Every morning before high school, I would be greeted by my sister with yet another sarcastic remark, and I would respond appropriately. I found it quite annoying, but had to get used to it due to the amount of sarcasm being thrown around throughout the day. Then I started wondering, why do people use sarcasm? Does it have some kind of affect on our interactions or relationships or intelligence? And apparently, according to the research I found, other people have wondered the same.

According to an article in the Smithsonian by Richard Chin, Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving…[and] and inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease” (Chin).

I was shocked by that statement! I couldn’t believe that something as simple as sarcasm could be a predictor of brain disease. So then I really wanted to find out why researchers were finding these types of things!

Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco, explains how our society uses sarcasm in everything nowadays, and  “’People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept’” (Chin). To further this idea of the prominence of sarcasm in our society, “according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically” (Chin).

In a study conducted by “Simone Shamay-Tsoory, PhD, and colleagues at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa and the University of Haifa, [there were] 25 participants with prefrontal-lobe damage, 16 participants with posterior-lobe damage and 17 healthy controls. All participants listened to brief recorded stories, some sarcastic, some neutral, that had been taped by actors reading in a corresponding manner” (American Psychological Association). What they found is that the people whose brains were damaged were unable to understand the sarcasm in the stories, but people with undamaged brains were able to understand. Interestingly, specifically “people with damage in the right ventromedial area had the most profound problems in comprehending sarcasm” (American Pyschological Association).

(pictured is the right ventromedial area of the brain in red)

This ventromedial area “enables individuals to adapt their behavior in response to unexpected rewards or adversities” (Psychlopedia). And the prefrontal cortex, in general, is “involved in pragmatic language processes and complex social cognition, thus it followed that participants with prefrontal damage had faulty ‘sarcasm meters.’ At the same time, damage to the ventromedial area…will disrupt not only understanding sarcasm but also understanding social cues, empathic response and emotion recognition” (American Pyschological Association).

So to get back to why sarcasm is actually beneficial to a person, according to research done “by Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, Adam Galinsky, the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, and Li Huang of INSEAD, the European business school, [sarcasm] requires indicate ‘superior cognitive processes’ at work” for both the people speaking the sarcastic message, and the recipient of the message (Pazzanese). Along with this finding,  “‘For the first time, our research proposed and has shown that to minimize the relational cost while still benefiting creatively, sarcasm is better used between people who have a trusting relationship,’” said Gino” (Pazzanese).

What I gathered from this and many other studies is that both speaking and understanding sarcasm does, in fact, have a positive affect on people! Although it may be annoying to some, like how I feel in the morning with my sister’s remarks, I guess it’s not such a bad thing after all!