Today’s post comes from disgraced journalist Bud Buck, who considers telling the truth to be “a content strategy that hasn’t really worked out.”

A team of researchers studying aggression in men has confirmed the long held suspicion that men will deliberately anger each other to get what they want.

Professor Kirk Buffdude of Pummel University led the study, which gave 140 undergraduate men a chance to call out to an opponent before competing with that same opponent in a fine motor skills contest.

The competition involved carefully threading lengths of puffy yarn through small holes cut in tablet-sized pieces of cardboard. Only one competitor was allowed to speak before the contest began, and that person had just three choices

Buffdude found that the participants who chose to issue a challenge to their opponent’s virility won the ensuing fine motor skills game 78% of the time, whereas those who chose to offer a supportive comment won only 3% of the time. The contestants chose to say nothing at all won the remaining 19% of the time.

“This shows that humiliating your opponent before a fight gives you a competitive edge,” Buffdude said. “The adrenaline spike of an impending confrontation makes it impossible to govern fine motor tasks, and aggressors inherently know this and use it to their advantage. It’s a major breakthrough, and it makes me the greatest aggression researcher of all time!”

But others in the field were not impressed.

“Buffdude’s study is a joke,” said Dr. Armstrong Slapdown, Chair of the Domination Department at Worrisome College. “If you add up the numbers, it’s apparent that the contestant who was allowed to talk won the competition every single time, no matter what he said. How is that possible? They must have been fighting girls.”

But Slapdown’s comments drew fire from Dr. Winsome Garrotte, holder of the Rob Ford Endowed Chair for In-Your-Faceness at Toronto’s Angst Institute. “Fighting girls is no picnic,” she said. “Professor Slapdown knows that very well from our joint appearance on the Bad Attitude Panel at last Fall’s I.V.A.C., the International Verbal Assassination Convention.”

In spite of the confrontational tone of the responses, the author of the study that sparked all the sniping was unmoved. “We don’t make a lot of forward progress in Aggression Studies,” Professor Kirk Buffdude said. “Mostly our work is a matter of posturing. You have to enjoy the show if you’re going to survive.”

How are you in a fight?