In a rather circuitous story emerging from a bar in Los Angeles, CA, 24-year-old Rachel Zhen made a mean comment, then her friend Yana Pierce repeated it back to her word-for-word, to which Rachel replied, “Well, now it sounds mean.”
Yeah, girl! It was mean!
The two friends had been engaging in a classic, weekly gossip session when the topic of their mutual acquaintance, Zara Matthews, came up. Despite not knowing Zara very well, Rachel was confident she could exactly identify “her problem.”
“I just don’t think Zara is going to find love until she truly understands who she is and stops putting up this weird facade she assumes everyone else wants from her,” Rachel stated confidently, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “She’s just getting in her own way.”
“So,” Yana replied. “You think she’s just getting in her own way and is putting up a weird facade that everyone hates?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of mean,” Rachel replied hesitantly, even though Yana put it the exact way she put it. “Like, I wouldn’t put it that way.”
By “that way,” sources suspect Rachel is referring to what she originally said, almost word-for-word.
This is a well-documented phenomenon: Researchers confirmed that 90% of the time, if you repeat someone’s words back to them, they’ll realize they were being kind of crazy in the first place.
“Hearing our own words back makes them sound really mean, statistically,” said Lead Researchers Caroline Yeoh. “We suspect this is because the words, themselves, are mean. Really amazing how that works.”
Back at the coffee shop, Rachel immediately tried to backtrack, desperate to maintain her self-image as an understanding and compassionate person.
“I just think she’s doing too much,” she said with renewed confidence this time. “And she should stop being so…big, you know?”
“So you think she’s being too big,” Yana replied, even more confused this time. “And that she should stop it.”
“Well, no, I wouldn’t say ‘big,’” Rachel responded, even though she literally just said that. “I honestly just expected you to agree with me on this.”
As of press time, Rachel realized she was kind of being a huge bitch, retracted everything she had said previously, and concluded the conversation with the terse assessment, “She seems nice.”
