21–30 of 58 posts
Sounds like a sociopath rather than a jerk. I hire sociopaths, fire jerks
I recently had a baby, and the self-realization that I am a jerk became very clear when I thought about the world. Let me explain: From a young age, growing up in Queens, I quickly learned the value of being a jerk/asshole as a deterrent for getting "jumped" for my jacket/sneakers. The idea was: kids mugging other kids would go for easy targets. Even an inkling of belief that someone would put up a fight was a disinc…
You don't have to be assertive to be a jerk... ...in fact, I'd say it's the people who correlate assertiveness with jerkiness that are in fact most often jerks.
Depending on who you talk to I am either unreadable, a jerk, a creep, insanely nice, demanding, nit-picky, angry, obsessive, or one of a myriad other things. I think it's definitely possible to be a well liked jerk.
For example:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656616...
That meta-analysis shows that rather-specific variance is greatest for agreeableness, although that is misleading (in an underestimating kind of way) because what you really want to know is the target-rater interaction variance, which is often not studied because it requires a lot of combinations of targets and raters. What I remember (and I might be incorrect) is that in such studies, there's also a lot of relationship-specific variance for agreeableness.
The papers I've read by Vazire ignores this interaction variance and focuses on agreement across traits. The interaction variance is implied, though, by the huge amount of variance not accounted by target or rater.
The takeaway message is that there will be a lot of disagreement for most people about who thinks who is a jerk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to be assertive to be a jerk... ...in fact, I'd say it's the people who correlate assertiveness with jerkiness that are in fact most often jerks.
Would love to hear more about why you think that.
I know that I used to be a jerk quite often in the past looking back at my own behavior. It has never been intentional, I simply did not think about it. Don't know about my current jerkiness I think one needs outside perspective to really judge that.
Interesting tidbit: Sweethearts also seem clueless to the presence of jerks, offering concessions to, and excuses for jerk behavior. Question: what's with jerks teaming up? How does jerk signaling work, such that it attracts jerks-of-a-feather, when jerks in the wild are found joining forces?