If your kids are sarcastic… it might actually be a good thing

A study has revealed that sarcastic people are more creative… surprise, surprise.

A team of researchers from Harvard have found that people who are sarcastic are usually more creative as their minds work more critically than others. The findings prove that those who was sarcastic are better able to really examine a statement and its meaning, and therefore are able to use their words accordingly.

“To create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions,” researcher, Francesca Gino, told the Harvard Gazette. “This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking.”

The research also found that while sarcasm can cause arguments with people you don’t know, it doesn’t tend to have the same effect with friends.

“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, for the first time, the cognitive benefit sarcasm recipients could reap. “Those in the sarcasm conditions subsequently performed better on creativity tasks than those in the sincere conditions or the control condition.”