While reading through one of our many personal insult-laden threads, I began wondering (again) about the actual goals & agendas of those who tend to regularly engage in that behavior (both here and in "real life"). Certainly everyone does it to some degree and frequency, but clearly there are those who appear to have a stronger need.
In today's hyper-partisan environment, what do you suppose is served by this? What is accomplished?
Anyway, I sniffed around a bit and found this:
The Psychology of Insults
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An insult can thus be interpreted as an attempt to reduce the social status of the recipient and raise the relative status of the insulter.
If that logic is correct, we can assume that insults are often motivated by anger surrounding issues of status insecurity. Many insults are reactive: They are responses to real or imagined slights from others, such as a person accidentally cutting in front of someone else in a line.
We live in a period of extreme concern about how we are perceived by others; social psychologists are charting a steady increase in narcissism among college students.1 There is little consensus about why this is happening, but some scholars believe that the more children are measured on evaluative scales—aptitude tests, IQ scores, and GPA—the more sensitive they are to threats to their social rank.
Of course, this narcissism trend is only accentuated by social media, where participants are subject to unrelenting evaluation by other network members who encourage participants to inflate their egos, often at the expense of others.1 Concern with how one is perceived creates social insecurity that may be relieved by lashing out at other chickens (or people) in the area. Social networks are replete with individuals who deliver stinging rebukes because they enjoy doing so, and because they are mostly exempt from the reprisals that one might expect for real-world put-downs.
Content: Status, Competence, Sex, and Hygiene
The purpose of a put down is to reduce someone else in the imaginary status hierarchy. So it is hardly surprising that insults will often refer to a person's social status in terms of ancestry, lack of prestige, or membership in a despised out group; for example, Nazis or vagrants. Otherwise, the content of insults across the ages is monotonously predictable: Many insults feature a sexual component, refer to sexual organs, or bring up shameful or ineffectual sexual behavior. In addition to status and sexuality, insults inflict shame by mentioning unappealing traits—fatness, shortness, baldness, spottiness, and contagious diseases.
Another way of taking a person down is by questioning their intelligence or general mental competence; for insult purposes, recipients are invariably "stupid" or "crazy."
The pecking-order logic of insults means that if the recipient is shamed, then the insulter rises in status relative to the victim: The insulter is the one doing the pecking rather than getting pecked. Not all insults are equal, of course: Some pecks miss their mark and have no impact upon relative status.
.
In today's hyper-partisan environment, what do you suppose is served by this? What is accomplished?
Anyway, I sniffed around a bit and found this:
The Psychology of Insults
=====================
An insult can thus be interpreted as an attempt to reduce the social status of the recipient and raise the relative status of the insulter.
If that logic is correct, we can assume that insults are often motivated by anger surrounding issues of status insecurity. Many insults are reactive: They are responses to real or imagined slights from others, such as a person accidentally cutting in front of someone else in a line.
We live in a period of extreme concern about how we are perceived by others; social psychologists are charting a steady increase in narcissism among college students.1 There is little consensus about why this is happening, but some scholars believe that the more children are measured on evaluative scales—aptitude tests, IQ scores, and GPA—the more sensitive they are to threats to their social rank.
Of course, this narcissism trend is only accentuated by social media, where participants are subject to unrelenting evaluation by other network members who encourage participants to inflate their egos, often at the expense of others.1 Concern with how one is perceived creates social insecurity that may be relieved by lashing out at other chickens (or people) in the area. Social networks are replete with individuals who deliver stinging rebukes because they enjoy doing so, and because they are mostly exempt from the reprisals that one might expect for real-world put-downs.
Content: Status, Competence, Sex, and Hygiene
The purpose of a put down is to reduce someone else in the imaginary status hierarchy. So it is hardly surprising that insults will often refer to a person's social status in terms of ancestry, lack of prestige, or membership in a despised out group; for example, Nazis or vagrants. Otherwise, the content of insults across the ages is monotonously predictable: Many insults feature a sexual component, refer to sexual organs, or bring up shameful or ineffectual sexual behavior. In addition to status and sexuality, insults inflict shame by mentioning unappealing traits—fatness, shortness, baldness, spottiness, and contagious diseases.
Another way of taking a person down is by questioning their intelligence or general mental competence; for insult purposes, recipients are invariably "stupid" or "crazy."
The pecking-order logic of insults means that if the recipient is shamed, then the insulter rises in status relative to the victim: The insulter is the one doing the pecking rather than getting pecked. Not all insults are equal, of course: Some pecks miss their mark and have no impact upon relative status.
.
