第一，没有彻底的混蛋，也没有完美的甜心。人类行为当然是随情境改变的。不同的情况（比如销售团队会议和拥挤的机舱）可能让一些人变成混蛋，另一些变成甜心。
第二，混蛋不能理解周围别人的观点，这很可恶。幼孩和有着严重心理残疾的人不能理解别人的看法，这无可非议，他们也并不是混蛋。同样，不是所有的观点都值得尊重。比如，不能理解新纳粹主义并不代表混蛋——虽然真正的甜心可能会竭尽全力，试图理解。
第三，我用“他”来指代混蛋，原因大家也许能猜到。但是，如果我再用“她”来指代甜心，性别的指向性就太强了。因此，我对甜心的指代也用了“他”。
我曾说我的理论可能会帮助大家辨别自己本身是否混蛋。可事实上，这是一个尤为复杂的问题。华盛顿大学心理学家西敏·瓦泽尔认为，我们能很好地认识到自己身上中性、直观的特质，但是对于隐藏得很好的，具有价值判断的特质，我们的认识就很欠缺了。如果你问一个人认为自己是否健谈，性情温和还是容易激动，再让她的朋友评估她的这些维度，通常自我评估和周围人的看法吻合度很高——同时这两方评价也与心理学家尽可能客观的评估结果一致。
这是为什么呢？也许因为不论是侃侃而谈，还是沉默寡言，都坏不到哪里去；行事低调，或像小兔子一样整天跳来跳去，好像都不错呢。而且这类特质都是显而易见的。然而，很少有人想成为一个木讷、愚蠢、不公或毫无创造力的人。如果你不想那样看待自己，就很容易忽略种种表征。毕竟，那些特质与我们外在行为的联系比较复杂，我们总倾向于认为是别人误解了我们。于是我们常常忽视自身的缺陷。
完全有可能的是，一个彻头彻尾的混蛋在表面上认识到自己的混账。他可能会说：“对，我就是个混蛋，那又怎样” 。
根据西敏·瓦泽尔的自我认知模型，我推测出一个人对自身混蛋性的评估与其真实混蛋性之间的相关性近乎为零。“混蛋”这个词有着浓厚的道德色彩，但我们很喜欢，也很容易自我合理化。你刚刚为什么对收银员态度那么差？——因为她活该啊，而且我一天过得很操蛋！为什么加塞那辆车，不老老实实排队？——因为我车技好啊，而且我还赶时间！为什么那个学生的论文晚交了一小时，你就让他挂科了，还一副幸灾乐祸的样子？——因为规矩早就讲清楚了，这样对那些努力按时交作业的学生才公平。而且我没笑，只是面部肌肉扭曲。
由于认识自身缺陷的最好途径是倾听你所尊重的人的坦诚反馈，混蛋们的自我认知之路障碍重重，瓦尔泽的模型甚至都无能为力。因为按照定义，混蛋无法尊重他人的立场，他极有可能把批评他的人当成白痴——或者混蛋——而绝不会虚心接受批评。
然而，让一个彻头彻尾的混蛋在表面上承认自己混蛋是完全可能的。他可能会说：“是，我就是个混蛋，那又怎么样？”但这个标签并不带任何自我谴责的意思，混蛋的道德无知依然存在。不尊重他人的立场，部分就在于没能看清自己对他人观点和关切轻视的不当态度。
具有讽刺意味的是，正是甜心自己会担心行为举止不得体，担心可能表现得太过出格，觉得有必要做出补偿。如果你没有真正站在别人的立场上考虑，这样的痛苦是不可能感受到的。事实上，至少在这一点上，这种痛苦本身就构成了一种与纯粹的混蛋行为的背离：担心这样做是否有助于减少这种行为。然而，如果你在这个事实中得到安慰，不再担心，那你已经破坏了你获得安慰的基础。
Ⅱ
Some clarifications and caveats.
First, no one is a perfect jerk or a perfect sweetheart. Human behavior - of course! - varies hugely with context. Different situations (sales-team meetings, travelling in close quarters) might bring out the jerk in some and the sweetie in others.
Second, the jerk is someone who culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him. Young children and people with severe mental disabilities aren’t capable of appreciating others’ perspectives, so they can’t be blamed for their failure and aren’t jerks. Also, not all perspectives deserve equal treatment. Failure to appreciate the outlook of a neo-Nazi, for example, is not sign of jerkitude - though the true sweetheart might bend over backwards to try.
Third, I’ve called the jerk “he”, for reasons you might guess. But then it seems too gendered to call the sweetheart “she”, so I’ve made the sweetheart a “he” too.
I said that my theory might help us to tell whether we, ourselves, are jerks. But, in fact, this turns out to be a peculiarly difficult question. The Washington University psychologist Simine Vazire has argued that we tend to know our own characteristics quite well when the relevant traits are evaluatively neutral and straightforwardly observable, and badly when they are loaded with value judgments and not straightforwardly observable. If you ask someone how talkative she is, or whether she is relativelyhigh-strungor relatively mellow, and then you ask her friends to rate her along the same dimensions, the self-rating and the peer ratings usually correlate quite well - and both sets of ratings also tend to line up with psychologists’ best attempts to measure such traits objectively.【high-strung being in a tense state 】
Why? Presumably because it’s more or less fine to be talkative and more or less fine to be quiet; OK to be a bouncing bunny and OK instead to keep it low-key, and such traits are hard to miss in any case. But few of us want to be inflexible, stupid, unfair or low in creativity. And if you don’t want to see yourself that way, it’s easy enough to dismiss the signs. Such characteristics are, after all, connected to outward behaviour in somewhat complicated ways; we can always cling to the idea that we have been misunderstood. Thus we overlook our own faults.
It’s entirely possible for a picture-perfect jerk to acknowledge, in a superficial way, that he is a jerk. “So what, yeah, I’m a jerk,” he might say
With Vazire’s model of self-knowledge in mind, I conjecture a correlation of approximately zero between how one would rate oneself in relative jerkitude and one’s actual true jerkitude. The term is morally loaded, and rationalisation is so tempting and easy! Why did you just treat that cashier so harshly? Well, she deserved it - and anyway, I’ve been having a rough day. Why did you just cut into that line of cars at the last minute, not waiting your turn to exit? Well, that’s just good tactical driving - and anyway, I’m in a hurry! Why did you seem to relish failing that student for submitting her essay an hour late? Well, the rules were clearly stated; it’s only fair to the students who worked hard to submit their essays on time - and that was a grimace not a smile.
Since the most effective way to learn about defects in one’s character is to listen to frank feedback from people whose opinions you respect, the jerk faces special obstacles on the road to self-knowledge, beyond even what Vazire’s model would lead us to expect. By definition, he fails to respect the perspectives of others around him. He’s much more likely to dismiss critics as fools - or as jerks themselves - than to take the criticism to heart.
Still, it’s entirely possible for a picture-perfect jerk to acknowledge, in a superficial way, that he is a jerk. “So what, yeah, I’m a jerk,” he might say. Provided this label carries no real sting of self-disapprobation, the jerk’s moral self-ignorance remains. Part of what it is to fail to appreciate the perspectives of others is to fail to see your jerkishly dismissive attitude toward their ideas and concerns as inappropriate.
Ironically, it is the sweetheart who worries that he has just behaved inappropriately, that he might have acted too jerkishly, and who feels driven to make amends. Such distress is impossible if you don’t take others’ perspectives seriously into account. Indeed, the distress itself constitutes a deviation (in this one respect at least) from pure jerkitude: worrying about whether it might be so helps to make it less so. Then again, if you take comfort in that fact and cease worrying, you have undermined the very basis of your comfort.
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