Pedants are literally everywhere. Although, there’s still space for oxygen and rabbits and scented candles. Announcing themselves with a catchphrase that could be from a Richard Curtis film about rustic water sources and being charmingly upper-class and awkward (Well, actually…), pedants can frequently be seen correcting grammar, factoids and social etiquette at auspicious occasions, before disappearing in a puff of nothing back to wherever it was they came from. It’s enough to make you nauseous.

Sigmund Freud stated that pedants are men who are unable to laugh at themselves. I would point out that female pedants exist, but he’d probably say I was being anal. Or maybe genital. Between you and I, I can never remember the developmental stages. Irregardless, pedants are individuals who make excessive displays of their own knowledge based on formal rules and overly precise details with an enormity that disregards common sense. Pedantry represents a behaviour and as such can potentially be explained through psychology/neuroscience/scientific just-so stories.

Personality

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Everyone has a personality. Not everyone has a good one. Photograph: Radius Images / Alamy/Alamy

Firstly, it may be expected that a greater level of pedantry can be expected from people who are grumpy or curmudgeonly. In this respect, pedantry might be related to certain personality types. In one American study, 83 people were asked to judge the writers of emails applying to be housemates. Some emails were written with correct standard English, some contained typos (typing mistakes attributed to finger misplacement) and some contained grammos (mistakes attributed to a lack of knowledge about standard English rules). Examples of typos include teh for the, and helllo for hello. Examples of grammos include their for there, and you’re for your. The participants had their personalities categorised via the big five personality traits. These comprise of extroversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness.

There were too many personality/pedantry interactions to discuss here, but interestingly, introverts were most judgemental of grammos and typos compared to extroverts. The authors argued that people who rate highly on introversion prefer a sense of order that these errors violate. This leads to an increase in arousal and irritation, with mistakes literally getting on the introverts’ nerves. Extroverts reporting they felt good grammar was important showed less sensitivities to typos than extroverts who stated good grammar wasn’t important. The authors opined the extroverts who felt good grammar was important viewed typos as mechanical errors and, under the circumstances, not evidence of bad grammar. Pedantry could then be seen as introverts’ response to a violation of a need for limited variation. The extent of an individual’s pedantry would then be mediated by their personality. Next up, correlation between Popehood and Catholicity, ursine temperate habitat defaecation, and anus/elbow differentiation.

Superiority

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People have many different ways to show superiority, many of which are irksome to say the least. Photograph: Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images

Secondly, pedantry could be viewed as an attempt to signal superiority. Basically, pedants are trying to show that they know more than others. Psychologically, one way in which people evaluate their competence is in relation to other people. If you value your own knowledge highly, then you can prove your knowledge is fantastic or that someone else’s is the same as that of a bacteria. Or both. For example, plenty of people at conferences try to catch speakers out with awkward questions rather than posing alright queries they have a genuine desire to know the answer to. Yes, I’m looking at you. If pedantry is an attempt at superiority-signalling, we might anticipate that the level of an individual’s pedantry would relate to their relative status. Individuals who believe they have a high level of knowledge relative to someone else may be more likely to be pedantic at that person to confirm this higher status. Unfortunately, there is no research looking at this specifically with regard to pedantry; the data is unavailable. However, gaining status in online platforms e.g. as a Wikipedia editor, has been shown to result in users having increasingly formalised speech. For example, higher status editors refer to Wikipedia policies more often than lower status users. In addition, the language of higher status people has been shown to be more instructive and contain more complex words than lower status people. If only there was some place they could look the words up. Low status individuals tend to use more ingratiating and conforming language. Hopefully, this partially supports the idea of pedantry as an attempt to assert status.

Identity

Facebook Twitter Pinterest “I is a proud pedannt” Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Finally, it has been suggested that public pedantry is a way for individuals to identify with and signal they are part of a group. Social identity theory states we seek to have our group valued positively relative to other groups to improve our self-concept. This can be achieved by making your group look good or other groups look bad. If you can correct publically someone on the minutia of something that disinterests most people, you are identifying yourself to those who do care (your ingroup) and simultaneously showing up members of the outgroup as not knowing these “vital” things. Decimating your chosen outgroup’s supposed errors almost to nothing with your pedantry would make you a hero to your ingroup. This has not been studied with direct reference to pedantry, though ingroup bias and outgroup derogation are well-established phenomenons. We’ve all seen football/discussed cats vs. dogs/know of racists.

So, why do pedants pedant? We don’t really know, but some tangential studies infer it’s to do with a mixture of personality, status-signalling and group identification. As with all things, more (good) research is needed. And anyway, it’s The Doctor, not Doctor Who; Sean Bean doesn’t always die at the end; cognitive dissonance is the bad feeling about the conflicting beliefs rather than the actual conflicting beliefs; banana jam ain’t a jam; stop complaining about grammar when you mean usage or orthography, and the Dunning-Kruger effect is related to skill rather than intelligence! I’m just right! It’s good to educate people!

Dave Steele can be found on Twitter as @hullodave. What you mean there are some “errors” in this post?