Trouble spotting Brent's bad behaviour

Older people find it hard to see what’s wrong with David Brent’s behaviour in The Office, researchers have found.

Psychologists found that the over-60s were worse at identifying his faux pas such as telling staff about his promotion immediately after announcing redundancies, and fawning over a female job applicant.

The team at New Zealand’s Otago University say the results could show that people lose their ‘emotion recognition abilities’ as they get older.

The study, published in international journal Psychology and Aging, involved 121 volunteers – half aged 18 to 35, the other half aged 60 or older. They were shown 16 clips of Ricky Gervais as Brent, in which he behaved appropriately in half of them and inappropriately in the rest, and asked to say which was which.

The older group were worse at judging the difference; a finding that was backed up by the second part of the study, in which participants were asked to interpret emotions from facial, vocal and bodily expressions. Again, the older sample fared worse.

Researcher Ted Ruffman said the team decided to use the The Office because its comedy is entirely based on the concept of socially inappropriate behaviour.

He added that, like Brent, older people were ‘not being mean or insensitive deliberately – they genuinely have difficulty picking up on some of those things’.

Published: 3 Feb 2011