How do jerks act

But how often are you lost in jerkitude? If we are all part jerk and part sweetheart, where are you on this spectrum? You can try, in retrospect, to recall how frequently you find yourself behind jerk goggles. Memory is selective—we tend to recall a few highly salient cases, or ones that confirm our prior opinions or show us in the best light or, among anxiously self-critical people, the worst light.

I see two more scientific approaches, if you really want to achieve an accurate perception of your jerkitude. One is to adapt the experience-sampling methods pioneered by psychologists Russell T. A second approach is to attempt something like mindfulness—a concept from Asian meditative traditions. Recently, psychologist Erika N. Carlson at the University of Toronto has suggested mindfulness training as a path to self-knowledge of the most difficult-to-know personality traits, those that like jerkitude are high in evaluativeness and low in observability or salience.

Although empirical mindfulness research is in its infancy, there is some evidence of a relationship between mindfulness and self-knowledge. For example, Amber S. Emanuel and colleagues at Kent State University found that participants who reported being observantly mindful of their mental states more accurately predicted their emotional reactions to a United States presidential election.

Christina L. Hill and John A. Updegraff, also both then at Kent State, found that greater self-reported mindfulness was correlated with a tendency to better differentiate among subtly different positive and negative emotions during experience sampling. Let me conclude, then, with a more modest suggestion: Think about this article sometime later today, sometime when you are surrounded by other people—maybe in the lunch line, or at a department meeting, or at a party, or in a crowded plaza.

Notice the people around you. Are they fools and tools, or do they sparkle with interesting individuality? Notice, in other words, if you are wearing your jerk goggles. We all look through jerk goggles sometimes. But we are not stuck with this vision of the world. Merely by reflecting on it a bit, we can, I think—most of us, at least momentarily—see what is deficient in that vision. Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California at Riverside and author of Perplexities of Consciousness and with R.

Hurlburt Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic. He blogs at The Splintered Mind. Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress. It's just not the same without them. Please sign in to Nautilus Prime or turn your cookies on to continue reading. Focus on breathing and keeping your cool. Make an active mental effort to calming yourself down.

Draw in a deep breath, hold it to the count of three, then exhale. Do this four or five times. Imagine that the irritation you feel is slipping out with each breath. Think before escalating the situation. Is the jerk actually saying anything worth listening to? What are you getting worked up over? Create some space. Pull back and stop interacting with the mean person directly. If there are other people around, talk to one of them until you cool down. Otherwise, find something else to focus your attention on to take your mind off an unkind comment or action.

If possible, go somewhere else and do something soothing to help you relax. If all else fails, pull out your phone and pretend to text a friend. That way, you can ignore an antagonist without the need to just sit in uncomfortable silence. You have nothing to prove to mean-spirited critics. Getting defensive is like revealing a chink in your armor that the jerk will zero in on and try to damage further. In these cases, try to take a stand without coming off as aggressive. This can just motivate a jerk to push back even harder.

This article should help: Get Rid of a Bad Friend. Not Helpful 10 Helpful If someone threatens to tell something about you, just let them. It will just show everybody who knows you how big of a jerk they are.

Tell them in a straightforward manner that don't want any contact with them anymore. You don't even have to tell them why, just tell them to leave you alone.

Block their number and social media accounts. Not Helpful 12 Helpful What if someone acts like a jerk but doesn't say any mean things, so I have no proof? Sometimes, you just have to shake it off. They might be saying mean things just to bring themselves up. If it is a serious problem that persists, start writing down what they say and when they say it before letting an adult know about it.

Hopefully your notes will serve as proof enough. Not Helpful 8 Helpful Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered. Be the bigger person. Diffuse the situation, don't wait for it to blow up. Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0.

Trying to strike back or humiliate a jerk is pointless because it only perpetuates their behavior, and may even make things worse. Avoid escalating tense situations, but don't be afraid to stand up for yourself or someone else if the mistreatment doesn't stop. Keep your wits about you. If a jerk feels like they're succeeding in flustering you or breaking your composure, they may be spurred to keep going. Can you give me one? In other words, someone who makes you feel like dirt.

I would make a distinction between temporary and certified assholes, because all of us under the wrong conditions can be temporary assholes. I'm talking about somebody who is consistently this way, who consistently treats other people this way.

In fact, some of them really do care — they want to make you feel hurt and upset, they take pleasure in it. A great question. The reason that I have this definition of assholes as somebody who makes you feel demeaned, de-energized, and so on is that you've got to take responsibility for the assholes in your life.

Some people really are so thin-skinned that they think everyone is offending them when it's nothing personal. Then the other problem, which you're also implying, is because assholeness is so contagious, that if you're the kind of person where everywhere you go, the people objectively treat you like dirt and treat you worse than others, odds are you're doing something to prompt that punishment.

You can see this with Donald Trump. If you insult virtually everybody, they're going to throw the shit back at you. I assume that most of us are occasionally assholes but prefer not to be. There's some evidence in the book about how few people will say that they're assholes compared to how many people will say they're oppressed by assholes.

There's a huge disparity. Why is that? But there are two problems with that. One of them is that in most situations, you actually need collaboration. And we have plenty of research that shows that people who are givers rather than takers tend to do better in the long term.

And, to be fair, there are examples of assholes in business being upended by their own assholery. There are typically costs for being an asshole in the professional world. First, it depends on how much power you have. Those are the two questions that you have to answer before you can decide what to do. To begin with, you've got to build your case. One of my mottos is that you have to know your assholes.

We already talked about temporary versus certified assholes, but another distinction that's really important is that some people, and you mentioned this at the outset, some people are clueless assholes and don't realize they're jerks, but maybe they mean well. This is simple persuasive work. I imagine this is a common situation for many readers interested in this book. The first question is, can you quit or transfer to another department?

The second question is, if you must endure, are you going to fight or are you just going to take it? In any case, I tell people to try to have as little contact as possible with assholes, and I offer strategies for doing that in the book. One of the simplest — but admittedly hardest — things you can do is simply learn not to give a shit.