Photo: NBC
Finally, all those years of being a sarcastic windbag may be paying off because according to a new study sarcastic people are a hell of a lot more creative that those folks that don’t go down the sarcastic route.
The study, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has found that sarcasm can actually make you a more creative thinker. It all kicked off when researchers at Harvard, Columbia, and the European business school INSEAD “manipulated’ sarcasm in a lab by having participants simulate conversations.
As part of the experiment subjects had to say something sarcastic or sincere, hear a comment that was sarcastic or sincere, or have a neutral conversation. Then participants had to remember a time when they said or heard something sarcastic, sincere, or neutral. Finally they had to imagine a sarcastic, sincere, or neutral punchline to a joke.
Following all of that they all completed creativity tasks, and (lo-and-behold) the people in the sarcastic conditions all smashed it compared to the other.
According to the findings, sarcasm sparks creativity as you have to think abstractly, figuring out the distance between the literal and figurative meaning of what you’re saying.
And all that mumble-jumble means that us sarcastic people are better than you all, right? Right.
Then again if you’re being sarcastic towards someone who doesn’t really know you well you might come across as a big a-hole. A big, creative a-hole that is.
