What Makes Someone a Jerk?

What makes someone a jerk? Most people have an intuitive sense of it: A jerk is someone who jerks you around. A butthead is someone who butts heads with you.

Operating on intuition, most people can’t define “jerk” nor have they given the definition much thought. They just know one when they see one. When they do see one they’re disgusted and a little proud – proud as though identifying a jerk proves they’re not one.

That’s the popular, common or default way we deal with jerks: By intuition. It’s also why we have a world rife with rival factions each confident that the other factions are the real jerks.

There’s a popular Reddit discussion (AmItheasshole) where people post stories of their conflicts and readers weigh in on who’s the real jerk.

These stories are written by people wondering if maybe they’re the jerks – a healthy question to ask ourselves. Still, you only get their side of story and again, readers mostly weigh in from their gut intuitions about what makes someone a jerk.

Nevertheless, this reddit thread can lead to what I consider the second way of dealing with jerks: Trying to get beyond our subjective intuitions to wonder what really distinguishes jerks. What traits do they have in common that all non-jerks don’t have? What’s the essence of jerkdom?

I think this is one of the most pressing questions in all of psychology.

For 25 years, I’ve explored and written about the essence of jerks. I call myself a psychoproctologist, a specialist in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of jerk behavior.

I’m a specialist, not an expert – some of the worst people in history proclaimed themselves experts on who’s a jerk. I chose a light name for my research into this most serious of topics. Psychoproctologists can’t afford to take themselves too seriously.

I call my research a fruitful exercise in futility. Though I don’t think an absolutely objective definition of jerks is possible, I believe it’s fruitful to pursue one.

Today, many people shun political news. They wash their hands of it, often proudly because they say all politicians are jerks. Some smug-shrug that they’ll never understand politicians who act like jerks.

I worry as much about people checking out of politics as I do about people assuming that their intuitions entitle them to declare with fake-objective authority that their rivals are the real jerks.

It’s worth trying to understand them. I also find that being curious about what makes jerks tick like time bombs makes following politics tolerable. It gives me something to do beyond virtue-signaling my proud disgust, angst and outrage at them. And it’s not just politics. Any dealing with a potential jerk can be a psychoproctologist’s opportunity to wonder more about how to accurately and objectively diagnose, treat and prevent jerkdom. I’ve revised my guesses about them through every interaction.

Today we hear a lot of advice about how to be a good person, even how to walk the straight and narrow of a righteous life. Psychoproctologists focus on the opposite.

Psychoproctology isn’t about how everyone should live. Rather, it’s about how no one should get away with living. It doesn’t focus on the right way to play the game of life but where to draw the out-of-bounds lines.

For that we need a lot more exploration and debate about where to draw those out-of-bounds lines, and above all, we must get beyond the intuitive subjective “I-know-em-when-I-see-em” way of dealing with the jerk problem. I encourage everyone to become a psychoproctologist.

Here’s my psychoproctology channel with several of my draft attempts to diagnose jerk behavior.