English: A bundle of kale from an organic food co-op. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I stumbled across an interesting article a few days ago:
Does organic food turn people into jerks? (Health on Today)
While the article talks generally about insufferable organic food enthusiasts, there is one line in the article that causes me to think we are touching on a wider principle here:
“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous,” says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans.
I recall when I was growing up, there was one woman in our neighborhood that we called the neighborhood do-gooder (that’s when we were being polite — we had other names we called her, too). Whenever there was some charitable cause for which door-knockers were needed, you can bet she’d come around knocking on our door. And yet, everything about her clearly conveyed that she thought she was better than everyone else in the neighborhood. When she went door-knocking, I think it was as much to peer into other people’s homes (and lives) as to collect the money. She very clearly didn’t want to spend social time with any of the other neighborhood residents, unless it was to deliver a bit of juicy gossip, criticize a neighbor for the way they chose to live, or try to put the touch on people for another donation.
Her husband was a pretty down-to-earth guy, and their kids turned out fairly normal (about the range you’d expect in any family with a few kids), but everyone knew that she was more concerned about her reputation than anything else, and what she never realized that was as far as most of her neighbors were concerned, her reputation was that of a self-righteous do-gooder who thought she had the perfect family, or at least was going to try as hard as she could to maintain that illusion.
Once, one of her sons and another neighborhood boy were caught shoplifting from a local store. The circumstances were such that the cops knew that at least one of the boys had shoplifted (actually, both had participated) but the crime could have been pinned on either one. I should mention that both boys were still minors. Shortly after it happened, she went to the other boy’s home when his parents were not home, and in effect begged him to take the rap for the crime. And her appeal to him was, “Think what this would do to my husband’s reputation!” (I don’t want to give away too many details, but he worked for a school district, and in the end that incident didn’t hurt his career a bit). Of course, when the other boys parents found out that she had done this, his mother went over to her house and fireworks ensued, because that’s the type of person she was – she didn’t take any crap out of anybody, and she certainly wasn’t going to let her son lie to protect the other boy, and if the truth were known, I admired her a lot more than I did the “do-gooder.”
Many years later, I took my mother shopping (she was too old to drive herself at that point) and we ran into Mrs. Do-gooder at a local store. It was a rather awkward encounter, because she acted like we were long-lost friends (when in reality she’d had no use for our family back in the day when we lived in the same neighborhood)! Neither my mother nor I could imagine where she got that idea. We were as polite as we could be under the circumstances, but excused ourselves as quickly as we could.
Now, is there a point to this little story, I hear you ask? Why, yes, there is. Have you ever noticed how people who hang out in support forums and try to help others often come off as the most self-righteous jerks on the forum, and yet they seem totally oblivious to the impression they are making on others? Maybe it’s the same principle. Maybe, somehow, the fact that in their own eyes they are doing good (by answering questions and helping people with their problems, or maybe even doing some coding) on some psychological level lets them give themselves permission to be total jerks now and then, especially with new users, those that haven’t attained any “status” in the community, and those that refuse to jump through whatever hoops they put in front of a questioner before they will actually answer the question.
The biggest problem with such people occurs when they camp on a forum and try to be the first to answer questions or to answer the most questions (or both), and eventually manage to become the go-to guy for answers in that forum. Then, one day, they have some issue with the forum administrators (or maybe another user that’s sick of their attitude), and they just up and leave. Or, maybe they just have some other reason they can no longer participate in the forum. Suddenly there is a void, because no one else has bothered to learn the information that the guy was giving out. It’s a very unhealthy situation, because when it’s just so easy to ask one guy for all the answers, nobody else bothers to learn how to answer those types of questions. It’s waaaaay too easy to “let George do it”, as the old saying goes, and if “George” gets sick, dies, gets thrown in jail, or just has a fall-out with the forum administrators, and ups and leaves without so much as a “goodbye”, it may take some time before anyone else can come up to speed on the information that this guy was dishing out (with a slice of attitude on the side).
Forum administrators really need to be on the lookout for guys like this. It may be very tempting to let such a person become your defacto unofficial customer support (and better yet, you don’t have to pay him), but the thing to watch out for is if the starts acting arrogant and condescending to other users. If that happens, it may be best to place limits on his participation in the forum early on. Unfortunately, that rarely happens, because the guy’s change in attitude usually happens rather slowly. One day he’s a new user himself, trying to figure things out (and asking a ton of questions) and a year or two later he’s the “Soup Nazi“, but it happens so gradually that there’s no single point in time when he first “crossed the line”. All I can say is “watch out”, because I’ve seen this sort of thing happen in more than one forum over the years.
(And please note, I’m not trying to be sexist when I use terms like “guy”, “he”, “him”, etc. I’ve just never personally seen this happen with anyone other than a guy in an online forum. I suppose it’s entirely possible a female could assume the same role, but one thing the English language still lacks is a good set of gender-neutral pronouns that people will actually use. Anyway, since I’ve never personally seen it happen with a female, I didn’t want to inadvertently imply that it had.)
Related articles
Organic Food Turns You Into a Jerk (neatorama.com)
Does Organic Food Turn You into a Jerk? (newsfeed.time.com)
Organic food might make you a jerk: study (nydailynews.com)
People exposed to organic foods are more judgmental, self-righteous: study – New York Daily News (drugstoresource.wordpress.com)
Buying Organic Makes You A Jerk, Study Says (inquisitr.com)
Does organic food turn you into a jerk? (timesunion.com)
STUDY: Organic Food Fans Are More Likely To Be Selfish Jerks (businessinsider.com)
Organic Food Makes You A Monster (theawl.com)
Organic Foods Making People Judgy (snspost.com)
Do Organic Consumers Shop Exclusively at the Jerk Store? (txwclp.org)
