Am I The Asshole? Let The Reddit Community Decide

A Reddit user who calls himself Renegadesrule33 was facing a crisis. He thought he hated his sister, who was mentally disabled. Renegade’s sister is nonverbal autistic, meaning she needs 24/7 supervision, even at the age of 12. She can't speak, suffers from fits, and destroys anything she gets her hands on. Renegade suspected his sister made him a tremendous asshole, and he would have gone to his parents with his feelings. Except, his father took every opportunity to remind Renegade he was here to be her caretaker.

For example, if Renegade turned off his phone at the movie theater, he was grounded for not being available for babysitting. If he hung out with other high school seniors after class, he was punished. Since age 7, Renegade lived in the basement with his broken toys because his sister needed the upstairs room near his parents. Even worse, when she visited his hideaway, she targeted his things for demolition. Finally, the day arrived when Renegade was ready to talk about college and moving out. He sat down with his father to discuss where he might go away for school. For this part, I will quote Renegade’s Reddit post:

“My father joked I should get a degree that pays so well that when they're gone, I could take care of my sister. I don't know why this caused me to break down. I cried…I screamed about how it was always about her. I'm nothing more than a caretaker to them; they always make it about her. I'm expected to be her slave for the rest of my life.”

Renegade locked himself in his room. Then he got on Reddit and spilled his guts, admitting that he hated his handicapped sister. And that even by admitting he hated her, he should be full of shame. He finally ended his story by not asking for sympathy but for public judgment; he wanted to know one thing. Am I the asshole here? And the community voted on it.

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The TV show Seinfeld lasted nine seasons and had 180 episodes. NBC earned $200 million a year from Seinfeld until it ended in 1998. Just last year, two decades after the curtain fell on Seinfeld, Netflix offered $500 million for the rights to air the show in its entirety. Why is this important? Because one of the most successful shows on the planet was secretly built around one question - A question Seinfeld and his friends would ask repeatedly in various ways: Am I the asshole?

This question wondering out loud if you're the asshole in a messy, socially complex set, was so entertaining it set the dial for 90s television. But we don't have Seinfeld anymore. Instead, we have a Reddit forum where hundreds of thousands of people go to vote on each other's borderline asshole. So, today, we're busting myths about borderline asshole behavior.

Myth One: Social media posts are just echoed chambers of our own warped views. Nobody on this Reddit forum is actually helping anyone, right?

Joe: Have you heard of the Am I The Asshole posts on Reddit?

Todd: No, I have not.

Joe: I didn't know this until looking into it, but Reddit is apparently one of the largest quarters of the internet. To give you some context, Microsoft Office only gets slightly more traffic than Reddit does in a day. By traffic, Reddit is also bigger than TikTok and LinkedIn as far as how many people visit in a day. There are a lot of subreddits as well. There are political subreddits. There are subreddits for artists and writers. There are subreddits for pretty much anything. A lot of them are support groups. For example, if I task you with the idea of making a website where you take 10,000 random people, and you make them decide case-by-case who is the asshole between these people? What kind of rules would you put in place?

Todd: That is the toughest one because you don't want to be too religious, so they can't get the whole story. You don't want them to be too political either.

Joe: Those are in place. I'll actually give you a real example. I went to a dinner party. It was after work, and I didn't really want to go. And once I got there, everybody at the table was trying to prompt me into talking about something. They were hoping to trigger a story. What they triggered was me being tired and annoyed. And I said something pretty awful. I said I don't need to be dragged out to entertain boring people.

Todd: You are as charming as a rattlesnake, Joe.

Joe:  So, now I come to you with this story, and I need you and 10,000 people to tell me whether I was being an ass or not.

Todd: I feel for you on this because you use up a lot of your niceness at work. Sometimes when you're tired and cranky, you've already used up all your pleasantries.

Joe: Well, the rules that exist on this subreddit, it's easy for these 10,000 judges to want to get into sermonizing and morals. If you and 10,000 judges tell me I'm an ass, I'm not allowed to argue with it.

Todd: You're being sentenced at this point.

Joe: So that is rule #3 - accept your judgment. We're not here to debate broad views is the very first sentence in that rule. Rule #11 is no partings or relationship or sex or reproduction advice. They ban you forever if you ask about sex, dating, ghosting people, etc. Rule 12 and 13 are no debating and no revenge stories. Rule #5 is no violence. You're not allowed to mention violence. You're not allowed to reference it from media phrasing. You're not allowed to threaten. You're not even allowed to talk about it in your own story. If, in real life, I had said I'm not here to entertain boring people, and I flip my plate and slap somebody, I wouldn't even be able to talk about it on this subreddit.

Now here's a funny one, rule #9 is do not ask for advice. This is funny because everyone is supposed to be on this Reddit for arbitration. And they're supposed to be there to get their social antenna tweaked. But frequently, you get advice from the public. They'll tell you whether you're an asshole or not. And then so many of them will actually offer solutions. And we'll get to how helpful that is because they do vote. And then they will vote on each other's comments. So eventually, a Yoda emerges out of the thousands of comments, the murk of comments.

Todd: I like that because someone will give you advice, but as you and I both know, with any kind of feedback, it needs to be worded in a way that you actually hear it and use it. That is a skill in itself.

Because some of these are so well worded or structured, some people have asked the moderators of Am I The Asshole are these fake? I'm going to quote them directly because I like their answer: Sometimes, very real circumstances might seem absurd to you when we judge whether or not a post is creative writing or a work of fiction; we don't ask ourselves whether this is likely to happen; We ask ourselves would Florida man do it. Remember, people often post here on their worst day. Some of these stories had gotten on television. So, I want to know why people are attracted to this? Why is this such an incredibly popular corner of the internet? I think that is a big part of it is we like challenging situations that reveal our character.

We've done episodes about gossip and how it's not all negative. There are a couple of reasons why this, Am I The asshole thing might be popular. Could it be schadenfreude where we like seeing people in discomfort? It could be us naturally keying off good stories where we like to see somebody challenged into revealing their personal inner character. Robin Dunbar, The Evolutionary Psychologist, mentioned that social grooming as humans is just picking nits out of each other's hair like chimps. Except for us, we found an easier, more effective way to maintain our relationships. We don't have to sit behind each other's back and literally groom each other. Instead, we can do chitchat. We can gossip, and we can build social networks. And we can basically spend that same time showing that we care about somebody else. But instead of doing it with tiny insect parasites, we do it with each other's emotions and each other's social abilities.

If you have hundreds of thousands of people online telling you you're an ass, those juicy tidbits are what teach us how to be emotionally mature humans. What to do and what not to do. That's effectively what Am I The asshole is doing for people. It's not just reading about an asshole who sends their girlfriends off to test their man like a spy. It's not just reading about that because it's entertaining. It’s good because it calibrates us. You get to the final judgment of all of these people. You want that diversity of people to catch your blind spots. That serves you better, and Vice did an article about this subreddit. They talked about actor-observer asymmetry - the idea is that if you are acting like an asshole, you say you were tired or just had an off day. You give justification. It’s not necessarily a wrong justification, but with actor-observer asymmetry, you're more likely to say my behavior comes from situational factors, whereas when other people act like an asshole, we say it's who they are as a person; It's their character.

Myth Two: These people have to know their assholes, just like the guy who cuts you off in traffic knows he's a jerk. A-holes know they are a-holes. Otherwise, they'd be nicer.

“My 20-year-old daughter and her fiancé are currently staying with us. I love my daughter, but she is very difficult, and I can't stand her fiancé. I gave them a deadline to move out because I just can't take this anymore. They got into a massive fight the other day when my wife was out. I guess a pair of my wife's underwear got caught got in their laundry, and she thought he was cheating. I think the fact that she immediately jumped to him cheating shows how bad the relationship is. She was waving the underwear around, and I recognized them because of the floral print, but this was just so ridiculous. I just let the fight go on. My wife came home about 30 minutes later, and she said they were hers. My wife and I didn't realize they were hers, and I accidentally laughed. My daughter burst into tears and won't talk to me anymore. Her fiancée stormed out of the house, but my wife thought it was funny.”

Joe: It sounds like a dad prank gone wrong. To me, it screams more of like, this is a dad that doesn't respect the son-in-law, so he's just going to let them fight until they break up. Do you think he knows when he posts this that everyone's going to vote he's an asshole?

Todd: I don't know if he is. I am almost against this kid staying with him. I think if you live with your mother-in-law and your father-in-law, you're supposed to kiss up for the free rent.

Joe: I'm going with he probably knows he's an asshole. Todd is going with, maybe he's got a point. He was voted asshole, though.

Todd: I just need way more information. I need to talk to all the parties involved.

Joe: Would you use that as a method to get someone to break up? Would you let them have a misconception that breaks them up?

Todd: No, because they have enough reasons to break up. They're fighting all the time anyways. I don’t need to manufacture anything.

Joe: I'm going to put a caveat on this. I'm going to vote yes; he is an asshole, but it's not like he did anything worse.

There were so many people that voted on whether or not this dad humor is an asshole or not. So, I have a question for you. If you knew this guy personally, and you wanted to correct his behavior and learn more emotional intelligence, would you send him to this subreddit? I think if there's enough peer pressure and enough shame, it can actually make people change for the better. I always joke about this some of us, like myself, need shame. Maybe that's the key. Maybe the people that are preaching emotional intelligence are the ones that don't use it.

In general, emotional intelligence does help us, but maybe not in the way we preach it. Maybe not the way we handed it out. So instead of handing somebody like this guy a book about emotional intelligence, what if we could just give them a simulator? What if we could sit them down at a computer and they played a video game, and it just ran them through social interactions. It taught them emotional intelligence by having them react to people. It seems more valuable. That seems to be a better structure than the peer group you pick – the ones who reward you for your risky behavior.

Myth Three: Can thousands of people telling you, yes, you are in fact an asshole, improve your emotional intelligence? If so, what's the next step? Could millions of voters help improve your behavior? Could an artificial intelligence?

There is a company, and we got this from Harvard Business Review, that created an AI that can teach emotional intelligence. It's called Gainsight, and it's in the Bay Area. What they do is use Kong and zoom to record calls between India-based managers, these are customer success managers, and they run them through these simulations. Then they take the data and feed it into a training simulator that helps CSMs prepare for upcoming calls. So, basically, they take almost this Reddit model where instead of having 10,000-40,000 people tell you whether or not you're an asshole, they use this AI to correct everything, and all you have to do is sit your employee down and have them do the simulator. Even if it was just 10% better, it would help so much.

There are programs out there to help your memory. There are apps that help you learn better math skills and better language skills. There could be an emotional intelligence app on your phone someday that is just a person simulator. And if you're wondering if EQ helps, emotional intelligence helps, there was a Yale study where they found out that emotional intelligence was higher rated than IQ in predicting team success. Another AI I want to talk about real quick is called the Cyrano AI, which is patented technology geared toward customer communication. It works with identifiable priorities, goals, and state of mind they exhibited in their last conversation. So, kind of like a chatbot that works in real-time and gets feedback through text and sets up a step-by-step system to overcome a problem that it can identify. This machine will basically gauge interactions, figure out what they want, and take the temperature of their mood.

So, we keep talking about this AI system as if AI is going to help us figure out how to be more emotionally intelligent ourselves. But even better than that is if we teach AI how to be more emotionally intelligent by making them interact with millions of people. So, what if we teach ourselves EQ? Even better, what if we can teach AI EQ so they can be the customer interaction for us? My only concern is that I kind of see this as a self-help thing. We may think this is good for everyone but ourselves, right?

So, in our last Am I the asshole post here, we wanted to get an example of one where the internet actually helps to correct someone's behavior. I see a lot of people looking at the assholes on this website and kind of shaming them and laughing at them, but honestly, I see a shocking amount of people who get good advice, take it, and follow up with a lesson learned post. This is a story about a man who becomes very insensitive. At first, he's very supportive. His significant other’s partner’s girlfriend has depression issues and has all her life. While this is going on, he tries to be supportive and tries to cheer up. He tries to do things for her. Then she loses her job and had some situational things or life that made her more depressed.

So, he kind of gets sick of trying to cheer her up and comes home one day, and all she's doing is watching Netflix and eating cereal, and she hasn't done anything for a long time. So, he finally snaps; he can't handle it anymore, and he says depression is not a reason to be lazy in this meanest, nastiest voice. And everyone thought he was being a jerk. It's important to note that this is a man who has not suffered depression because if you have depression, you know that he's right, but when you are depressed, you can't do things. It can be debilitating. The most active man who ever tried to save the country, Abe Lincoln, would go into paralysis, curl up into a chair and stop moving. So, if Abe Lincoln couldn't fold laundry when he was depressed, this woman shouldn't be expected to do the same. Well, he took this advice. He read through the votes, and he went back to her, and he gave her some space. She stayed with her mother for a few days and eventually met up, and he said where his head was at, and he apologized. He said he wanted to work on the relationship, and then she explained to him that she was in therapy.

So, this is kind of what we were talking about before when you hear both sides of the story. It doesn't make it look just like a lazy doing nothing. She has chronic depression, and that relationship was making it even worse. But to his credit, he took what he learned from this and implemented it, and their relationship now both are doing a lot better. She even started exercising and he supported her through the whole thing. My favorite line from this is, “we are both putting more effort in, and the communication is a lot better.”

Final Thoughts

The internet is an echo chamber. If you're logging on to Facebook to rail about politics or religion, you're not actually expected insight; you're there to get your beliefs validated or to get your daily dose of moral outrage. However, if you go to the Internet with your hat in your hand speaking to get your social antenna tuned by the masses, you might be pleasantly surprised.

In every good story, there's a mentor who steps in to correct the main character's misbeliefs. Luke Skywalker had Obi-Wan, Rocky had Coach Mickey, and Good Will Hunting had Robin Williams. Well, if you don't have a mentor in real life, you can always turn to thousands of online commentators and the public, in turn, will upload the most helpful mentor. It's as if Yoda told Luke there is no try, and the entire audience could download the Muppet who speaks in riddles to promote Obi-Wan's solid advice instead.

In her opening narrative, Renegaderules33 asked the entire internet if he was a monster for thinking he hated his disabled sister. The best advice was uploaded, and Renegade followed it. According to his follow-up post, which is currently rated as one of the top three posts ever, Renegade realized he didn't actually hate his sister; he hated how his family made him a parent figure too early, how they used him instead of hiring a professional care provider. Renegade even moved in with his grandfather and found evidence of his parents squandering the money they'd been allotted for childcare and confronted them about it.

In short, the internet socially groomed Renegade, and now he's escaped his parents’ house, emitted that he actually loves his sister, and is getting ready to attend college while he stays with extended family. As of his final post, Renegade's parents remain unapologetic. But he hopes to reconcile with them eventually.