We all love our grandparents. They’re wise, have stories about our parents that we can save in our shame arsenal, and are usually purveyors of those hard butterscotch candies that no one else seems to like, but damn I love ’em. However, a new study has been released that seems to imply that old people, as a general rule, enjoy hearing that us younger people are miserable. That’s not very nice, Grandpa.

In a study for the Journal of Communication, Dr. Silvia Knoblock-Westerwick and her co-author Matthias Hastall studied 276 German adults, including 178 aged 18 to 30 and 98 between 55 and 60. For the study, they gave the subjects a limited amount of time to pick an article in a news journal to read. While the younger group, as expected, chose to read positive stories about other young folks, an interesting trend arose among the older group — a majority of them chose to read negative articles about young people. So while a young person in the study might choose to read and enjoy a story about a group of college students teaching medical care to Haitians, an older women would likely choose an article about a Paris Hilton getting away with her third drug related offense in a year.

According to the scientists, they believe this may be related to the elderly folks desire for a self-esteem boost, and reading about those younger than them failing seemed to do the trick. It’s no wonder old people like to sit on street corners and call in red light runners. The thought of getting someone an expensive ticket seems to give them the same kind of rush us normal people get when we drink a Red Bull.

You heard it here first: old people are scientifically proven to be jerks.

*Note: you’ll notice neither group chose to read articles about old people, because old people are yucky. J/K Grandma, LOVE YOU!