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Unless you inhabit a hermit cave with no internet access, you’ll know that we live in the Age of Offense. With high levels of polarization and innumerable ways to broadcast one’s every thought to strangers far and wide, it is easier than ever to lob insults and to denigrate ideological foes. Not surprisingly, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, 47 percent of Americans believe that people saying things that are “very offensive” to others is a major problem in the country today, whereas only 11 percent say it is not a problem. (The remainder says it is a minor problem.)
You might conclude that the solution is for people to stop offending others—good luck with that!—but consider another statistic in the same poll: A larger percentage of Americans (62 percent) says another big problem is “people being too easily offended by things others say.” These are not at all mutually exclusive findings; they suggest that we are simultaneously too offensive and too thin-skinned.
The second issue, however, is the one on which I wish to focus, because, for most people, being too easily offended is worse for one’s own quality of life than being obnoxiously rude. So instead of spending your efforts trying to stamp out what you find offensive, you should work on being less offended in the first place.
The foundational study on the psychology of taking offense—one still frequently cited today—was written in 1976 by the psychologist Wolfgang Zander. He argued that we get offended in three stages: First, we identify when we’re insulted or harshly contradicted; second, we assess how extreme the offense is; finally, we respond emotionally or in some behavioral way. Say, for example, a colleague at work says in a meeting, in front of your boss, that your latest proposal is stupid. You identify this as a contradiction of your ideas; you assess this as mildly annoying; you decide to register your unhappiness in an appropriate manner with your colleague after the meeting.
I chose this example because research has found that such a negative judgment from another person is precisely what we typically deem most offensive. Scholars in 2018 showed in a survey of 129 people that 73 percent of cases of offense-taking was for threats to dominance or competence. The other 27 percent of instances related to attacks on goodwill or appearance. This reminded me that someone on social media once called me a bald guy who writes bad columns. The first part reminded me of something I don’t love, but it didn’t offend me—hey, the truth is the truth—but the second part stung a little.
People react to offenses in different ways. That same study found that women, when offended, are more likely than men to experience sadness and bitterness, whereas men are more likely to experience pride (manifested as indignation) and anger. Another study found that when an offense is highly hurtful, the most common reaction is acquiescence, which might involve tearfulness or even apologizing. When an offense is less hurtful, the most common reaction is to laugh or ignore it.
However we react, our response can be less under our conscious control than is perhaps implied by the example that I gave of Zander’s three-stage process. That’s because an offense triggers parts of our ancient brain, notably the limbic system, which indicates a threat. The workings of this strong primal structure raise the possibility of more-drastic action: fighting, verbally or physically.
Here, too, reactions differ by gender. Males are more likely than females to respond to an offense with aggression, including violence. Fortunately, this outcome is unusual for either sex because the brain’s executive center—the prefrontal cortex—inhibits the amygdala’s fight response. The way this works in practice is that when someone says something offensive, you initially feel furious (limbic system), but then you tell yourself Don’t freak out (prefrontal cortex), and you manage to act calmly.
As you may have noticed, some people exhibit more effective inhibition than others. Scholars have shown that the likelihood of a violent response to an offense is far higher among people with substance-use disorders—especially when that condition is paired with mental illness. By the same token, men convicted of violent crimes have been shown to have weaker-than-average connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex when they face a personal insult.
The point of describing the neurological and psychological mechanisms that underpin taking offense is that knowledge is power. If you know what’s happening to you when you feel offended, that’s the first step toward controlling how you respond.
Naturally, life is happier if you’re not being offended. One strategy is to try avoiding anyone who might offend you and put up barriers against any exposure to them. If this involves curating your friendships to shun someone who’s liable to hurt your feelings repeatedly, that’s fine. But if taking measures against being offended means shutting down free speech on your college campus, that is less likely to go well for you or serve your purpose.
Those techniques involve trying to control your environment, but the more you try to expand the scope of that control, the less effective and the more costly it will become for you and others. Better by far to control yourself—by learning to be less offended. The studies I mentioned above suggest several strategies to do just that and help you live more happily as a result.
1. Laugh it off.
Remember that when an offense is not grave, the most common reaction is to ignore it or laugh. This is a very good option because it makes you the judge of how severe the offense is, rather than cede that judgment to some outside arbitrator. You don’t have to laugh in a defiant, bitter way; on the contrary, you can usually effectively neutralize another’s jab with self-deprecating humor. (I’m bald? Tough but fair.) Doing so can actually raise your self-esteem. Scholars have also shown that, especially if you are a team leader, this kind of joke can actually increase others’ trust in you and boost their perception of your effectiveness. You can imagine how this could work in business or in sports, but you can use the same tactic to maintain your position in other situations.
2. Use your prefrontal cortex.
I teach my business-school students that the most important management job they have is self-management—to understand their emotions and act independently of them. Admittedly, this skill is harder for some people than others, but we can all improve with determination and practice. Many techniques for activating your brain’s executive center exist: prayer, journaling, meditation. If you’re facing an interaction with a troublesome person, I’d recommend reading this passage from the Stoic classic Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius:
It is the privilege of human nature to love those that disoblige us. To practice this, you must consider that the offending party is of kin to you, that ignorance is the cause of the misbehavior, and the fault is involuntary, that you will both of you quickly be in your graves; but especially consider that you have received no harm by the injury, for your mind is never the worse for it.
3. Tune out the offense-making machines.
You can’t eliminate all offense from your life, but you certainly don’t have to go looking for it. Yet that is effectively what you’re doing when you consume a lot of controversial, limbic-system-triggering media content. If you are spending an inordinate amount of time reading political opinions or watching cable-news talking heads, for example, you are probably outraged constantly—even more so if you are very online as well. One way to feel less aggrieved about what other people are saying or posting is simply to cut all that out of your life: Turn off the TV; delete the app.
One more aspect of offense-taking is worth considering, especially in today’s contentious ideological environment. A novel recent experiment tested participants for whether they were more prosocial or more pro-self (a way to test for narcissistic tendencies). The researchers then randomly administered electric shocks to 5 percent of participants, and offered a monetary reward to those who got one. Payment was on the honor system, though, so the researchers paid up when participants said they’d received a shock, whether it was true or not. The high pro-self participants were by far the most likely to lie, saying they’d been shocked when they hadn’t, and take the money.
Surprising, right? Not really. Scholars have noted that people with a “proclivity to be offended” tend to be poor performers at work and prone to all kinds of counterproductive behavior. Such prickly people are very likely to be narcissists, because their offense-taking is driven by an overweening sense of entitlement and an unwillingness to overlook any sleight; they may even feign being offended—shocked, even—to gain advantage.
So, of course, you should be sensitive and empathetic if you see others being harmed around you. But especially when the hurt is nothing more than a speech act, also consider that being offended may not be reliable evidence of true offensiveness. It might instead be evidence that a person who claims to be offended is not acting in good faith.
The post The Art of Self-Control in the Face of Provocation appeared first on The Atlantic.
