It turns out that sometimes your friend who treats you the meanest might actually be the one who cares about you the most.
According to a study conducted by psychological scientist Belén López-Pérez at the University of Plymouth, many people often try and intentionally make others feel negative emotions if they think it will be beneficial for them in the long run.
“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,” López-Pérez states in his paper published by the Association for Psychological Science.
The study was partly conducted in response to other researchers who found that oftentimes people try and worsen others’ moods for their own personal gain — i.e. selfish personal reasons. López-Pérez, along with colleagues Michaela Gummerum and Laura Howells wanted to see if there were other possible altruistic explanations as well.
“These results expand our knowledge of the motivations underlying emotion regulation between people,” says López-Pérez.
Their research helps to explain the love-hate relationships we often have with those who we are very close to, like parents for example.
“We identified several everyday examples where this might be the case — for instance, inducing fear of failure in a loved one who is procrastinating instead of studying for an exam,” López-Pérez says.
While it can often feel that parents are antagonizing us and putting too much pressure on us, causing unnecessary stress, many times we know it is because they have our best interests at heart.
At the end of the day, that fear of failure they are trying to induce is done out of love, or at least that what López-Pérez thinks.
“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,” López-Pérez concludes.
His research can be really be applied to any loved ones in our lives, including close friends, boyfriends, and girlfriends, etc.
While not everyone who is being mean to us is doing so for altruistic reasons, it is important to always give consideration to that as a possibility.
Also, keep in mind that the study conducted by López-Pérez was based upon video games.
Participants were asked to play first-person shooter Soldier of Fortune, and zombie game Escape Dead Island with other players. The research team manipulated the conditions under which the participants played the games in order to influence the emotions they felt towards their game partners. Then they observed the results.
“After receiving a note supposedly written by Player A, some participants were asked to imagine how Player A felt, while others were told to remain detached. The note described Player A’s recent breakup and how upset and helpless Player A felt about it. Then, participants were asked to play a video game so they could then make decisions for Player A on how the game would be presented,” the description of the study on Science Daily states.
The results of the study suggest that those who felt empathy towards their partner’s situation influenced them to make different game decisions than they otherwise would have ordinarily.
While more research will have to be conducted to come to any definitive conclusions, it is easy to see the logic in how sometimes one would purposefully be mean to someone who they feel empathy towards in an attempt to help that person improve their situation.
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