Not everyone who’s blunt, sarcastic, or having a bad day is actually mean. Genuine meanness, the kind that seeks out someone’s discomfort rather than simply causing it in passing, turns out to be a specific, measurable personality trait, and two studies looking closely at it found a clear behavioral signature that separates real cruelty from ordinary bluntness.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2013 study by Erin Buckels, Daniel Jones, and Delroy Paulhus, published in Psychological Science, introducing what the researchers termed “everyday sadism,” a trait present in ordinary people, not just clinical or criminal populations. In one experiment, participants who scored higher on a measure of everyday sadism were significantly more likely to choose an unpleasant task over a neutral one when given the option, and those who chose it reported real pleasure afterward, while low-sadism participants felt nothing either way. In a second experiment, the researchers gave participants a chance to cause mild, unprovoked discomfort to an innocent opponent, but made doing so require extra, boring, unpaid effort. Only sadism, not psychopathy, narcissism, or Machiavellianism, predicted people’s willingness to put in that extra effort just for the opportunity. Sadism was also strongly linked to choosing to cause harm even when it was easy and cost nothing, suggesting the trait isn’t about impulsivity or reacting to provocation, it’s about actively seeking out someone else’s discomfort as its own reward.
A second study helps show that the same trait shows up clearly in an everyday, real-world setting: arguing with strangers online. In a 2014 study by Erin Buckels, Paul Trapnell, and Delroy Paulhus, published in Personality and Individual Differences, the researchers surveyed over 1,200 people about their online behavior and personality traits. Everyday sadism was by far the strongest predictor of enjoying internet trolling, deliberately posting to upset or provoke strangers, correlating far more strongly with trolling enjoyment than psychopathy, narcissism, or Machiavellianism did. Crucially, sadism had almost no relationship with enjoying ordinary online activities like chatting or debating, isolating a specific appetite for causing distress from simply being opinionated, argumentative, or active online. Follow-up analysis showed sadists trolled specifically because they found it enjoyable, and once that enjoyment was accounted for, sadism’s direct link to trolling behavior dropped by nearly half.
Together, these two studies offer a genuinely useful way to distinguish someone who’s actually mean from someone who’s simply blunt or in a bad mood. Buckels, Jones, and Paulhus’s research shows the core signature of real cruelty is effort, a mean person will go out of their way, even at a personal cost, for the chance to cause someone discomfort, and they enjoy it afterward. Buckels, Trapnell, and Paulhus’s research shows that same pattern plays out in ordinary online behavior, where it’s specifically the appetite for provoking distress, not general outspokenness, that marks someone as genuinely cruel rather than merely direct. Between the two, meanness looks less like a mood and more like a consistent preference, seeking out someone’s discomfort rather than simply not minding it.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Both studies measured sadism through self-report and lab or survey-based behavior, which can’t fully capture how the trait plays out across someone’s full range of relationships and everyday interactions. The samples were also drawn largely from university students and general online populations, and it’s not certain the exact same pattern of effort-for-cruelty would show up identically across every age group or culture.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful distinction for telling a truly mean person apart from someone who’s simply direct, tired, or having an off day. The tell isn’t whether someone says something sharp once. It’s whether they go out of their way, repeatedly, for the chance to cause someone discomfort, and whether they seem to enjoy it once they have.