The infamous Am I The [Jerk]? (AITA) community on Reddit has become quite popular in recent years. The subreddit was created back in 2013, gained popularity in 2018, and by 2019 July had over 1 million members. Now, 10 years in, it has versions in multiple languages such as German and Portuguese and stands at 11 million users and counting.

The premise is simple: you post your morally questionable situation for the world to peruse and judge and wait 18 hours for people to do so. Then, the votes are tallied up and it is revealed whether the majority of the readers consider you a jerk or not. In fact, there are four different judgements you can be issued: You’re the [Jerk] (YTA), Not the [Jerk] (NTA), No [Jerks] Here (NAH), Everyone Sucks Here (ESH).

The phenomenon of the subreddit didn’t go unnoticed by scientists. In a 2022 study, a group of Australian researchers looked at 100,000 posts from the subreddit to see how this internet space reflects on the state of our ethics.

They came back with a few curious takeaways. The first is that the majority of the inquiries are related to either relationships or communication. The second is that they usually contain two different topics. This could be a clash between family and money or loyalty and honesty.

The third insight is probably the most compelling one that speaks a lot to the nuances that come with ethical decisions. That is that the “final verdicts do not line up with the moral concerns in the original stories in any simple way.” This means that a seemingly straightforward question such as “Should I support my wife’s dream aspiration?” gets way more complicated once it is revealed that the wife is crossing agreed-upon boundaries and is lying about it. In other words, the devil is in the details.

This only speaks to how perfectly the subreddit reflects the real world. Ethics is messy and there seems to be no straightforward way to solve a typical situation because there’s no such thing as a typical situation. Each case is different in its own way and judging them by some set-in-stone principles can be wrong. 

Another study found that the members of the AITA community tend to prefer the positive stories, those in which they absolve the authors who end up being right after all. Those end up being upvoted the most. This shows that naturally tend to see the good in people and like to root for the protagonist instead of condemning them. It also speaks to our desire for complexity. It gives us a glimpse into a situation where nuance does matter.

The same study also found that people who do share negative stories actually prefer to do so in the subreddits dedicated to confessions, such as Off My Chest or Confessions. There, people know they are in the wrong and don’t typically seek any validation for their actions.

After quantifying all the data, the researchers also found that the subreddit’s community only minimally cares about the poster's gender or age. Young females tend to get more favorable judgements than older males, but only by a small margin. As the impact is very slight, the paper concludes that “age and gender have a minimal effect on whether a user is judged to have positive or negative moral valence.” This means the community tends to be quite objective when judging others’ moral behavior.

All in all, it seems like, just like plenty of philosophers, the Am I The [Jerk] community is fascinated by the workings of morality and ethics. The nuances are often fascinating and show us that no one decision is as straightforward as it might seem. Unless you’re talking about choosing to endlessly scroll on your phone at the cinema. There’s no justifiable reason for that. Or is there?