How does that make sense?

Question

How is asking if other people find a majority of the elderly rude, make me self centered?

Answer 1

It doesn't make you self centered. It's an opinion on how you may find some people tending to be. Self centered really has nothing to do with this, so I don't know what idiot you heard that from. Just ignore it.

When you see an old person, you don't immediatly assume this do you? Because that would make you stereotypical. Finding the majority of elderly rude is an observation. It's not a big deal. You were just asking. Don't worry about it. I doubt you are self centered and it really does not make sense.

Answer 2

So you asked, "do other people find a majority of the elderly rude?" and someone else called you self-centered for it? That doesn't make a lot of sense.

Maybe they thought that you phrased it in a way that strongly states your personal view and assumes that everyone else would agree? Maybe if you had taken the "other" out of the question, it would have completely removed yourself? Maybe there was an elderly person standing right next to you and you were too self-centered to notice? Maybe all the elderly people they know are extremely nice (although then I don't know who they would have learned to be so rude from) and they were offended by the question and wanted to attack? My money is on that last one.

Answer 3

There isn't an obvious connection, but from your quesiton I'm guessing the following thing happened:

-  You were taking a survey for a sociology class.

- One of your questions was about whether or not the person thought the majority of elderly people were rude.

- An elderly person (or perhaps a caretaker of an elderly person) got insulted, couldn't express their feelings very well, and the word "self-centered" was all they could think of, so they called you that.

Even if all of the above isn't quite accurate, the only possible connection I can think of is that someone took offense at your question and said the first negative word that came to mind.  They didn't want to use a bad word (like, "you suck" or "I hate you") because that would make them worse than you (from their point of view, of course), so they probably just spouted the first combination of words that came to mind.