That Best Insult Ever

What’s the last thing someone said to you to be mean?  Their aggression tells us more about them than it does about you.  What are the types of aggression and are there more bullies now than ever before?  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

It's That Popular Podcast. Mitch Princetine is a psychology professor at UNC Chapel Hill and the former Chief Science Officer at the American Psychological Association. Aaron Keck is a political scientist and award-winning radio host. Together, they discuss the popular and not so popular quirks of human behavior. Welcome into That Popular Podcast. Now, here's Mitch and Aaron.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Hey, welcome into the podcast. I'm Aaron. This is Mitch. How's it going?

SPEAKER_03 0:28

I'm doing okay. How are you doing? I am excellent. And I am feeling really, really, really good this week. Wow. Because I got the best compliment that I may have ever gotten in my entire life recently. Yes. Okay. Let me hear it. Uh so it was someone who was trying to insult me online. Wait, wait. The best compliment you've gotten was an insult. Was an insult. Yeah. I know this is a really sad thing about my life, but no, because I work for a radio station and we do a lot of interviews and things, and we post all of our material on social media. So we put up an interview that I had done with someone, and we get a response from this guide. And the response was, I hate Aaron Keck so much. He is such a jerk. Oh my God. And his justification for that was that I had said critical things about, we're in Chapel Hill, so UNC is the school. I had said critical things about UNC football way, way back when I first started at the radio station, and I've hated him ever since. And rah rah.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Well, UNC football back then was worthy of scorn and ridicule.

SPEAKER_03 1:35

You know, there's there's always things that you can say, but that's his that was his argument. And I read that and I'm like, this is supposed to be a criticism. Like this guy clearly doesn't like me. But I started at the station like 14 years ago. Like this, we we'd be talking 2010, 2011 thereabouts. If this guy actually thinks that the jerkiest thing that I have ever done is say one critical thing about a team he likes 15 years ago, that is such a powerful like affirmation of who I am as a person.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

That means you've been on a 14-year streak of just saying good things.

SPEAKER_03 2:14

Wait a second. And you have no idea because I do jerky things all the time.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Apparently.

SPEAKER_03 2:31

I don't even know.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

So on perhaps an unrelated topic.

SPEAKER_03 2:35

Might have been unrelated. Apparently. Oh my God. So my one of my colleagues says that this guy does occasionally like post negative comments about me. This isn't the first time after like a 15-year streak. I know it's great.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Oh my God. That is a high compliment, actually.

SPEAKER_03 2:57

It's actually really interesting because like I'm not that well known of a public figure, but like I'm on the radio. I'm a little bit of a public figure. And a couple of years ago, we did we commissioned a survey of residents in Chapel Hill just to uh get a sense of like what people are thinking about the station, who's listening, and what they think about us. This was also in conjunction with it's public policy polling, which is a polling outfit that's based out at Chapel Hill anyway. And he was going to do a local survey because there was a local election coming up, and he reached down and said, Is there anything else you want to you want us to ask? And we're like, yeah, ask us about our approval rating.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

And we've got this one of the questions, how much do you think Aaron is a jerk?

SPEAKER_03 3:35

Uh how much uh what is your what is your opinion of WCHL a radio station? Like is it is positive approval, negative approval, no opinion. Sure. Uh and we got the results back, and our net approval rating was like sky high. Our name recognition was way higher than any of the local candidates. Wow. And our approval to disapproval rating, I think, was something like 56 to 4. Oh my gosh. Which is really, really, really good. Really good. Yeah. Yeah. That said, 4% of the people in Chapel Hill actively disapprove of us. And there's like 75,000. And if you incorporate Carter or a next door neighbor, 100,000 people in those two.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Wait, are you counting up how many people there are that therefore disapprove of you?

SPEAKER_02 4:18

2,500. 2,500 people actually.

SPEAKER_03 4:25

4,000 people. 4,000 out of 100,000 is 4%. Yeah, 4,000 people disapprove of us. So yeah, when I walk into Whole Foods when I'm going downtown, like there are 4,000 people who dislike me.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Someone in this aisle probably hates me right now.

SPEAKER_03 4:39

Who is it? It's very weird.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Oh my God, that is that is so unnerving. Wait a minute. But to be fair, like, aren't you like the multiple years award-winning best radio person ever?

SPEAKER_03 4:52

Like what what is it exactly? Apparently not unanimously.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Well, there's a contested count of those votes, apparently. From this guy.

SPEAKER_03 5:01

Yeah, we've won we've won a lot of awards at the station. Like we're really proud of it. And I've won a couple, like I've won Personality of the Year, I've won Best Interview of the Year a few times. It's really cool to win awards, but it's it's a nice reassurance that not everyone feels but except for this guy and 2,400 of his friends. And 4,000 of his friends. Yeah. I did the math wrong.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

So here's the thing that is sticking with me here. What what what do you have to be thinking, feeling? How bored are you to take the time to go online and actually type out in this very public, unnecessarily kind of cruel way? I think he's a jerk. Like how rude? I don't know. It's a little rude. Have you how many times have you gone onto a public website and just decided to publish your own comments about someone being a jerk? I will say for me, zero.

SPEAKER_03 5:50

Off the top of my head, none. I can't think of any.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

I mean, most people I know would not take time out of their lives just to do that.

SPEAKER_03 5:57

I also do there is something to be said for expressing opinions as opposed to bottling them up. I did, I used to do, I used to do improv, and the improv theater had an issue where there were a lot of personality clashes like within the improv company, but the people who were clashing with each other never talked to each other about their personality clash. They would always just talk to other people. So there were multiple situations where everybody knew that X person had a problem with Y, except Y. No one ever brought it up to Y. And I said at the time, we should have a whiteboard somewhere in the building where we just like had a just like a makeshift Excel spreadsheet of all the names and just like who they have grievances with, just so we're all on the same page. And since ever since then, we used whiteboarding as a makeshift verb for I'm telling everyone about a problem that I have except the one person who can fix it.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Which is the whiteboard is like the burn book, but it's up for everyone to see?

SPEAKER_03 7:05

Basically, yeah. Like when you whiteboard something, you you complain about a person or a problem to everyone except the person who can actually solve it.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

Okay. I am I am never going to work there. That sounds horrible. So this is reminding me of what we know about aggression because this is aggressive. This is verbal aggression. Like people don't usually take time out of their day to call someone a jerk, much less to do it on I mean, maybe I haven't been on Twitter, you know, and as much as one should, because that's probably happening every 30 seconds across the whole Twitter series. But like, but that's not okay, right? Like we should not be not only, I mean, it's one thing to feel it, it's another thing to say it, it's another thing to take time out of your day to say it, and it's another thing to say it in a public forum just to slam, troll, embarrass, humiliate, hurt the feelings of someone else. Like that's not necessary. So interestingly, the the research on this kind of talks about there's actually two different kinds of aggression. And what's really helpful when you are the target of this is which kind of aggression have you gotten because or have you been, you know, on the on the short end of because it actually helps you understand what the bully was going through. One of these is called reactive aggression. And it's basically these people think of it as hot-blooded aggression, right? Like you've made me upset, or something else has made me upset. I can't control my feelings about this right now. Right. So I'm gonna lash out. I'm gonna kick the garbage can, I'm gonna yell at somebody, or I'm gonna go and just say, ah, they're all jerks. I hate them, you know, they're really crazy, whatever. And that's very different than proactive aggression. Proactive aggression is cold-blooded. It's kind of like I strategically, whether I realize it or not, I strategically need to make myself feel good. And the only way that I can I've learned to make myself feel good is to put others down, to assert my like dominance over them.

SPEAKER_03 9:05

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

So it's more of like a calculated kind of thing. So if you think about it, if you take a moment to think about the last time someone experienced, you know, you experienced aggression towards you, or you know, maybe you've been aggressive towards others, right? You can almost all the time put it into one of those two buckets. You know, were you in some way trying to show your dominance, superiority, moral high ground over someone else?

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Or are you just having a hard time keeping your emotions in check and you kind of lashed out?

SPEAKER_03 9:34

Yeah. I could, I could see that. I've done both. I've definitely done both. Yeah. Yeah. I could think of specific instances. I I am non-jerky enough to the point where when I am in those cold-blooded moments, I usually am able to get it out of my system by just having the conversation with myself and moving on. Right. Probably a healthier way of doing it, but still, like I've had those moments for sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

I know for me, when I'm having like that temptation to be reactively aggressive, I'm a big fan of writing an email to nobody, you know, and just kind of like having like my whole little tirade on an email where I very carefully made sure not to put anyone in the two line, just God forbid, right? And then after it's all done, I like and put it in a draft, and then I look at it two days later. I'm like, yeah, I'm never sending this to anyone. I'm deleting it, but I gotta like, but that's the thing. You're not a jerk, so you don't actually, but this is what some people have a hard time with.

SPEAKER_02 10:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Right? Like, so this jerk guy and his 5,000 friends, but none of them took the time to say it online. Not that I'm this guy, though, it's hard to know just from that, but you have to imagine what's what's his life like, you know, that he is having such a hard time containing his emotions that he can't help but just blur it out, you know, in the most inconsiderate, rude way possible. That's kind of sad.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

A little bit, yeah. But then again, it's social media. A lot of social media is kind of sad.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

I you know, it's the thing with social media, and I haven't been on since the last presidential election, but you know, it's how high is the threshold of anger and aggression that reading one little thing, one little you just fire off some hostile, aggressive, like really? Are we all just ramped up with anger so high that the tiniest hair trigger kind of we have to let loose with some horrible tweet against somebody else?

SPEAKER_03 11:25

I guarantee you a lot of people are listening to this going, yep. That's me every day.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Fair. I mean, fair, but that's that's not okay. It's not okay. Like that's really sad for all of us.

SPEAKER_03 11:36

And that's like collectively not okay because I think I think a lot, a lot of people, I'm not gonna say all, but a lot of us are kind of going through that period where we just constantly feel like we're living in a high stress time. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

Not even necessarily anything having to do with us and our personal lives, but just like culturally, socially, like it's a stressful time in general. The antidote to aggression is empathy.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

I think we're in an empathy crisis. You know, I think we read someone's profile, if we even get that far, we just look at their photo. We read someone's post and we uh react to them as if that's the only thing about them that exists. We we have stripped them of all humanity, of all nuance, of all depth and layered thought. And it's like you said that one sentence, therefore I hate you, and you're a jerk, and if you don't like UNC football circa 2010, then damn you, and you know, like but that depersonalization is a problem. I mean, sometimes I think to myself, just as an empathy exercise, like okay, this person just did something that's incredibly uh blood boiling, they they can make mistakes. They once had their first steps, right? They once you know had their first time driving a car, they are a human that has had ups and downs, they had birthday parties, they were a toddler, they were a college student once, and start to think of them as a broader person.

SPEAKER_03 13:12

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

And then like just because you said something about football that someone doesn't like, that doesn't define you in your entirety. Like you're a whole human.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Well, so this is the thing. People who are proactively aggressive, who do it in this cold-blooded way, I should say. Interestingly, research shows that they have grown up probably with someone using kind of power dynamics and power assertion in their life. It might be their parents one to the other. It might be the ways in which someone acted towards them, a parent to child. And they've kind of learned that the only way to make yourself feel good or get what you want is to kind of assert that power over someone else. And if you think about it, it's kind of, I mean, that's really that sucks for them because that's not the way one will get ahead and be happy for life. So, you know, when someone's doing that to you, it's like, yeah, I you're probably going to, you're probably going to win here. You're going to come out across more dominant because you're being super aggressive. But it's sad that that's the only way you know how to feel good.

SPEAKER_03 14:17

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Is to put others around you down, make yourself feel bigger.

SPEAKER_03 14:21

So three questions. And I think this will take us to the end. Yeah. Because these are three big questions. Number one, if you find yourself in that situation where you are having a hard time keeping yourself from lashing out or reacting negatively in this way, what do you do to get over that?

SPEAKER_01 14:40

So that's yeah. So now that's the reactive aggression. And those kids who are adults who are kind of just so bottled up with rage that they just lash out and they're being aggressive because of that emotional hot-blooded place. It is about really trying to slow down the interaction as much as possible. You know, how much can we take that and rather than acting impulsively in that moment with what we're feeling, do something. And everyone has something different. You know, ever since we got a puppy taking a the dog for a walk, the dog is just so cute. You can't be angry. You like watching the little dog doing its walk, you know, going to watching a TV show, exercising has always been my thing, like going to the gym and lifting. Because then I can use the aggression, you know, in a in an adaptive way. And then I'm just so tired afterwards. I'm not able to withstand, like, sustain the aggression anymore. So I think that's important. I think if it's the proactive aggression, it's about like, wait a minute. And that's the cold-blooded. That's the cold-blooded. So like, at what cost? Like I see an opportunity here to get ahead. I see a way to make myself feel good, but at what cost? And a lot of us who do have a capacity for empathy, I still believe that, even though everything is crap right now, I still believe that the vast majority of humans have a deep capacity for empathy, is just to take a minute and think, how would I feel if this happened to me? And do I want to do that? That's gonna make me have a short-term win, but it's gonna hurt someone else, you know, it probably in a long-term way.

SPEAKER_03 16:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

And how much can we just take a moment to switch switch roles?

SPEAKER_03 16:13

And then on the other side, if you are the target of aggression on either side of that proactive, reactive divide, what is your best response to that person?

SPEAKER_01 16:23

So, you know, I'd be lying if I said, like, oh, just it it doesn't have to hurt if you just understand it. Because of course it hurts. I mean, we're human beings, it's gonna hurt, that's gonna suck. Stick stones and names all right, right? Yeah. It is, it's your coping skills for thinking of it as a compliment are exceptional, and that is a great way to kind of feel good in a situation like that. But the fact of the matter is, you know, we're mere mortals and it's gonna hurt, and that's gonna feel bad, and it's gonna sting, and it's gonna stick with us for a while. But in a way, I do think that if there's a way to understand why people are aggressive, whether it's hot-blooded or cold-blooded, right? We actually might have a little bit of sympathy for them and realize this is a really deeply unhappy person. And uh their being aggressive towards me says as much about them as as anything, any grain of truth in what they actually said about me. I mean, think about it. That guy, how much of his time does he spend just walking around upset about football comments made 15 years ago? Or anything else. Or anything. That's that's kind of sad. So I think it's important to kind of think about try to take the position of the other person for a second and realize they probably have a lifetime of dealing with things in a pretty bad way if that's the way they're acting in this moment.

SPEAKER_03 17:47

Uh I think it was Patton Oswald, the comedian on Twitter, and this was years ago, had a I think a singular exchange. I don't know how replicable this is, but it ended up working out really well for him, where someone was being really nasty to him on Twitter, and he looked up the guy's profile and saw a whole bunch of other posts about going through a really stressful time, like losing my job and family health issues and stuff like that, and actively responded to him and said, Hey, I know you're going through a tough time. I'm sorry about that. And they ended up having this amazing exchange and coming out friends at the end of it. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

No, that's a great example. I mean, remember that the person who is so aggressive that they can't contain themselves on a post to a news story or that screams at you in traffic or that posts something bad about you online, you know, they're probably not just acting that way towards you. They're probably doing that to a lot of people. And they're probably not having pretty satisfying relationships across the the board at work, at home, with their kids, with their spouse. And I know I'm being such a psychologist here because this is what we're trained to do, but in even in the face of someone who you might have a lot of judgmental feelings about, they may be suffering and they may be someone who's having a tough time really across the board. So what will hurt you for 10 minutes or an hour or maybe even a day is probably nothing compared to the problems they're having in relationships across every day, perhaps for decades of their life.

SPEAKER_03 19:21

So do you interact with? Do you just feel that empathy within and not engage? Like how do you, what do you, what should one do? How are they different for different situations? I don't engage.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

I mean, I think if they're if they're not able to hold it together in the moment that they put in that comment, I don't know that they're in a place where they're ready to have like a calm, rational, helpful conversation. So sometimes it's worth just trying to let it go.

SPEAKER_03 19:45

And then last question, because all of this is great if you start from the assumption that this guy on social media is just throwing out bullying insults without any reference to it. All of us are imperfect, flawed people. Sure. How do we call each other out on our flaws and help each other become better people and overcome flaws without falling into being aggressive and bullying?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

So are you asking me whether you might actually be a jerk? Yes.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

Yes. Am I a jerk? Am I a bad person? I told I my uh my husband uh is always like half convinced that he's a sociopath. And my response is always real sociopaths don't ask questions about themselves. They don't like worry about it. So I think if you're worried about being a jerk, you're probably not. But I know I'm not a perfect person. Like, how does how and and I know for a damn fact that other people around me are not perfect people. So how do we, how do we criticize each other in like a constructive way without being bullying about it?

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Yeah. I mean, I think it's really important to talk with people about whatever their flaws or, you know, in the context of their strengths and recognizing that we're not defined by any one single action. So I think it's fine to say, listen, I know that you, I I see, I feel that you're the kind of person that is whatever, kind, good, attempting to be helpful, whatever. I wondered if sometimes there are things that you do that other people might misinterpret, right? This could come across in this way, or this might be working against you, or this might be not representing what I think is truly in your heart or truly what you want. And I think that people can hear that critique when it's in the context of positive assumptions of who they likely are, recognizing that sometimes we're just not good at at, you know, coming across the way that we think we're coming across and kind of coming at them as I'm I'm trying to be helpful to you in this moment because if you criticize somebody, they're automatically gonna be defensive. And it's a perfect way of making sure that they never hear the feedback. But if you approach them from the perspective of I'm actually coming at this from your side. I'm making all the positive assumptions. Can you with me create the possibility that this might be something that accidentally is coming across? Then you're less likely to get their defensive guard up and you're more likely to get them to actually hear it.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

And then if it turns out that they're still acting in bad faith, walk away. Well, then they're just a jerk. Then they're just a jerk. Yeah. But not you and me.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

No, of course not. This has been That Popular Podcast. Find all our episodes on thatpopularpodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts.