There is an old joke about a guy finding a genie, in a bottle or something, who offers him three wishes with one catch: Whatever he wishes for, his neighbor will be granted double. Now, the guy has a problem with his neighbor, or maybe not. Maybe the guy is just a jerk and doesn't like the fact that his neighbor is a nice person or always leaves his trash cans out for two days, or left his Christmas decorations up until opening day of baseball season.

Anyway, the guy wishes for a million dollars, and poof, he gets a million and his neighbor gets two. He wishes for a beautiful lover, and once again, his neighbor gets two.

The genie reminds him that he is down to his last wish, and the guy ponders it for a few minutes.

Finally, he tells the genie, "Beat me half to death."

That joke has its roots, it is believed, in Eastern European folklore. It is perhaps even older than that. As The New York Times recently pointed out, the "Iliad," a classic of Greek literature and one of the enduring stories of human civilization, is based pretty much on spite, that Achilles' grudge against Agamemnon is so spiteful that he refuses any attempt from the king to settle it, preferring instead to slaughter loads of people and abuse a corpse and wind up dead from a foot wound.

Achilles was kind of a jerk, just like the guy in the joke, and the guy who sits in his car, talking on the phone, or inspecting his nostrils in the rearview mirror, or just screwing around while you're waiting for him to pull out of the parking space so you can get to the beer store before it closes. (You know who you are.)


It's called spite. And it gets a bad rap.

At least that's what a new study by some psychologists found. Spite is often thought to be a negative trait, leading people to do stupid things, like ask genies to beat the snot out of you or abuse corpses or sit in that parking space for what seems like hours when you know full well that somebody is waiting for you to vacate the spot. None of this does anybody any good. The genie still beats the guy half to death and Achilles (spoiler alert) winds up dead after being shot in the foot, and the person sitting in the parking space is wasting precious moments of his life that could be better spent annoying someone else.

It turns out that spite is a good thing — that, as the Times reported, it may have played a role "in the origin of admirable traits like a cooperative spirit and sense of fair play."

It's not exactly clear how that happens other than spite being some kind of a means of exacting justice or that the jerk sitting in your parking space is teaching you a valuable lesson in patience and the need for a seven-day waiting period before purchasing rocket launchers.

The researchers surveyed 946 college students and 297 adults — as if the two are mutually exclusive — and found that men were more spiteful and often displayed traits of callousness, poor self-esteem and narcissism. Like we needed a study to learn that.

The survey contained statements such as, "If my neighbor complained about the appearance of my front yard, I would be tempted to make it look worse just to annoy him or her" and "If I opposed the election of an official, I would happily see the person fail even if that failure hurt my community" and asked respondents to say how much they agreed with them.

Now, regarding the first one, my front lawn really doesn't look that bad. It was a rough winter. And that tree is supposed to look like that. And it's not a junk car; it's a collectible.

And the second one kind of explains the tea party and write-in candidacies for the state Senate.

Another study — spite is the new black among psychologists, apparently — used a computer game to see how spite affects communities. It found that communities that contained both nice people and spiteful jerks were most successful because the spiteful jerks made the nice people act nicer to make up for their jerkishness. So in that way, spiteful jerks were unable to commit spiteful acts because they were such spiteful jerks that the nice people among them felt the need to be much nicer than they usually were to compensate.

Which makes perfect sense.

Predictably, communities dominated by spiteful jerks collapsed because, I guess, most of them were sitting in parking spaces waiting for someone to come along to annoy.

