As the name of the Facebook page suggests, much of its content is sarcastic. And congratulations if you can tell which of the memes belong to this category because some scientists believe the ability to detect sarcasm is pretty useful.
"Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm," says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco.
"People who don't understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They're not getting it. They're not socially adept."
Sarcasm has saturated 21st-century America so much that 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.
When a team of researchers from Harvard, Columbia, and Insead had volunteers engage in a sincere, sarcastic, or neutral (control) exchange before completing a creative task, they found that it's a pretty good mental workout.
"Those in the sarcasm conditions subsequently performed better on creativity tasks than those in the sincere conditions or the control condition," Harvard's Francesca Gino, who participated in the study, explained. "This suggests that sarcasm has the potential to catalyze creativity in everyone."
"That being said, ... it is possible that naturally creative people are also more likely to use sarcasm, making it an outcome instead of [a] cause in this relationship."
This is because "to create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions," Gino said.
The process is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking.
"Not only did we demonstrate the causal effect of expressing sarcasm on creativity and explore the relational cost sarcasm expressers and recipients have to endure, we also demonstrated ... the cognitive benefit sarcasm recipients could reap."
Penny Pexman, a psycholinguist at the University of Calgary, uncovered that we can understand more about sarcasm's complexity by looking at its developmental trajectory across childhood.
Generally, kids under five are simply unable to detect sarcastic statements and tend to take them literally. And even after they start to realize that the words are veiling some kind of hidden meaning, they may struggle to understand nuances. For example, they may think that someone is simply lying.
An understanding of sarcasm's use in humor, as a form of teasing, comes last of all. "That develops particularly late – at around 9 or 10 years of age on average," said Pexman.
This developmental arc seems to follow the emergence of the "theory of mind" – a child's capacity to understand another’s intentions – which tends to become more sophisticated with age.
Other factors may include vocabulary and grammar, the capacity to pick up on the subtle vocal cues that might signal the sarcastic meaning, and an understanding of the contexts in which sarcasm might or might not be expected. This can only come with extensive experience in social situations. "There are all these pieces that a child needs to put together, but none of them is sufficient, by itself, to understand sarcasm," Pexman added.
