Eric Schwitzgebel, How Do We Know If We Are Jerks or Not?

Are you surrounded by stupid, insipid people? People with bad taste and foolish desires? Boring people who don’t deserve your attention? People who are easy to see through? Sycophants, the arrogant, the big-headed, brutes, airheads, self-satisfied jerks, and, most importantly, clueless people? If you often see the world this way, I have bad news for you. You are probably a jerk. The world doesn’t look this way to most people, and it really isn’t this way.

Nautilus — I want to talk to you about something you probably didn’t do this morning: look in the mirror and ask yourself, am I a jerk?^۱

This question seems reasonable and justified. There are probably genuine, pure jerks in the world, and many of them likely consider themselves morally superior or at least average. In their own view, they are not jerks, because self-knowledge for jerks is a difficult and elusive matter.

Simine Vazire is a psychologist at the Davis campus of the University of California. She believes we tend to have good knowledge of our personality traits when those traits are both evaluatively neutral (neutral meaning that having them is neither good nor bad) and straightforwardly observable.

For example, people like to know if they are talkative or quiet. Being talkative or quiet are both more or less fine, and in any case, your degree of talkativeness is quite palpable to others. For talkativeness, self-assessment^۲ corresponds fairly well with peer-assessment^۳ and objective evaluations. On the other hand, creativity is a trait that carries much more evaluative weight and is far more difficult to assess; everyone likes to think of themselves as creative and innovative. According to Vazire’s model, there is a very weak correspondence between self-assessment, peer-assessment, and psychologists’ attempts at objective evaluation of creativity.

The question, “Am I really an arrogant jerk?” carries a very high evaluative weight, so you will be strongly inclined to find a favorable answer: “No, of course I’m not!” Being a jerk is also not straightforwardly obvious and palpable, so you will have the opportunity to reinterpret the evidence in your favor: “Well, yeah, maybe I treated that cashier badly, but he deserved it because he forgot to pour my drink in its special cup.”

Academic elites are not immune to this kind of motivated reasoning either. On the contrary, Dan M. Kahan of Yale University recently conducted research showing that thoughtful, educated individuals can be particularly skilled at rationalizing their pre-existing beliefs; for instance, interpreting complex evidence about gun control in a way that aligns with their political preferences.

Regarding jerkitude, I imagine there is no correlation between an individual’s personal opinion

and their actual degree of it. Some flagrant jerks might be aware of their jerkitude, but others might think they are absolutely wonderful and fantastic. Some decent people might be fully aware of their decency, while others might severely underestimate themselves morally.

There is another obstacle on the path to self-knowledge for jerks, and that is that, at least for now, we do not have a good understanding of the nature of jerkitude. There is no official scientific name that corresponds to the broad, general use of this term for various kinds of jerkish behavior: the person who cuts in line in front of you, the teacher who callously humiliates students, and the colleague who turns every minor encounter into a battlefield.

Among the established, scientific personality categories that come closest to "jerk," the Dark Triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy^۴ are the most relevant. Narcissists consider themselves more important than those around them, and jerks, implicitly or explicitly, do the same. Nevertheless, narcissism is not entirely equivalent to being a jerk, because narcissism also entails a desire to be the center of attention, a desire to which jerks are not always inclined. Machiavellian personalities tend to treat people as tools for achieving their own ends, which jerks also do. Yet, Machiavellianism does not completely overlap with being a jerk either, because Machiavellianism involves conscious cynicism^۵, whereas jerks can often be oblivious to their own selfish tendencies. People with psychopathic personalities are selfish and callous, and jerks are the same, but psychopaths also have a propensity for impulsive risk-taking, while jerks can be calculating and risk-averse.

Another related concept is that of the asshole^۶, a concept recently examined by the philosopher Aaron James of the University of California, Irvine. According to James's theory, assholes are people who allow themselves to enjoy special advantages over others based on a settled sense of entitlement. Although this state is closely related to jerkitude, they are still not entirely the same. A person can be a jerk due to their arrogant and offensive behavior even if they derive no benefit from it.

With all these obstacles in the way, what is a jerk who wants to change supposed to do?

The first step toward an answer is to provide a precise definition of what it means to be a jerk. My suggestion is that being a jerk should be accepted as a category that specifically merits scientific study. The word "jerk" is apt and useful. It captures a very real phenomenon that no other concept in psychology fully encompasses. Jerks are people who culpably fail to value the perspectives

of those around them. Instead of treating others as moral and epistemic peers, they treat them as tools to be properly utilized or as fools to be managed. Being a jerk means being ignorant in a specific way: being oblivious to the value of others, oblivious to the merit of their ideas and plans, indifferent to their desires and beliefs, and unforgiving of their faults. The valuable contribution of folk wisdom in labeling certain people as jerks is its emphasis on the existence of these flawed types.

Jerks see the world through a lens that blurs the humanity of others. The restaurant server cannot be a fascinating human being, a person with a personality, a history, and a unique set of goals that you might even share in some respects. Instead, they are merely a tool for providing you with a meal or a fool upon whom you can vent your anger. The people standing ahead of you in line at Starbucks have no personhood and do not count. Those below you in the social hierarchy lack your talents and deserve only servitude and menial work.

To sharpen our understanding of being a jerk, we can also use the opposite of the word jerk, namely sweetheart.^۷ You might know one or two such people: those who are habitually attuned to the needs and interests of others, who care about the thoughts and interests of others, who, in difficult cases where they suspect the fault might lie with them rather than the other party, are responsible and committed. Imagine turning your jerk goggles inside out and transforming them into sweetheart goggles, goggles that clearly reveal the worth, charm, importance, and specialness of the people around you.

Probably no one is an absolute jerk or sweetheart. Decades of psychological research show that when it comes to broad, global personality traits, the vast majority of people have mixed, complex personalities and are subject to unpredictable influences. But where exactly do you stand on the spectrum from jerk to sweetheart? And in what respects, in what situations, and toward which people do you think you possess these qualities? Perhaps nothing in your moral character is as central as your degree of jerkitude. It is your moral conduct toward the people around you.

This definition can help us identify two obstacles to jerks' self-knowledge. One obstacle is this: to the extent that a person is genuinely worried about

being a jerk, their jerkitude disappears for a time. If you feel a bad feeling of fear and embarrassment about your possibly shameless behavior toward someone, in that moment, by the grace of this pain, you are affirming the legitimacy of that person's interests and values and recognizing them as an individual who has moral claims on you, not a tool or a fool. You have, at least for a moment, taken the jerk goggles off.

So, as it happens, the people who are most often worried about having acted like jerks are sweethearts, the kind of people who later come up to you and apologize with a red face for some not-so-bad behavior. In contrast, for full-fledged jerks, nothing is more alien than this kind of apology.

Of course, if you feel comfortable with this idea and think to yourself, "Look, since I'm worried about being a jerk, and here I am sitting and reading an article on this very topic, I must not be a jerk!" and stop worrying, your jerkitude reveals itself in that very moment.

Another distinct obstacle to jerks' self-knowledge is their inability to listen. One of the most important paths to moral self-knowledge is to listen with open arms to others' moral criticisms of you. This is not easy for jerks. Because jerks do not like to see others as equals worthy of moral and intellectual respect, the jerk rarely accepts criticism constructively. Why should I take seriously the words of a fool or a tool? Why should I try to pay attention to their critical views about me? Most likely, the jerk will either dismiss the criticism, retaliate, bluff and storm out shouting; or smile and twist the knife deeper.

Other moral vices are not this defiant against self-knowledge. Hypocrisy, for example, does not close a person's ears to accusations of hypocrisy. Greed does not specifically prevent us from thinking about our own greediness. But the nature of jerkitude is not listening.

If the essence of being a jerk is not valuing the opinions of those around us, we have probably found a secret path to self-knowledge: don't look at yourself, look at others. Instead of staring into the mirror, turn your face away and pay attention to the colors that paint the world. Is your environment full of stupid and nondescript people? People with bad taste who have foolish desires? Boring people who don't deserve your attention? People you can

easily recognize? Sycophantic, arrogant, big-headed, brutish, empty-headed people and self-satisfied jerks, and, most importantly, jerks?

If you see the world this way most of the time, I have bad news for you. You are probably a jerk. The world does not look this way to most people, and the world is not really like this. You do not have a correct view of the world. You do not see the individuality and capabilities of those around you.

I have depicted the image we see through jerk goggles in the greatest detail, but I think aspects of it are familiar to all of us, except for the full-fledged sweethearts (who practically have their own problems, because they easily get caught up in the desires and opinions of others). We all have our jerkish moments.

But how often do you get lost in jerkitude? If we are all somewhat jerks and somewhat sweethearts, where do you stand on this spectrum? To reflect, try asking yourself how often you feel you are looking at the world through jerk goggles? But unfortunately, people are not very good at these kinds of judgments. Memory is selective. We tend to recall a few very important instances, or instances that confirm our prior beliefs, or instances that show us in our best light (or, for self-critical people, in their worst). If you really want to reach an accurate understanding of your own jerkitude, I know of two other scientific approaches.

One of these approaches is adopting experiential sampling methods⁸ devised by two psychologists named Russell T. Hurlburt from the University of Nevada and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from Claremont University. Activate an alarm on your mobile phone or any other device at hand in a random manner. When the alarm sounds, see what you are thinking about at that time. You might not be very good at self-assessment and might want to justify self-flattery at that moment, but at least after a while you will obtain a representative sample.

The second approach is trying something like mindfulness⁹, a concept drawn from Asian contemplative traditions. Recently, Erika N. Carlson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, has proposed mindfulness exercises as a way through which greater self-knowledge of elusive personality traits becomes possible, traits such as jerkitude which, in terms of

evaluation, are high but their observability is low. The essence of mindfulness is to pay attention to our experiences as much as possible without judgment. Carlson believes that if we habitually examine our own experiences as they pass, we can arrive at more and more representative evidence and use it to assess our personality.

Although research on empirical mindfulness is still in its early stages, there is evidence of a connection between mindfulness and self-knowledge. For example, Amber S. Emanuel and her colleagues at Kent State University found that participants who carefully attended to their mental states more accurately predicted their emotional reactions to the U.S. presidential election. Christina L. M. Hill and John A. Updegraff, also both researchers at Kent State, found that self-reported mindfulness^۱۰ was closely linked to the tendency to distinguish between positive and negative emotions during experience sampling.

I don't know how realistic it is to expect that a large number of people would seriously employ these two methods to enhance their understanding of their moral character, rather than to measure their success. So let me conclude this piece with a more modest suggestion: a few hours from now, when you are among others, think about this matter—for instance, while standing in the lunch line, or in a meeting, or at a party or in a crowded market. Pay attention to the people around you. Are they jerks and tools? Or do they shine with compelling individuality? In other words, notice whether you are wearing the jerk goggles or not.

We all sometimes look at the world through jerk goggles. But we are not captive to this vision. I think most of us can see what is flawed in this perspective simply by thinking about it.

And that is the way to take off the jerk goggles.

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Endnotes:

* This piece was published on September 15, 2016, under the title How to Tell If You’re a Jerk on the Nautilus website, and the website Tarjomaan translated and published it under the title How Do We Know If We Are Jerks or Not? on November 23, 2016. * Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His published works include the books Perplexities of Consciousness, Describing Inner Experience?, co-authored with R. T. Hurlburt, and The Missionary Meets the Heathen. He blogs at his blog titled The Splintered Mind.

[۱] Jerk [۲] Self-rating [۳] Peer-rating [۴] psychopathic personality [۵] self-conscious cynicism [۶] Asshole [۷] sweetheart [۸] Experience-sampling methods [۹] Mindfulness [۱۰] Self-reported mindfulness

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ere’s something you probably didn’t do this morning: Look in the mirror and ask, am I a jerk?

It seems like a reasonable question. There are, presumably, genuine jerks in the world. And many of those jerks, presumably, have a pretty high moral opinion of themselves, or at least a moderate opinion of themselves. They don’t think of themselves as jerks, because jerk self-knowledge is hard to come by.

Psychologist Simine Vazire at the University of California, Davis argues that we tend to have good self-knowledge of our own traits when those traits are both evaluatively neutral (in the sense that it’s not especially good or bad to have those traits), and straightforwardly observable.

For example, people tend to know whether they are talkative. It’s more or less okay to be talkative and more or less okay to be quiet, and in any case your degree of talkativeness is pretty much out there for everyone to see. Self-ratings of talkativeness tend to correlate fairly well with peer ratings and objective measures. Creativity, on the other hand, is a much more evaluatively loaded trait—who doesn’t want to think of themselves as creative?—and much less straightforward to assess. In keeping with Vazire’s model, we find poor correlations among self-ratings, peer ratings, and psychologists’ attempts at objective measures of creativity.

The question “am I really, truly a self-important jerk?” is highly evaluatively loaded, so you will be highly motivated to reach a favored answer: “No, of course not!” Being a jerk is also not straightforwardly observable, so you will have plenty of room to reinterpret evidence to suit: “Sure, maybe I was a little grumpy with that cashier, but she deserved it for forgetting to put my double shot in a tall cup.”

Academically intelligent people, by the way, aren’t immune to motivated reasoning. On the contrary, recent research by Dan M. Kahan of Yale University suggests that reflective and educated people might be especially skilled at rationalizing their preexisting beliefs—for example, interpreting complicated evidence about gun control in a manner that fits their political preferences.

I suspect there is a zero correlation between people’s self-opinion about their degree of jerkitude and their true overall degree of jerkitude. Some recalcitrant jerks might recognize that they are so, but others might think themselves quite dandy. Some genuine sweethearts might fully recognize how sweet they are, while others might have far too low an opinion of their own moral character.

There’s another obstacle to jerk self-knowledge, too: We don’t yet have a good understanding of the essence of jerkitude—not yet, at least. There is no official scientific designation that matches the full range of ordinary application of the term “jerk” to the guy who rudely cuts you off in line, the teacher who casually humiliates the students, and the co-worker who turns every staff meeting into a battle.

Jerks see the world through goggles that dim others’ humanity.

The scientifically recognized personality categories closest to “jerk” are the “dark triad” of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathic personality. Narcissists regard themselves as more important than the people around them, which jerks also implicitly or explicitly do. And yet narcissism is not quite jerkitude, since it also involves a desire to be the center of attention, a desire that jerks don’t always have. Machiavellian personalities tend to treat people as tools they can exploit for their own ends, which jerks also do. And yet this too is not quite jerkitude, since Machivellianism involves self-conscious cynicism, while jerks can often be ignorant of their self-serving tendencies. People with psychopathic personalities are selfish and callous, as is the jerk, but they also incline toward impulsive risk-taking, while jerks can be calculating and risk-averse.

Another related concept is the concept of the asshole, as explored recently by the philosopher Aaron James of the University of California, Irvine. On James’s theory, assholes are people who allow themselves to enjoy special advantages over others out of an entrenched sense of entitlement. Although this is closely related to jerkitude, again it’s not quite the same thing. One can be a jerk through arrogant and insulting behavior even if one helps oneself to no special advantages.

Given the many roadblocks standing in the way, what is a potential jerk interested in self-evaluation to do?

The first step to the solution is to nail down more clearly what it means to be a jerk. I submit that jerkitude should be accepted as a category worthy of scientific study in its own right. The word “jerk” is apt and useful. It captures a very real phenomenon that no other concept in psychology quite does. Jerks are people who culpably fail to appreciate the perspectives of the people around them, treating others as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with, rather than as moral and epistemic peers. To be a jerk is to be ignorant in a certain way—ignorant of the value of others, ignorant of the merit of their ideas and plans, dismissive of their desires and beliefs, unforgiving of their perceived inferiority. The nugget of folk wisdom in calling certain people jerks is to highlight this particular species of deficiency.

Jerks see the world through goggles that dim others’ humanity. The server at the restaurant is not a potentially interesting person with a distinctive personality, life story, and set of goals to which you might possibly relate. Instead, he is merely a tool by which to secure a meal or a fool on which you can vent your anger. The people ahead of you at Starbucks are faceless and of no account. Those beneath you in the social hierarchy lack your talents and deserve to get the scut work.

To sharpen our conception of jerkitude, it’s helpful also to consider the jerk’s opposite: the sweetheart. Maybe you know one or two of these people—habitually alert to the needs and interests of others, solicitous of others’ thoughts and preferences, liable in cases of conflict to suspect that the fault might lie with them rather than with the other party. Imagine flipping our jerk goggles inside out, converting them into sweetheart goggles—goggles that make especially vivid the value, interest, importance, and specialness of the people around you.

The jerk will either dismiss the criticism, counterattack, bloviate, storm off, or smile and sink the knife in deeper.

Probably no one is pure jerk or pure sweetheart. Several decades of psychological research confirm that, when it comes to big, broad personality traits, pretty much everyone is mixed and complex and subject to a variety of shifting influences. But where specifically are you on the spectrum from jerk to sweetheart, and in what respects, in what situations, toward which people? Maybe nothing is more central to your moral character than your degree of jerkitude. It is your basic moral comportment toward the people around you.

This definition can help us see two obstacles to jerk self-knowledge. One obstacle is this: To the extent one genuinely worries about being a jerk, one’s jerkitude momentarily vanishes. If you prickle with fear and shame at your possibly shabby behavior to someone, in that moment, by virtue of that very prickling, you are recognizing the legitimacy of that person’s interests and values, seeing that person as an individual with moral claims upon you, rather than as a tool or fool. You have, at least for a moment, taken your jerk goggles off.

Thus, ironically, it is often the sweethearts who are most worried that they have been acting like jerks—who approach you later with blushing apologies for their really not-so-terrible behavior. In contrast, nothing is more foreign to the full-on jerk than a blushing apology.

Of course, if you take comfort in this idea and think, “hey, since I’m worried that I might be a jerk, and in fact I’m reading a magazine article on that very subject, then I must not actually be a jerk!” and thus cease to worry, at that very moment your jerkitude potentially reasserts itself.

The other distinctive obstacle to self-knowledge of jerkitude is the jerk’s inability to listen. Plausibly, one of the most important paths to moral self-knowledge is listening, in a genuinely open way, to other people’s moral criticisms of you. The jerk cannot easily do this. Because the jerk tends not to see others as peers worthy of intellectual and moral respect, the jerk rarely accepts criticism constructively. Why take seriously what a tool or fool has to say? Why try to engage with their critical perspective on you? More likely, the jerk will either dismiss the criticism, counterattack, bloviate, storm off, or smile and sink the knife in deeper.

Other moral vices are not recalcitrant to self-knowledge in these ways. Dishonesty, for example, does not block one’s ears to accusations of dishonesty. Greediness does not particularly interfere with the ability to think that one might have been greedy. But it’s the nature of jerks to stop their own ears.

If the essence of jerkitude is a failure to appreciate the perspectives of others around you, this suggests what might be a non-obvious path to self-knowledge: looking not at yourself but at other people. Instead of gazing into the mirror, turn away from the mirror and notice the colors in which the world seems to be painted. Are you surrounded by fools and non-entities, by people with bad taste and silly desires, by boring people undeserving of your attention, by people who can be understood quickly by applying a broad and negative brush—creeps, stuck-up snobs, bubbleheaded party kids, smug assholes, and, indeed, jerks?

If this is how the world regularly looks to you, then I have bad news. Likely, you are the jerk. This is not how the world looks to most people, and it is not how the world actually is. You have a distorted vision. You are not seeing the individuality and potential of the people around you.

Maybe nothing is more central to your moral character than your degree of jerkitude.

I’ve painted this jerk-goggled vision in extreme colors, but aspects of it are, I suspect, familiar to all of us except the most hopelessly sweet sweethearts (who, actually, have their own problems, since they are too easily swept up into the desires and opinions of others). We all have our jerkish moments.

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. But unfortunately this isn’t the sort of judgment people are very good at. 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. Hurlburt of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, now at Claremont Graduate University. Set a random beeper or some other arbitrary external trigger and, when the alarm sounds, notice how you’ve been thinking of things. You might not be very good at self-assessment and perhaps you will be prone to rationalizing self-flattery, but at least over time you’ll collect a representative sample.

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. The essence of mindfulness is to attend as non-judgmentally as possible to one’s stream of experience. Carlson’s suggestion is that by more habitually attending to our experiences as they pass, we can acquire a broader and more representative evidence base by which to assess our personalities.

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. M. 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.

I don’t know how realistic it is to expect many people to do experience-sampling or mindfulness training in any serious way, with an eye to improving self-knowledge of their moral character, nor how successful such training would ultimately be. 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.

And that is the way to take those jerk goggles off.

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California at Riverside and author ofPerplexities of Consciousness and (with R.T. Hurlburt) Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic. He blogs at The Splintered Mind.

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How Do We Know If We Are Jerks or Not?

Author: Eric Schwitzgebel

Translator: Amir Ghajargar

Translation Source: Tarjomaan Website

Reference: Nautilus

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