Chill Out: Study Finds Easily-Triggered People Make Terrible Employees
With half the country seemingly triggered over the slightest injustice, microaggression or misgendering, a new study concludes that people with a high “proclivity to be offended” (PTBO) make terrible employees.
What is PTBO? According to the study, it’s “a state-like tendency to be sensitive to customarily innocuous societal events and traditions,” such as “playing of the United States’ National Anthem,” and is the “tendency to view an array of events and/or traditions as offensive.” People with high PTBO “are likely to feel that social events or traditions to which they take offense also violate moral or equitable standards.”
Dr. Jeremy Berneth, Associate Professor of Management at San Diego State University, asked 395 employees at seven US colleges what they thought about certain events receiving “substantial media attention” – including “17 items developed to assess the proclivity to be offended, eight moral outrage items, 11 microagression items and nine political correctness items.”
The study found that easily triggered people are less productive, are prone to view their organizations as “less fair,” and “consume a lot of time complaining about trivial matters.”
“The person offended by everyday occurrences diverts important and limited cognitive resources away from the client (and potential sale) towards a task-irrelevant stimuli.”
They also make terrible team players.