#cynicism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cynicism, aggregated by home.social.
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An elm tree swing
An orchid, romantic things☽⋅••
but cynics knockWarmth shot before the dawn
A thing is just a thing••⋅☾ #Tanka ☽⋅••
#Poetry #詩 #NMPoetry #VSSDaily 9/4 #Elm #DailyHaikuPrompt #Orchids #TankaThursday #Knock #Cynicism #Romance #Plushies #IsTheOrderARabbit #GochiUsa #HeckleAndJeckle #Crows #Summer #Haiga #俳画 #Photography #マストドン写真部 #写真 #UrbanPhotography #都市写真
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#epsteinparasiteclass #billionaires #billionaireclass #billionairesclub #oligarchy #elites #apathy #cynicism #centrism #HellPlanet #orwell1984 #OrwellianWarning #guillotine #guillotines #guillotinetime #guillotinethem #GuillotinesWork #BillionaireTax #eattherich #composttherich #SoulessBastards #uspolitics #totalitariancapitalism #totalitarianism
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DATE: August 22, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People who favor dark humor tend to exhibit more problematic personality traits
The way a person jokes may offer a subtle glimpse into their underlying psychological makeup and how they handle interpersonal relationships. A recent study published in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts suggests that people who favor darker forms of humor, such as sarcasm and cynicism, tend to show higher levels of maladaptive personality traits. In contrast, those who use lighter, more playful humor tend to display fewer traits associated with personality disorders.
Humor is a universal human behavior that does more than just make people laugh. It serves as a tool for emotional regulation, social bonding, and communicating complex ideas. “Humor is one of the most fascinating forms of human communication, and I have been studying its psychological functions for about 15 years,” said lead author Alberto Dionigi, a psychologist and cognitive behavioral psychotherapist at the Noesis Clinical Center in Italy.
“I am a psychologist and Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapist, and my main research interest is understanding how humor can influence the way we cope with emotions, relate to other people, and express our personality,” Dionigi explained. Psychologists often break humor down into different comic styles. Lighter styles include fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, and wit, which generally promote positive feelings and social connection.
Darker comic styles include irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism. These styles often rely on criticism, mockery, or a sense of superiority, which can strain relationships if used excessively. “We often think of humor as something inherently positive, but this is not always the case,” Dionigi said. “Humor can promote wellbeing, reduce stress, and facilitate social relationships, but it can also be used to criticize, distance ourselves from others, express hostility, or protect ourselves from vulnerability.”
Past research linking humor to personality mostly focused on standard traits, like extraversion or agreeableness. The authors of this new research wanted to explore how these eight specific comic styles align with a wider range of personality disorder traits.
“For this reason, we decided to investigate whether different ways of using humor are associated with specific maladaptive personality traits,” Dionigi added. “Rather than simply asking whether someone has a “good sense of humor,” we examined eight different comic styles, ranging from lighter forms such as fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, and wit to darker forms such as irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism.”
The scientists focused on a normative adult sample. This means they studied everyday people rather than patients formally diagnosed with a psychiatric condition. Mental health professionals recognize that personality disorder traits exist on a continuous spectrum. Many people possess subclinical levels of these traits, meaning they have certain cognitive or behavioral tendencies that do not meet the threshold for a full medical diagnosis.
The researchers surveyed 599 Italian adults with an average age of 40. Participants completed the survey online, answering questions from the Comic Style Markers questionnaire. This tool measures how frequently a person uses the eight different humor styles. The survey asked participants to rate statements on a scale from one to seven based on how well the descriptions matched their behavior.
For example, a statement measuring fun was “I am a funny joker,” while a statement measuring sarcasm was “Biting mockery suits me.” Next, the participants completed the Personality Belief Questionnaire-Short Form. This tool measures dysfunctional thinking patterns associated with ten different personality disorder traits. These traits include avoidant, dependent, passive-aggressive, obsessive-compulsive, antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, schizoid, paranoid, and borderline tendencies.
An avoidant trait was measured with statements like “I should avoid unpleasant situations at all costs.” An antisocial trait was measured with statements such as “Force or cunning is the best way to get things done.” The researchers analyzed the collected data to see which personality traits predicted which humor styles. The authors controlled for the age and sex of the participants during their statistical analysis to isolate the effects of personality.
The findings indicate that darker comic styles are consistently linked to more problematic personality features. “I think the main message is that humor is not simply positive or negative: how we use humor matters,” Dionigi explained. “In our study of 599 Italian adults, we found that darker comic styles, particularly sarcasm and cynicism, were more strongly associated with maladaptive personality traits.”
Sarcasm and cynicism showed the strongest positive associations with passive-aggressive, antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline traits. The statistical models explained up to 23 percent of the variance in the use of cynical humor. This indicates a moderate statistical relationship, meaning that almost a quarter of the differences in how often people use cynical humor can be predicted by these specific personality traits.
These patterns suggest that individuals with antagonistic or impulsive tendencies might use sarcasm and cynicism as socially acceptable ways to express dominance. “For example, they were related to traits involving interpersonal antagonism, distrust, hostility, and emotional dysregulation,” Dionigi said. “This does not mean, of course, that a sarcastic person has a personality disorder. Our participants came from the general population, and we investigated personality traits on a continuum, not clinical diagnoses.”
Irony and satire also showed positive links to maladaptive traits, though the associations were slightly weaker. Satire, which involves mocking foolish behavior to correct it, was associated with both narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive traits. The researchers propose that narcissistic individuals might use satire to mask their feelings of superiority in a socially acceptable format.
Meanwhile, those with obsessive-compulsive traits might use satirical humor as a way to enforce moral rules and maintain a sense of order. Irony was positively linked to borderline, paranoid, and obsessive-compulsive patterns. The authors suspect irony provides a cognitive distance that helps people regulate intense emotions. “Similarly, irony may sometimes help people create emotional distance from difficult experiences,” Dionigi noted.
The researchers caution against labeling any humor style as strictly good or bad. “One aspect I would emphasize is that our results should not be interpreted as saying that some forms of humor are “healthy” and others are “pathological.” Humor is much more complex than that,” Dionigi explained. “Even darker styles can have adaptive functions depending on the context. Satire, for example, can be used to criticize problematic behaviors or social norms and encourage reflection and change.”
Lighter comic styles were mostly isolated from these darker personality traits. “On the other hand, lighter forms of humor were generally less strongly related to maladaptive personality traits and were more connected with social affiliation, playfulness, and cognitive flexibility,” Dionigi added. Fun and benevolent humor showed weak or negative associations with maladaptive tendencies.
Avoidant personality traits, which involve a deep fear of social rejection, were negatively associated with fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, and wit. People with high avoidant traits tend to withdraw from social situations, which likely reduces their opportunities to engage in playful banter and share jokes.
“A frequent reliance on cynical or sarcastic humor, for example, may sometimes offer clues about hostility, distrust, or the need to maintain emotional distance, while difficulty using more affiliative forms of humor may be associated with social withdrawal or vulnerability,” Dionigi said.
The histrionic personality trait, characterized by excessive attention-seeking and emotionality, heavily predicted the use of fun and humor. Individuals with these traits may use playful jokes to maintain the spotlight and engage with their audience. Wit, which involves clever verbal associations, was positively associated with narcissism, suggesting that self-enhancing individuals might use intellectual humor to impress others. Additionally, men in the sample reported higher scores on the darker, more maladaptive forms of humor than women did.
“So, perhaps the most interesting takeaway is that our sense of humor may tell us something about the way we relate to ourselves and to other people,” Dionigi said. “Humor can be a way of connecting, playing, and sharing positive emotions, but it can also become a socially acceptable way of expressing hostility, keeping emotional distance, or defending ourselves.”
A cross-sectional design was used for this research, meaning all data was collected at a single point in time. This setup indicates associations between variables but cannot determine cause and effect. “An important caveat is that this was a cross-sectional study, so we cannot establish causality,” Dionigi explained. “We can say that certain personality traits and comic styles are associated, but we cannot say that personality traits cause a particular type of humor, or vice versa.”
The study relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires. People often lack objective self-awareness, especially regarding their own negative traits, and they may answer in ways that make them look better than they actually are.
“Humor is a highly interpersonal behavior, so future studies could include ratings from partners, friends, or clinicians, as well as behavioral measures of how people actually use humor in real-life interactions,” Dionigi noted.
The sample consisted primarily of Italian adults, and nearly 73 percent of the participants were women. This demographic imbalance and specific cultural setting might limit how well the findings apply to other populations. “Our sample was also composed mainly of nonclinical Italian adults, so the findings should not automatically be generalized to people diagnosed with personality disorders or to other cultures,” Dionigi said.
Future studies could track people over time and across different cultures to better understand how humor and personality interact throughout a lifespan.
“One question I find particularly interesting for future research is whether it is not only which humor style people use, but also how effectively they use it that matters,” Dionigi explained. “Two people may both use sarcasm, for example, but with very different interpersonal effects. It would also be interesting to study these relationships in clinical populations and among professional humor performers.”
As a psychotherapist, Dionigi hopes this research encourages people to think more deeply about their own habits. “So, rather than asking “Is humor good or bad?”, perhaps we should ask: “What kind of humor am I using, with whom, and what function is it serving in this particular moment?””
The study, “Humor and Personality Disorders: Associations Between Comic Styles and Maladaptive Personality Traits in a Normative Adult Sample,” was authored by Alberto Dionigi, Mirko Duradoni, and Laura Vagnoli.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #DarkHumor #HumorAndMentalHealth #ComicStyles #PersonalityTraits #Sarcasm #Cynicism #Satire #HumorResearch #PsychologyOfHumor #SocialBehavior
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A quotation from La Rochefoucauld
The world oftener rewards the appearance of merit than merit itself.
[Le monde récompense plus souvent les apparences du mérite que le mérite même.]François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) French epigrammatist, memoirist, noble
Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales [Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims], ¶166 (1665-1678) [tr. Bund/Friswell (1871)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/la-rochefoucauld-fra…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #larochefoucauld #appearances #cynicism #facade #merit #praise #recognition #reward #virtue
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@[email protected] This has been a long, self-serving thread about how to survive the current AI mania while keeping your career, your mind, and your soul intact.
#AI #CorporateMania #Surviving #Thriving #Cynicism -
A quotation from Ambrose Bierce
EQUAL, adj. As bad as something else.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Equal,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1884-05-24)More about this quote: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/85176…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #bierce #ambrocebierce #devilsdictionary # halfempty #pessimism #cynicism #equal #equality #sameness
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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026)
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/
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"He has the most who is most content with the least." - Diogenes of Sinope (aprox. 412 BC to 323 BC)
Diogenes lived in Athens during the shift toward Hellenism. He rejected social conventions and material wealth, famously living in a ceramic jar to demonstrate true freedom through self-sufficiency.
Source: Diogenes Laërtius (compiled via Google Gemini)
#GreatThinkers #philosophy #cynicism #diogenes #freedom #history #wisdom
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A quotation from Hannah Arendt
A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part 3, ch. 11 “The Totalitarian Movement,” sec. 2 (1951)More about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/41872/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #arendt #belief #cynicism #elitism #gullibility #mob #totalitarianism #truth
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A quotation from Hannah Arendt
Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Origins of Totalitarianism, Part 3, ch. 11 “The Totalitarian Movement,” sec. 2 (1951)More about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/41783/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #arendt #absurdity #belief #cognitivedissonance #cynicism #deceit #deception #lying #mistrust #propaganda #totalitarianism
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A quotation from John Quincy Adams
I have, and must have, confidence in the possible virtue of human nature; and although in entertaining this idea, a man must, and will sometimes, be disappointed, yet if it is coupled with a sound judgment and close observations, I believe he could make fewer great mistakes, than one whose principle is the universal rascality of the species.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) US President (1825-29)
Letter (1809-06-22) to William EustisMore about this quote: wist.info/adams-john-quincy/83…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnquincyadams #cynicism #goodfaith #goodpeople #humannature #knavery #misanthropy #rascal #vice #virtue
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The non-action bloc: resignation, cynicism, and the culture that keeps people powerless
"#Oxfordboaters - Some of the people have to lie to themselves as they blindly believe in private property and rule of law but squat on private property and brack the law by not moving. They try and pretend this is not true, if they do this pretending to strongly they will make us all homeless." A lot of people are up shit creek without a paddle, yet keep looking in the same places that got them there. On this apathy and laissez-faire "common sense", we have a real problem, decades of […] -
So my local Board of Elections was kind enough to send me a postcard informing me that there were no non-partisan elections coming up next month for the primary, and therefore I wouldn't need to come to the polls, as I can't vote in them.
In other words, I'm in a closed primary state, where only the Democrats vote for their ilk, the Fasc^H^H^H^HRepublicans vote for theirs, and the winners of each go on to meet each other in the General in November. In other words, the playoffs, but for politics.
Which is how it should be, really, if parties are to mean anything. Of course, I do not vote like seemingly everyone else around me votes - they treat it like it's Survivor, apparently - so several states have, to my feelings, weirder ways of doing it. As an example, I think California has something called the "jungle primary" where literally everyone gets on the same ballot and they take the top two for a runoff, which is so mindbogglingly stupid that the person responsible should be beaten with a stick.
Of course, I also know about election methods, and wish that we could have Mixed Member Proportional for the legislature and maybe a Condorcet for single member seats (I'd accept AV or STV), but I'm in such a vanishingly small minority in that respect - as I discovered during my political career - that I soon realized that staying quiet about things was for the best. (I'm certainly not going to join up with the Republican or Democratic Parties for what should be obvious reasons.)
Side note: There's also Delegative, or "Liquid" Democracy, which I really find innovative, and we have the technology to pull it off, but again, we'd need to come to some sort of understanding about what #democracy is actually designed to do, and considering we're still having the "debate" about the Electoral Fucking College, I have no illusions of anything guided by a modicum of reason penetrating into the public consciousness in the foreseeable future.
#uspol #USElections #PrimaryElections #VotingMethods #cynicism #blathering #OldManYellsAtCloud -
"Stop blocking my sunlight." - A homeless guy to the most powerful man in the world
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"Stop blocking my sunlight." - A homeless guy to the most powerful man in the world
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We built the Cloud to escape decay. Now it forgets, misfires, duplicates, and calls it “sync.”
My work publishes itself unfinished, identity requires deliberation, and errors arrive as UX features. No rebirth—just loops.
Digital entropy isn’t a glitch. It’s the system working as designed.
Aristotle deserved better. So did we.
https://medium.com/@ljerka.kovacic.tot/digital-enthropy-and-the-death-of-telos-009cb06ad93b
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Useless Facts, Badly Drawn #499: Diogenes of Synope.
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#diogenes #philosophers #philosophy #greekphilosopher #diogenesthecynic #cynicism #alexanderthegreat #history #strangebuttrue #webcomics #comics #uselessfacts #uselessfactsbadlydrawn -
"It's Not Me, it's The World."
-- Prince Eryck Gutteral#quote #confidence #independence #cynicism #dystopia #society #selfsovereignty #Satanism #selfcare
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Refuge
We all have so much power that we don’t use. And I think it’s because of cynicism, which is a toxic spiritual state. Cynicism is a refuge for cowards.
~ Cory Bookerslip:4a751.
#CoryBooker #Cynicism #Quotes
