Health Buzz: Why Being Mean to People Might Actually Help Them in the Future

Being mean to someone isn’t typically seen as something to be proud of – but what if you were doing it in order to help someone else?

Though a roundabout way of doing so, people might try and make someone feel bad in a situation where they think it will be helpful to someone in the future, a new study says.

Previous studies have found people look to make others feel bad with personal gain in mind, though researchers for this study wanted to find out whether people would do it altruistically.

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“We have shown that people can be ‘cruel to be kind’ – that is, they may decide to make someone feel worse if this emotion is beneficial for that other person, even if this does not entail any personal benefit for them,” study author Belén López-Pérez said in a statement. For example, you might induce “the fear of failure in a loved one who is procrastinating instead of studying for an exam,” López-Pérez continued.