Attention office jerks: Back off!
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“It never made sense to me or Lily Cushenbery why being a jerk would be linked to actually coming up with original ideas,” Hunter says. “Instead, it made sense that being a bit pushy may help in getting your ideas heard and used by others.”
To determine whether this jerk quality was useful in all social contexts, Hunter and Cushenbery ran a second test—online—with 291 individual participants. Here, subjects were told to come up with a solution to a problem and propose it to two other members of a small chat room. The catch: Those two other chatters were actually actors following a script, either offering support for the participant’s idea, or being more confrontational. The results from this second test showed again that the jerk trait helps push through an idea in a more hostile environment, but proves to be harmful to creative thinking in milder settings.
So jerks aren’t necessarily all bad—if, that is, you’re in an office full of other bozos. In this case, Hunter says, “make sure there are ‘jerks’ on hand to push their ideas forward.”