Jerkology: The Diagnosis, Treatment and Prevention of Jerks

Jerks! If anything keeps us up at night, it’s them — how they’ve wronged us, how to get them to shape up or get out.

They might be feeling the same about us. The feeling that they’re a jerk is often mutual. There are a lot of jerk-on-jerk battles, especially these days, factions accusing each other of being the real jerks, yet with no consensus about what distinguishes jerks.

Defining who's a jerk

The social sciences are weirdly silent about jerks, buttheads, or a-holes. They get a lot of attention in everyday folk psychology, but not within scientific research. That’s a big problem because they’re a big problem. Jerks are largely responsible for humanity ticking like a time bomb and yet we don’t get much serious research about what makes them tick.

Of course, there are the clinical diagnostic categories like psychopath, malignant narcissist, and dark triad personality. But “jerk” is different — it's a broader category of behavior. One can be a jerk without meeting those diagnostic criteria. Maybe Hitler had a congenital dark triad personality disorder but I don’t think the same could be said about everyone who became a jerk under his leadership.

Being a jerk is less an inherent psychological disorder or personality type than a lifestyle. People can be part-time jerks, jerks on some topics and not others, and jerks to some people and not others.

Perhaps jerkdom doesn’t get investigated because it seems to be such a subjective categorization. In folk psychology, a jerk is just anyone who jerks you around. A butthead is just anyone with whom you butt heads.

The term “jerk” describes how they appear to us, not necessarily what’s going on with them. But then the same could be said of “bully” or “narcissist,” both of which describe the impression they give us, not necessarily what’s makes them tick. Narcissists sure seem high on themselves, but that may not be what it’s like to be them. Many narcissists and bullies may have fallen into a habit that worked because they could get away with it.

Psychopathy is often treated like a congenital trait, not a lifestyle. As a lifestyle, jerk is a little like willful or motivated psychopathy. There are advantages to being a jerk if one can get away with it.

Perhaps researchers sidestep the topic because the names we have for total jerks are too informal, many of them vulgar and spit out in anger. Every aspect of human behavior is fair game in psychology but somehow clinicians skirt this one, rounding off to the nearest DSM diagnostic or letting them fall through the cracks.

As a result, laypeople round off to DSM’s names, often spit out in anger too but with the air of clinical neutrality. Articles on dealing with narcissists are always popular as is folk-diagnosing our exes as narcissists and psychopaths when maybe, with us, they just fell into the jerk lifestyle.

The study of jerkology

One way or another, jerkology remains a backwater in psychological research even while in our current cultural cold war, jerks become a hotter topic than ever.

About 25 years ago, I landed on a research question that has been an obsession ever since: What distinguishes a butthead since it can’t just be that we butt heads with them? That is, what’s the most objective way to distinguish total jerks?

I call this research topic “psychoproctology,” Though here at Psychology Today, we’re calling it jerkology. Basically, it’s the study of a-hole diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

For me, “a-hole” is a poetic stand-in for the more vulgar term — poetic in that I think the jerk lifestyle is a placeholder, a hole into we need a more clinically precise, explanatory term, and because a-holes are like black holes, sucking the life out of life.

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“Psychoproctology” or “jerkology” are deliberately light names for serious topics. In this serious work, we can’t take ourselves too seriously. History’s biggest villains saw themselves as the supreme experts on who’s a jerk: Anyone who challenged their Godlike authority. No one should be granted that kind of expertise. I’m a specialist in psychoproctology, not an expert. I don’t think one can be an expert in psychoproctology.

And I don’t mean my jerks — the people I happen to think are jerks because of what they believe. I mean jerks in general, regardless of what they claim to believe. Being a jerk is not a function of what someone claims to believe, but something about how they strut it. One can be a jerk branded to any cause or no cause at all.

I consider psychoproctology a fruitful exercise in futility — futile because I don’t think we can ever land on a last-word objective definition of a-hole; fruitful because it’s well worth trying and here’s why: In an adaptive society, we can’t go around telling everyone how they all must live. Still, we have to stop a-holes, or else it won’t remain an adaptive society.

This leads to two questions:

1. Diagnostics: What most objectively distinguishes a-holes?
2. Treatment and prevention: How do we stop a-holes without becoming a-holes in the process?

I consider these the most important questions in moral philosophy and moral psychology: Not how people should act, but how to keep them from acting the one fundamental way that we can’t afford to act.

My psychoproctology research is informed by the three other areas of research I do in collaboration with UC Berkeley biologist/neuroscientist Terrence Deacon:

• Teleogenesis: From chemistry, explaining the emergence and nature of life’s struggle for existence, organisms making effort to achieve their aims. (How life’s iffy effort emerges from matter’s passive existence.)
• Logogenesis: From life, explaining the evolution and nature of humans, a uniquely language-using species. (How does adapting to reality change under the ungrounding influence of language? Note: While there are plenty of parasites and predators in biology, being an a-hole is a distinctly human thing.)
• Meta-genesis: Explaining how hierarchy emerges (How part/whole relationships happen — not just why they would be useful but how they emerge.)

My research has yielded some new approaches to psychoproctology’s two big questions which I’ll be presenting in this blog and elsewhere. On psychoproctology, I have an audio podclass of my soon-to-be-published book here, short videos here, and many posts on my other Psychology Today blog.

If you want to understand what makes some people tick like time bombs, I’ll hope you’ll drop by my new blog here.