Why sarcastic teens can be the smartest

Young children don’t understand sarcasm, but by the time they reach adolescence, it may be their usual way of responding. This is what the science tells us about the mental acrobatics behind an ironic phrase.

If I told you that sarcasm is one of our most powerful linguistic tools, your first reaction might be not to take me seriously. Perhaps you will even assume that I am using a bit of irony myself.

We are often reminded, after all, of Oscar Wilde’s line that “sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” though we forget that the writer immediately qualified his statement by adding “but the highest form of intelligence.”

Parents or teachers of teenagers in particular may find it hard to believe that this linguistic quirk is a sign of a flexible and inventive mind.

Yet that is exactly what psychologists and neuroscientists have been arguing. These experts found that sarcasm requires the brain to overcome numerous difficulties to arrive at a correct interpretationwhich requires more brainpower than literal statements.

And while it’s often dismissed as juvenile behavior, sarcasm is actually a test of maturity, since it takes years for a child’s developing brain to fully understand and master it.

“It can be quite challenging,” says Penny Pexman, a psycholinguist at the University of Calgary in Canada.

The mental effort is worth it. Sarcasm allows us to add some much-needed nuance to our interactions, softening the blows of our insults or adding playful teasing to a compliment.

There is even some evidence that it can prepare us to be more creative and that it can help us vent negative emotions when we feel depressed.

Pexman is so convinced of the importance of sarcasm that she has now begun designing training programs for those with an underdeveloped sense of sarcastic irony.

small steps

Some clues to the complexity of sarcasm come from its long developmental path through childhood, a fact that Pexman has uncovered with the help of some mischievous puppets.

In a representative study, a child might see a character named Jane who tries to paint a rose, but ends up making a mess.

“You are an amazing painter,” says Anne, the puppet’s friend.

Or you may see a character named Sam who is pulling weeds in the garden and gets the job done very quickly. “You’re a horrible gardener,” says his friend Bob.

In general, children under the age of 5 simply cannot detect the sarcasm in these phrases and tend to take the statements literally.

And even after they begin to perceive that words hide some meaning, they may have a hard time understanding the nuances. (They may think, for example, that someone is simply lying.)

The understanding of the use of sarcasm in humor, as a form of ridicule, comes last. “That develops particularly late, around 9 or 10 years of age on averagesays Pexman.

This arc of development appears to follow the rise of “theory of mind,” one child’s ability to understand another’s intentions, which tends to become more sophisticated with age.

Other factors may include vocabulary and grammar, the ability to pick up the subtle vocal cues that might indicate sarcastic meaning, and an understanding of contexts in which sarcasm may or may not be expected. This only comes after extensive experience in social situations.

“There are all these pieces that a child needs to put together, but none of them is enough, by itself, to understand sarcasm,” says Pexman.

His latest studies have shown that a child’s home environment can strongly influence their understanding and use of sarcasm. If parents use sarcasm, children are much more likely to develop the skill on their own.

“Around age 4, children develop the ability to take in another person’s perspective and recognize that the belief someone might have in their mind is different from their own,” says Pexman.

Sarcasm is complex because the child must understand the actual belief of the speaker and the ways in which he intends the other person to interpret his words.

It is a two-step process and takes time for a child to master. (Children under the age of 7 generally find it difficult to keep two potentially conflicting ideas in mind.)

By the time they reach adolescence, many children master these complex skills.and perhaps not surprisingly, they then enjoy experimenting with them and testing their effects on others.

Creativity

If you’re still not convinced that your teenage son or daughter’s love of sarcasm is a milestone worth celebrating, consider a recent experiment by Ruth Filik, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

Participants were asked to lie down in an fMRI scanner while various common event scenarios were read.

In some cases, the characters’ statements were intended to be mildly ironic, such as:

“Bernice and Caitlin were applying to a psychology course at a US university. They went to print their forms together. The printing press only had pink paper available. Bernice said to Caitlin, ‘Very formal!’”

In other scenarios, the same words were used as sarcastic criticism of a particular person:

“Bernice and Caitlin were applying to a psychology course at a university in the United States. They went to print their applications together. Caitlin chose to print hers on pink paper. Bernice said to Caitlin, ‘Very formal!’”

Both types of irony activated the “mentalizing” network involved in understanding other people’s beliefs and intentionsa finding that underscores the importance of theory of mind in interpreting this type of ambiguous statement.

However, it is important to note that Filik found that sarcasm also triggered greater activity in semantic networks involved in general language processing and in brain regions involved in humor, compared to non-sarcastic irony, which she interprets as as a sign of its overall complexity.

“It’s more challenging to figure out what the other person’s beliefs were, why they said that, and if they’re trying to be mean or funny,” says Filik.

This mental training can have some surprising benefits. Working with colleagues from Harvard and Columbia universities, Li Huang of the Insead business school in Fontainebleau, France, has shown that expressing, receiving, or remembering sarcastic comments can help catalyze creative thinking.

One of his experiments involved, for example, the “candle problem,” in which participants are presented with a candle, a pack of matches, and a box of thumbtacks.

Your task is to find a way to fix the candle to the wall so that it can burn without dripping wax on the floor. The correct answer is to empty the box of tacks, nail it to the wall, and then place the candle inside, a solution that will only occur to you if you’re prepared to think laterally about the functions of each object.

Before tackling the problem, some participants were asked to recall a sarcastic interaction, while others recalled a sincere or neutral exchange.

Surprisingly, sarcastic memories more than doubled the success rate of participants, from about 30% to more than 60%.

As a form of humor, sarcasm also can help us deal with frustration or stress. “It can be a way to let off steam,” says Kathrin Rothermich of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, in the United States.

Interestingly, one of his recent studies found that depressed and anxious people’s use of sarcasm increased during the covid-19 pandemic, which may reflect this coping mechanism.

In general, however, the main motivation for sarcasm will be linguistic: to add color to the messages we hope to convey.

“You have the veil of surface meaning over the underlying meaning,” says Pexman. It could be mild teasing, and if you’re implicitly criticizing someone, it can even give you plausible deniability, reducing the risk of an altercation.

Although these studies were conducted with adults rather than adolescents, it seems likely that adolescents experience similar feelings when using sarcasm and may see it as a useful coping mechanism for negative feelings or difficult situations.

sarcasm training

Initially, it may come as a shock to parents to notice their children showing sarcasm, a sign, perhaps, of a more adult cynicism that clashes with their impressions of their children’s youthful innocence.

Parents can feel particularly helpless when dealing with a teen who injects them into almost every interaction, as if they have a hard time expressing honest emotion.

But should we blame teenagers for handling this versatile tool? Perhaps it would be better to see it as the useful practice of a life skill?

“It’s a skill that teens want to be good at, particularly because so much of the language we use in everyday life is not literal,” says Filik.

Pexman agrees, and it is for this reason that he has begun looking for ways to teach sarcasm to children who are slow to pick up its nuances.

The result is Sydney Gets Sarcastic(“Sydney gets sarcastic”), a storybook that provides multiple examples of sarcasm and the reasons why it is used.

A recent experiment showed that children who read and discussed the story later found it easier to detect sarcastic statements.

Given sarcasm’s bad reputation, we could all appreciate its complexity and sophistication a little more. And I’m not using any irony when I say that sarcasm is literally one of the greatest gifts of language.