place. (He does have the capacity, though, which makes him not an ubermensch and not a sociopath.)<br /><br />The other thing that I think is worth adding to this discussion, especially in a blog called The Splintered Mind, is the idea that selves are splintered. Every man has a jerk inside him, and presumably because that creature is needed to perform traditionally manly chores for which sympathy for your fellow being would be a distinct impediment. So a jerk on this view is someone whose inner jerk runs the show.G. Randolph Mayeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18285281186698499962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-10708854093753698032010-11-12T07:59:40.501-08:002010-11-12T07:59:40.501-08:00The notion that "I am important but downtrodd...The notion that "I am important but downtrodden" and the notion that "Everyone else is an idiot getting preferential treatment" - aren't these really just two sides of the same idea?<br /><br />I suggest a jerk is simply someone who doesn't think other people are important. One jerk might rationalise this belief by saying they (the jerk) are highly intelligent or so beautiful the rules of others don't apply to them. Or they might come up with the alternate rationalisation that everyone <i>else</i> in the queue must be dumb or maliciously inconveniencing them.<br /><br />But the point is, the rationalisation doesn't matter. It's just a half-formed justification for a belief which already exists.<br /><br />A jerk then, is someone who lacks empathy for those they have no specific reason to care about. Which places them halfway between a normal person and a sociopath.Kapitanohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14647896216499813443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-25287140478231174252010-11-12T07:47:13.623-08:002010-11-12T07:47:13.623-08:00Interesting post, Eric! One interesting feature o...Interesting post, Eric! One interesting feature of the characterization you've given here is that sweetieness and jerkhood are not incompatible. But to me, that actually sounds right. What you get when you combine them is the kind of person who thinks she's responsible for the welfare of those around him *because* she's so important and *because* they're such idiots. Hmm. Perhaps jerkhood-cum-sweetieness is a characteristic feature of the political personality?Matt Zwolinskihttp://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinskinoreply@blogger.com