Sarcasm May Make You More Creative
Sarcastic WolfKnow Your MemeThe Sarcastic Wolf--which emerged in 2013--shows a blank-eyed wolf, meant to embody sarcasm.If you've ever doled out a sarcastic joke to a sensitive friend, you know all too well the consequences of its crass nature. But new research from Harvard Business school suggests that the processes involved with initiating and delivering a sarcastic comment may improve the creativity and cognitive functioning of both the commenter and the recipient. Their findings were published this past week in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.To figure out if sarcasm could affect cognitive functioning, the researchers assigned participants to one of three groups to have simulated sarcastic, sincere, or neutral dialogues by responding to pre-written responses showed to them on a piece of paper as vignettes. Immediately after these conversations, they put the participants up to tasks which tested their creativity. The researchers found that...