Anger and Thinking: Not Always Good Companions
America seems awash in anger. From trolling to road rage to political tweets, civility has seen better days. Anger can, of course, be justified when reacting to moral outrage. Yet it can also lead to shoddy thinking that fails to deliver the justice it seeks or fosters harm.
Anger, for some, can seem a plus. Angry people, research tells us, are often seen as competent, powerful and dominant. That's why some leaders may find it an appealing strategy. In their research paper, "Fuel in the Fire: How Anger Impacts Judgment and Decision Making," Jennifer Lerner of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and colleagues from Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon found that "[B]eing perceived as angry can enhance one's social status." It can also lead the angry person to feel a sense of greater control and certainty: "I'm angry and I'm going to do something about it!"
Angry people, whether leaders or anyone else, however, are prey to miswired thinking circuits. Anger leads us to say and do things we often come to regret - or should. Anger excites the emotional center of the brain. Creators of "tweetstorms" know and count on this. Reading a Twitter feed increases emotional arousal by 65 percent. Tweeting and retweeting increases it by 75%. Stimulation of the emotions is associated with decreased activation of the prefrontal cortex, the brain's center for logical thought and executive decision making. Strong emotion makes reason take a holiday. It struggles to be a restraint on the poor guidance that emotions can produce.
Research also confirms that we are prone to make decisions first with our emotions. Then, we call on logic to justify what we have already decided. If you've ever made a decision out of anger that you know is wrong but makes you feel good (at least for a moment), you know about this. You also know that your logical mind then can kick into gear as you use it to rationalize the irrational.
Our anger infects others too, through what researcher call social contagion. Online anger spreads viraly, but the contagion of anger is not just an Internet phenomenon. In one experiment, Georgetown and University of Florida researchers paid an actress to scold neonatal intensive care doctors and nurses before a simulated procedure. They found that people got defensive and would not help each other, leading to a 40 percent decline in effective diagnosis and treatment.
Anger can also lead people into a false sense of confidence about their thinking and generate precipitous action. Lerner and her colleagues concluded that "anger makes people . . . indiscriminately optimistic about their own chances of success, careless in their thought, and eager to take action." Angry people are also more likely to stereotype others and be convinced (wrongly) by "relatively superficial characteristics."
These problems might be less serious if we could take a timeout and think about how we're thinking. But research suggests that's hard. When anger fosters partisan extremism, for example, people at the political poles are less able to question their thinking. In one experiment, far-left and far-right subjects were asked to look at two different clusters of dots and decide which had more dots in it. They were then asked to rate how confident they were in their correctness. Compared to more politically moderate subjects, extreme partisans did about as well in their numerical estimations, but when given the chance, they were less likely to question those decisions. They were no more accurate - but they were significantly more confident. Anger and hubris have been the twin cousins of more than one public and private failing.
Sen. Ben Sasse, in his recent book Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal, highlighted the dangerous practice of "nutpicking." This is the act of identifying some nutty behavior and shaming an entire group to whom the "nut" may belong but does not represent. "Nutpicking" fosters anger. It encourages people to believe that "we" are not like "them." This may well contribute to the recent research finding that over 40 percent of both Democrats and Republicans view the opposition as "downright evil," and nearly 20 percent agree that their political adversaries "lack the traits to be considered fully human - they behave like animals."
Anger is human, but so is being able to take a step back and think. Acting on anger in ways that demean human dignity is not foreordained. A little more awareness of the thinking potholes that anger puts in our paths might help us avoid driving ahead so dangerously.
Photo Credit: Tatiana T
