Being mean to someone isn’t typically seen as something to be proud of — but what if you were doing it in order to help someone else?
Though a roundabout way of doing so, people might try and make someone feel bad in a situation where they think it will be helpful to someone in the future, a new study says.
Previous studies have found people look to make others feel bad with personal gain in mind, though researchers for this study wanted to find out whether people would do it altruistically.
The study of 140 adults included multiple parts, one of which was playing a computer game. Everyone in the study was assigned to be “Player B,” thinking there was a Player A they were partnered with for said game — though no such player existed. The study was published in Psychological Science, an Association for Psychological Science journal.
First, players were given a note “written” by Player A that detailed the player’s recent breakup and their despair surrounding it. One group of players was told to think about Player A’s feelings, while another was advised to stay detached.
Next, players were asked to play one of two games: “Soldier of Fortune,” a first-person shooter game with a goal of killing as many enemies as possible, or “Escape Dead Island,” a first-person game where the objective was to escape from a zombie-filled room. These were meant to represent confrontation and avoidance goals, respectively. Then, after listening to music clips and reading short descriptions of the games which had differing emotional content, they rated on a scale of 1 to 7 how much they thought their partners should listen to and read the media, among other ratings.
It turned out people who empathized with Player A were the ones who tried evoking emotions out of them, varying per the goal of the specific computer game. For the shooter game, Player B picked angry music clips and game description, while for the zombie game, Player B chose fear-inducing media. Those asked to feel empathy “decided to induce anger in a supposed fellow participant” who was working to achieve a confrontation goal, the study abstract notes.
“We have shown that people can be ‘cruel to be kind’ — that is, they may decide to make someone feel worse if this emotion is beneficial for that other person, even if this does not entail any personal benefit for them,” study author Belén López-Pérez said in a statement. For example, you might induce “the fear of failure in a loved one who is procrastinating instead of studying for an exam,” López-Pérez continued.
But what does this study tell us, exactly, going forward?
“These findings shed light on social dynamics, helping us to understand, for instance, why we sometimes may try to make our loved ones feel bad if we perceive this emotion to be useful to achieve a goal,” noted López-Pérez, who performed the study while at the University of Plymouth, and currently is at Liverpool Hope University.
Looks like being tough with someone might be the best medicine after all.
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Why Being Mean to People Might Actually Help Them in the Future originally appeared on usnews.com
