University forum: Speaker shares merits of ‘insult pacifism’

Excerpt

William B. Irvine has a “five-second rule” that has nothing to do with eating just-dropped food off a floor. But it has a lot to do with a person’s ability to brush off an insult, the Wright State University philosophy professor said Nov. 19 at Bluffton University.

Irvine is a self-described “insult pacifist” who, as part of a research project, began responding to verbal slights with silence or self-deprecating humor. The latter type of reply has worked so well that it has become his common response, said the author of the recently published book, A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt—and Why They Shouldn’t.

What a person does in the first five seconds after being insulted determines how much pain the insult causes, Irvine told a Bluffton Forum audience. Immediate efforts to calculate an insulter’s motive will be upsetting, he said, but if insulted individuals try to turn the situation into a joke, their “sense of injustice won’t be triggered” and they can move on, he argued.

Read more at BlufftonIcon.com.