When I was a kid, about five years old, I hit a girl. I think her name was Suzie, and she may have been Chinese. I can’t really remember. But what I do remember is that she was being annoying, and so I hit her. I’m not sure whether I knew that I wasn’t, as a boy, meant to hit a girl. But it was an instinctive reaction. There was nothing I could do. My arm was a physical extension of the annoyance and frustration and anger that I felt. The reaction was natural, simple and driven completely by her irritating, taunting voice. At least that’s how I tend to justify it to myself. I felt angry and so I lashed out.
Anecdotes like these, with their implication that anger = violence, is the stuff that gives this sin its bad name. You would, of course, be excused for thinking that anger and violence are the same thing. In historical depictions of the sin, the link is tightly and quite literally drawn. Medieval images representing anger (or ira, as it was known then, from the Latin) typically portray sword-wielding maniacs. And in Bosch’s painting The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, again the angry man carries a sword (although here he seems to be attacking a monk with a table on his head; I’m not sure of the significance of that). In contemporary culture too, anger and violence are one: in David Fincher’s Seven, anger is murder.
But they are not the same, anger and violence. For one, they’re not the same on definitional grounds. Violence is, technically, the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property. At least that’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says.1 Anger is something else.
For psychologists, anger is, first, an emotion. When we psychologists talk about emotions we have in mind a complex blend of the physiological (heart rates and hormone levels), the experiential (subjective feelings and sensations), the behavioural (fight or flight tendencies), and the cognitive (beliefs and mind-sets). Anger has its own constellation of these components. It is accompanied by the sensation of the pulse quickening, a general tension of the body, and a narrowing of focus.2 There is also an actual elevation of heart rate, muscular changes (more frowning and less smiling) and rising blood pressure.3 None of this entails violence in any way.
One might be tempted to argue that although not technically synonyms, anger and violence may still be quite closely associated. Anger may routinely cause violence, for example. Well, it may, some of the time, but it doesn’t do so very often. In fact, one estimate suggests that violence follows anger in only about 10 per cent of cases; another estimate puts it as low as 2 per cent.4 Anger is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of violent behaviour.
So at the outset, put violence from your mind. I am not talking here about hitting or kicking or killing. I’m talking about that feeling you get when you are cut up by an inconsiderate driver or when your child keeps on and on about wanting another biscuit before dinner. For our purposes, it’s important to realize that one can experience anger without feeling the need to kill the driver, your child, Kevin Spacey, or indeed anyone else.
Approaching anger
With violence removed, anger starts to look less menacing. Sure, there’s still the gritted teeth and furrowed brow, but don’t let this fool you. At its heart, anger actually looks more like a positive emotion than a negative one.
Many psychologists still group anger among the negative emotions. Like fear, sadness and contempt, people believe there’s something untoward about anger. This is mostly because it is often triggered by unpleasant events. There are, understandably, some drawbacks to the emotion: the anger-prone are more likely to have a heart attack and other cardiovascular problems, and are also at greater risk of anxiety, alcohol abuse and unsafe driving behaviour.5
But despite these minor annoyances, anger researchers are beginning to ask whether this emotion is a negative one at all.
Consider the following study by Mario Mikulincer of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.6 Participants come into the lab and are presented with a series of puzzles. These involve discovering the rule underlying a series of patterns. They do this for a while, but no one seems to do very well. Actually, not a single participant can uncover the hidden rule. This is not surprising, given that Mikulincer used unsolvable problems in this study. There was, in fact, no rule to discover. He did this because he was interested not in performance, but in people’s reactions to failure.
Participants began the task with a goal in mind: discover the rule. But all were prevented from reaching their goal. How did participants respond? Some expressed dejection and sadness at their failure, feeling depressed that they didn’t succeed. Others, however, got angry. When Mikulincer then gave his participants a second task, this time a task with a solution, those who felt anger performed better. They persisted longer at this second task, and their persistence paid off.
Mikulincer’s study highlights two points central to understanding the benefits of this sin. First, it hints at the fact that anger is often triggered when our goals are blocked. It’s anger we feel when the vending machine takes the last of our change or teases us by at first gesturing toward dispensing a Mars bar, but deciding at the last minute to keep it.
The second thing Mikulincer’s study highlights is that anger is a motivator, a drive to keep trying, to persist. It’s this sin that keeps us rocking that vending machine back and forth until it releases its stubborn grip and lets the Mars bar fall with a satisfying clunk into the dispenser tray. (That or – and here’s another downside to the emotion – the vending machine falls on top of us, seriously injuring or killing us, as it does to numerous people each year.)7 Anger is both a gauge of our progress towards a goal and a force that makes us persist in the face of obstacles.
To me, this all seems quite functional for a sin. And it’s this functionality that is leading those of us who study effect to rethink our classification of anger as a negative emotion.
One can get a better understanding of anger’s affiliation with the positive emotions by looking at the angry brain. For Charles Carver, of the University of Miami, and Eddie Harmon-Jones, of Texas A&M University, one of the defining features of anger is that it is accompanied by what’s called an ‘approach motivation’.8
Emotions, as well as other psychological states, such as goals, can be broadly classified as either approach or avoidance. Approach states orient us toward engagement with the environment. They lead us to focus on rewards and incentives and propel us to pursue them. Avoidance states, like fear or disgust, on the other hand, prompt people to distance themselves from aspects of the environment: spiders, for example, or contaminants. The avoidance motivation system is focused on removing threats or punishments.
Each of these motivational orientations has a distinct pattern of brain activation. And it seems that the angry brain looks very much like the approach brain. When you look at the brain under approach motivation, you see a consistent pattern of activation in the left anterior regions of the cortex; when you look at the angry brain, you see much the same thing.9
What’s even more interesting than the fact that anger motivates approach tendencies, is that people recognize that it’s a motivator and use it to their advantage.
It is often assumed that emotion regulation is about increasing positive emotions and decreasing negative ones; that people are interested only in feeling good. But this isn’t always the case. When you go to a funeral, for example, it isn’t OK to smile inanely or laugh at the eulogy, so you might strategically up-regulate sadness and down-regulate happiness. You do this because sadness is more appropriate in the funeral context, even though feeling sad is clearly less pleasant than feeling happy.
Something similar applies to anger. Maya Tamir of Boston College and her colleagues, Christopher Mitchell, also at Boston, and James Gross of Stanford, asked participants what kind of music they wanted to listen to before playing a computer game.10 The computer game was Soldier of Fortune, a first-person shooter game in which the player walks around a virtual world shooting people. Participants could listen to music that they knew to be neutral in tone, music that was angry, or music that was exciting (but not particularly anger-inducing). These may not be obvious genres, but Tamir tested the tunes beforehand to ensure that they induced the emotions she wanted. Participants got to sample each musical piece before rating how much they would like to listen to it prior to playing the game.
What Tamir and her colleagues found was that people preferred to listen to the angry music before playing Soldier of Fortune. Faced with a task in which anger might serve a useful function, facilitating the shooting of enemies, participants opted for an anger boost. What’s more, listening to the angry music actually improved performance, suggesting not only that people strategically regulate anger, but also that such regulation pays off.
Of course, anger is not always a useful emotion. In contexts in which it’s not helpful to be competitive (when playing the game Dinner Dash, for example, as other participants in Tamir’s study did, in which the goal is quality customer service in a restaurant rather than, well, killing), not only is anger not up-regulated, it’s actually detrimental to performance. Angry waiters aren’t good waiters.
Of course, this is a rather obvious fact. We all know that anger is dysfunctional at times, such as in the service industry or when the vending machine has an unpredictable centre of gravity. But the point here is that in the appropriate circumstances, strategically amplifying anger actually makes us perform better.
The reason anger changes our behaviours is that it changes the way we think. Ironically, it is this very fact that led early anger detractors to demonize the sin. As they saw it, anger’s power to distort perception and disturb reason was the heart of the problem. But on closer inspection, it is precisely because anger biases our cognition and perception that it serves us so well.
All emotions are signals of what is important in our immediate surroundings. Fear signals threat, and so encourages people to selectively attend to threatening stimuli, like snakes and spiders, and act in ways to diminish such threats. Anger also selectively biases our attention, but in a different way.
Brett Ford of Boston College brought participants into his lab and gave them an emotion induction11 much like the one Maya Tamir used in her study on anger and performance. Some participants listened to anger-inducing music and also wrote about a past experience in which they had felt the emotion. Other participants were induced with fear, others with excitement, and yet others, the controls, listened to neutral music and wrote about an emotion-free past event. After emotions were manipulated, participants were hooked up to an eye-tracker. By measuring where the eyes are focused during the scanning of an image or text, inferences can be made about what aspects of the environment are capturing people’s attention.
While in the eye-tracker, Ford’s participants were shown pairs of images. Some of these depicted threatening information, like people wielding knives. Others depicted rewarding information, such as people having sex. Others were neutral. There were various combinations of images (threat-reward, threat-neutral, reward-neutral, etc.). After the presentation of each pair of images, a question was asked about a detail of one of the images – for example, ‘Did you see a key?’
Actually, Ford wasn’t interested in the answers to such questions. What he was concerned with was angry people’s allocation of attention during image viewing. Given pairs of images, were the angry more likely to focus on threat or reward? On knives or on sex?
There were two possibilities here. Because anger is generally considered a negative emotion and because negative emotions usually direct one’s attention to bad stuff in the environment, it was possible that angry participants would selectively attend to the negative, threatening images. But anger, remember, is also an approach emotion, and approach states have been shown to come with a bias toward rewarding information.
So what does anger actually do? When Ford examined where participants spent most of their time looking, he found a clear bias towards rewarding stimuli. It was the erotic couples that seemed most interesting to the angry participants, not the knives. By comparison, and as expected, fearful participants were biased towards threat. Neutral participants showed no bias either way.
The monk John Cassian was afraid that anger would blind us.12 But it doesn’t so much blind us as put a particular brand of functional blinders on our perceptual systems, redirecting them to what is relevant in the environment. When angry, we focus on rewards. And it is this focus that partly explains why we persist in the face of adversity. If we encounter an obstacle while pursuing a goal, anger directs our attention to the rewards of reaching our goal and so breeds perseverance.
Such perceptual shifts are powerful, but they pale against the broader cognitive changes that anger evokes.
Consider the following questions: how likely is it that you will experience the following events during the course of your life?
1. Receiving favourable medical tests at age sixty.
2. Being on an aeroplane and encountering severe turbulence.
3. Marrying someone wealthy.
4. Developing gum problems.
I don’t know what the actual statistics are for these questions, but I do know that how you answer them will depend on how you are currently feeling.
We have known for some time that our current feelings influence how we think and behave. If, for example, you’re asked, on a sunny day, how satisfied you are with your life, you’ll be more satisfied than if you’re asked the same question on a rainy day.13 The positive mood induced by sunshine makes one more likely to focus on the good things in one’s life.
The four questions above, however, are more about risk perception than about general well-being. So what does being angry do to our judgments of risk? To answer this question, psychologists Jennifer Lerner of Harvard and Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, recruited some students to do a study, ostensibly on imagination and information processing.14 When they got to the lab, participants were given one of two sets of instructions. Some were asked to list three to five things that make them very fearful and then to pick the ‘one situation that makes you, or has made you, most afraid’. They had to write about this event with as much vividness and in as much detail as possible, so that someone reading the description might actually become afraid just through reading it. The rest of the participants got the same instructions, except that ‘angry’ replaced ‘fearful’ and ‘afraid’. Although seemingly about imagination, these writing tasks are actually designed to induce the emotions of fear and anger.
After doing this, participants got a list of life events, like the ones above, and were asked to rate the likelihood that they would experience each circumstance at some point in their lives. Lerner and Keltner computed an ‘optimistic risk perception’ score from responses to these questions. When they analyzed the results, they found something quite interesting. The emotion that participants happened to be feeling at the time significantly impacted their risk perceptions: angry people were more optimistic about their futures than were fearful people.
Why does this happen? Lerner and Keltner also measured something else that might give us a clue. Not only did they ask participants how likely the events were, but also how controllable they were. When they considered the answers to this second question, they found that angry people also saw future events as more controllable than did the fearful. The researchers also showed, statistically, that participants were more optimistic because they felt more control.
Such mental shifts are probably what account for the performance benefits attributable to anger. Although our trajectories towards a goal might be momentarily blocked, by focusing on the potential payoff rather than ruminating on our failure, anger prompts us to persist. When we experience this emotion, attention narrows to focus on rewards, and we also have a sense of greater control and optimism, making us think that we can actually attain those rewards.
Open up and say grrrrr
Humans have an amazing capacity for believing weird stuff: that grasping a chicken by the shoulder blades and then shaking your head transfers one’s own sins to the chicken; or that about 75 million years ago an intergalactic warlord rounded up a crew of space creatures, flew them to earth, and then dumped them in volcanoes.
Perhaps the only thing that trumps the weirdness of our beliefs is their stubbornness. Once implanted in our brains, beliefs are notoriously hard to change.
Much of our belief resistance is due to what psychologists call the confirmation bias. This is simply what it sounds like – a bias towards confirming what we already believe. And you can see it all around you. It’s why Republicans watch Fox News and Democrats watch The Daily Show. And it’s why first impressions are notoriously hard to shake – we constantly seek information to support them and ignore anything disconfirmatory.
Now, you might guess that anger, with all its self-righteousness and confidence, would lend itself to stubbornness and increased belief resistance. But there is another possibility. Although anger doesn’t routinely lead to violence, it does come with a general behavioural shift towards confrontation. This need not be physical, of course; it may manifest merely as a state of mind. When angry, one might be prone to challenge the views and opinions of others, for example.
This possibility was explored by Maia Young of UCLA in a series of studies.15 In one of these, participants were asked to indicate their opinion of the effect of hands-free cell phone devices on driving safety. Do hands-free devices reduce the frequency of car accidents? Yes or no? Next, they were given eight statements that were summaries of longer articles on the hands-free debate, ostensibly collected from various media outlets. Participants were asked to read these eight summaries, four of which were clearly pro-hands-free and four of which were anti, and then choose up to five articles that they would like to read in their entirety.
The key manipulation here was what participants were doing before this task. Some were asked to recount as concretely as possible a time in their life when they felt especially angry. Others were asked to write about the events of the previous day – these were the controls.
Control participants showed the typical trend in favour of confirmatory information: they chose to read articles that confirmed their original position on the issue. But angry participants showed the reverse pattern: they were more likely to select articles containing disconfirmatory information.
In another of Young’s studies, a similar effect was found for political attitudes.16 When angry participants were asked to select information to read in support of Obama or McCain in the lead-up to the 2008 US presidential election, they showed no confirmation bias: they were just as likely to want to read a piece in support of their preferred candidate as they were to read one favouring the opponent.
The interesting thing about this penchant for disconfirmatory information is that it may actually open the angry person’s mind a little, making them more susceptible to persuasion and attitude change. When Young later asked her participants, after exposure to the five paragraphs, to restate their attitudes to hands-free devices, she found that angry people were indeed more likely than controls to have adjusted their attitudes in the direction of the disconfirmatory statements.
Part of the reason for such attitude change may be that angry people are processing information more effortfully and analytically. Not only do they search for information that might disconfirm their own opinions, they might also process this information more carefully. Work by Wesley Moons and Diane Mackie, both from UC Santa Barbara, supports this interpretation, showing that angry people are more sensitive to argument quality, and are persuaded only when disconfirmatory information is of a high standard.17
Note to people on a mission to convert or persuade: annoy your audience first – it opens their minds.
Righteous anger
One of the best things about being a social psychologist is that, in the name of science, I can get away with exposing unsuspecting participants to things like this:
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Or this:
A brother and sister like to kiss each other on the mouth. When nobody is around, they find a secret hiding place and kiss each other on the mouth, passionately.
These scenarios are used to study moral judgment. They are examples of normative violations, behaviours that transgress certain norms or rules. Some people think these actions – bestial necrophilia and incest – are morally objectionable. I happen not to, and chances are that if you’re a liberal from what has recently been dubbed a WEIRD society (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), then you also don’t think these are morally wrong.18 You may not be into sex with chickens or making out with your sister and you may even find these things a little disgusting, but you wouldn’t morally condemn someone for these acts.
Violations like these belong to what Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, calls the ‘moral domain of purity’.19 They may violate our sense of the sacred and pure and produce a feeling of spiritual defilement. Purity, however, is but one domain among five that comprise the moral universe. According to Haidt, the other four domains are based on harm, fairness, ingroup loyalty and social hierarchy.
Different cultures value each of the domains differently. In WEIRD places like the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, it’s really only the harm and fairness domains that are considered in any way morally relevant (unless you’re a political conservative, in which case, you tend to moralize all five).20 In non-WEIRD cultures, people tend to see all five domains as morally relevant.21
So by this account, most of you reading this book would likely take exception, morally, to the following violations (examples of harm):
A person puts cyanide in a container of yogurt in a supermarket.
Someone steals a purse from a blind woman.
But not only do people deem such behaviour morally wrong, they also feel angry about it. And it’s this anger that accounts for their moral condemnation. According to Haidt, our moral judgments are driven largely by our emotions and intuitions. And when it comes to violations of rights and fairness, especially those involving harm, it’s anger that does the driving.22
Anger has evolved as an emotional gauge of injustice. When we see the rights of others trampled or someone get harmed, we get angry. In fact, anger and harm are so closely intertwined that the experience of anger itself may lead us to see harm where none exists. Roberto Gutierrez and Roger Giner-Sorolla of the University of Kent presented participants with the following scenario:23
A man belongs to a necrophilia club that has devised a way to satisfy the desire to have sex with dead people. Each member donates his or her body to the club after death so that the other members of the club can have sex with the corpse. The man has sex with a dead woman who gave her body to the club. She had no surviving family members. The man and all other members of the club use adequate protection so there is no risk of disease being spread. After they have finished, they cremate the woman’s body, following her final instructions to them.
Those who felt anger about this act were more likely to perceive that someone was harmed. Precisely who is unclear. Still, the anger–harm link is so ingrained that it biases our perceptions, leading us to impute harm to relatively harmless situations.
So what’s the use of all this moral outrage? Sure, we get angry when a person’s rights are violated or someone slips a little cyanide into a tub of yogurt, but what is the function of this feeling? As a reaction to goal-blockage, anger triggers task persistence. What does it do in the moral domain? Well, it triggers another kind of approach action.
Imagine the following:
You come into a lab and you’re told you’ll be playing a game, a ‘proposer–responder bargaining’ game. In this game, two people, the proposer (your partner) and the responder (you), have to agree on how to split £10. The proposer begins by making you an offer, which you can either accept, in which case you keep the amount offered and the proposer keeps what’s left, or reject, in which case you both get nothing.
This is called the ‘ultimatum game’ and it is used in the laboratory to study fairness and self-interest. Now imagine your partner makes you an offer of £4. Would you accept it? What about an offer of £2? If you were being completely rational about the whole thing (and here I mean rational in an economic sense, where all you care about is maximizing your own gain), then you should accept any non-zero offer that the proposer makes. From a purely rational point of view, you should accept an offer of £2 (the proposer keeping the other £8), because £2 is better than nothing. (Indeed, you should accept any offer that is greater than zero, even one cent).
But most people don’t behave like this. When Joydeep Srivastava, a professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues asked a group of participants to be responders in the ultimatum game, they found what many other studies have found: that people don’t behave like purely rational agents at all.24 Srivastava split his participants into two groups. Both groups believed they were playing with a real partner, a real proposer, but in fact, the proposals were manipulated by the experimenters. One group was made offers of £2; the other group, £4. Of those offered the reasonable, fair £4, about 80 per cent accepted. Of those offered the less-than-fair £2, only about 44 per cent took the offer; over half of the participants refused, in effect punishing the proposer for being unfair.
The interesting thing about Srivastava’s study is that researchers considered the role of anger in all this. As you would expect, people in the £2 group considered the offer as significantly less fair than did those in the £4 group. What’s more, the £2 participants were much angrier about the offer. And when the researchers did the statistical tests to examine anger’s role in people’s decisions to accept or reject offers, they found anger indeed led people to reject the unfair offers. Unfairness triggers feelings of indignation and outrage, and as a result, the perpetrator of the unfairness is punished, even though such punishment may come at a cost (in this case, £2).
In the moral domain, as in the performance domain, anger is both a gauge and a trigger. It is an experiential signal that someone’s rights are being infringed on, or that justice isn’t being very well served. It’s also a trigger that sets in motion action to redress the perceived wrong. The more anger we feel, the more punishment we seek. The function of moral anger is to uphold certain standards of behaviour – those that protect others’ rights.
Anger express
Up to now, we have been considering anger from the inside. We have examined what the feeling of anger does for us. But we can also examine anger from the outside. What does expressing anger do for us?
In early 1999, just as the US Senate was debating President Bill Clinton’s guilt over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Larissa Tiedens of Stanford University brought two groups of students into her lab to do a study that would have been of use to the Democratic Party’s publicity office.25 One group saw a forty-seven-second clip of Clinton’s grand jury testimony, showing an angry Bill Clinton gesticulating with force and staring down the camera barrel as he denounced the behaviour of the opposition lawyers. The other group saw a forty-five-second clip of a sadder, more subdued Clinton, with head hung and gaze averted as he discussed the inappropriateness of his relationship with Miss Lewinsky.
After watching these videos, participants reported their agreement with various statements relating to the whole Clinton scandal, such as ‘Clinton should be removed from office’, ‘The Senate should find Clinton guilty’, and ‘Clinton should be severely punished for his behaviour’. People who saw the angry Bill were much more in favour of letting the president keep his job and treating him leniently.
Why does this happen? In another of her studies, Tiedens found that anger expressions increased perceptions of competence.26 We see angry people as dominant, strong and tough. Presidential qualities, one may argue. Seeing Clinton as angry and thus dominant and presidential led participants to want to keep him in the office his qualities so suitably fitted.
This is all fine for Bill Clinton, but what about the rest of us? Those of us who aren’t president of the United States, former or otherwise? One possibility is that expressing anger only brings benefits to those already in a position of power. In another study, Tiedens again showed participants one of two video clips, but this time the clips were of an everyday person being interviewed for a job.27 The interviewee in these videos, a male, talked about various things, including a challenging time in his previous job when he and a co-worker lost an important client. The two clips were identical, apart from the emotion expressed in response to the lost-client episode: in one video it was anger; in the other, sadness.
After watching the interview, participants answered several questions, including one asking how much the job applicant should be paid. The results show that expressing anger, quite literally, pays: people who saw the angry applicant suggested a salary of $53,700; those who saw the sad applicant; $41,330. This constitutes an anger bonus of just over $12,000.
So what works for Bill Clinton works for the rest of us, right? Well, not quite. Seven years after Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony, Hillary was the Clinton in the news, and social psychologists got another idea for a Clinton family-inspired study. After Mrs Clinton criticized the Republican Party’s behaviour in Congress, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, criticized her right back about being angry.28 In a commentary on the episode, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote the following:
They are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she-monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies . . . This gambit handcuffs Hillary: if she doesn’t speak out strongly against President Bush, she’s timid and girlie. If she does, she’s a witch and a shrew.29
So when Bill is angry, he’s presidential and unimpeachable, but when Hillary gets riled up, she’s a witch?
To test the idea that anger expressions may backfire for women, Victoria Brescoll of Yale and Eric Uhlmann of Northwestern University replicated Tiedens’s job interviewee study, but used female in addition to male interviewees.30 Again, angry men got a salary bump: $37,807 for the angry versus $30,033 for the sad. But women paid an anger penalty of about $5,500: Suggested salaries were $23,464 for the angry, $28,970 for the sad.
Why do women pay an anger penalty? It’s because of how the emotion is explained. For men, anger is expected, it’s normal, and when it’s expressed, it is seen to be triggered by external cues: the printer broke or my wife cheated on me, so I’m pissed. Anger is seen as an appropriate response to environmental triggers.
But for women, stereotyped as the caring, softer and kinder sex, anger seems unusual and, as a result, it tends to be attributed to internal, dispositional causes. Angry women are seen as just that: inherently angry women. There is good news for the angry woman, however: if your anger is attributed not to who you are but to environmental triggers, then the anger penalty disappears.
Negotiating anger
I hate dealing with phone companies. I don’t do it very often, but when I do, it’s invariably a frustrating experience. It all begins when you dial the number and are connected to Lara or Sarah or some other automated and always female voice-recording who regales you with a range of possible reasons for your call. ‘Bill inquiry?’ ‘Change of address?’ You respond with a yes or a no and the voice recognition software that’s meant to decode these elaborate responses doesn’t work. ‘No’. ‘Was that yes? Press 1 to confirm.’ Your frustration rises but you try to remain civil. You keep your composure for a few rounds of this farcical back and forth until you either give up and hang up, or Lara decides to connect you to a real person.
I’ve always wondered why phone companies insist on infuriating their customers in this way. But from the customers’ point of view, this naturalistic anger induction might actually pay off, especially if they’re trying to negotiate something.
In a study by Gerben van Kleef, Carsten De Dreu and Antony Manstead at the University of Amsterdam, participants took the role of a mobile phone salesperson and were asked to negotiate with a buyer over the price, warranty period, and service contract duration of a consignment of phones.31 The negotiation would be computer mediated, so they would type their offers into dialogue boxes and be able to view the offers and comments of their negotiation partner, the buyer, in similar boxes on the screen. Their goal was to get the best deal possible. In fact, participants were negotiating not with a real buyer, but with a computer, programmed to make a preset series of offers over the course of six bargaining rounds. The details of this negotiation paradigm are a little complicated and they don’t really matter for our purposes; the important point is that the participants (i.e. the sellers) were led to believe that the ‘buyer’ (i.e. the computer) was feeling happy or angry or emotionally neutral about the progress of the negotiation.
As the negotiation rolled on, offers and counteroffers appearing in dialogue boxes, there appeared the occasional comment from the buyer. In one condition, the buyer seemed rather calm, offering bland and emotionally neutral comments like, ‘I think I’ll offer $115 for the phones, with a six-month warranty and a seven-month contract’. In another condition, the buyer gave the impression of being happy about the whole thing: ‘This is going pretty well so far; I think I’ll offer . . .’ In the third condition, however, the buyer didn’t seem happy at all: ‘I am going to offer $115 for the phones, with a six-month warranty and a seven-month contract, because this negotiation pisses me off.’
The researchers were interested in how the buyers’ emotional reactions would influence the demands made by the seller. Would anger simply fuel the fire, ramping up seller anger and increasing the competitiveness of the negotiation? Or would angry buyers scare sellers into backing off? It was the second of these possibilities that occurred: sellers who faced an angry buyer made lower demands and were happier to make concessions than those with happy or neutral opponents.
This happens because anger expressions signal competence, ambition and toughness, all factors that suggest that a negotiator knows what they’re doing and might be a fierce competitor.32
But there are a couple of important caveats to using anger in negotiation:
1. Don’t try it on the powerful. If you express anger to a negotiating partner who is of higher status than you, it won’t work as well.33
2. Don’t try it in Asia. Different cultures have different rules – called emotional display rules – for when and how it is appropriate to express emotions. And although it’s fine to express anger in the United States and other Western cultures, it’s not done in many Eastern cultures. In countries like Japan, which place a significant premium on social harmony and interdependence, it’s not appropriate to display anger. So if Asian negotiators find themselves facing an angry buyer or seller, they may not only not concede, but actually retaliate.34
Angry couples
Anger may work for us in a negotiation context in which we’re trying to maximize our own gains at the expense of others, but what does it do in that very different kind of negotiating context, the romantic relationship? This is an important question, as the majority of our anger experiences occur with people we like or love.35 In fact, about half of our anger episodes occur in the home.36
Conventional wisdom has it that anger is destructive to relationships. But the empirical evidence tells a different story. In a study by Howard Kassinove of Hofstra University and his colleagues, when about 750 people were asked to think about recent anger episodes in close relationships, over half (55 per cent) reported positive outcomes.37
What seems to matter most for anger’s success in the relationship arena is how it’s experienced and expressed. In another study by Kassinove and his colleagues Raymond Tafrate and Louis Dundin of Central Connecticut State University, people who experienced dysfunctional thinking patterns during their anger episode (including things like being excessively demanding and blaming) reported worse outcomes.38 These thought patterns are associated with a set of even more dysfunctional behaviours, such as yelling and screaming, which do nothing to help the situation. But those who experienced anger in the absence of these dysfunctional thoughts and behaviours were twice as likely to report long-term positive outcomes.
It really comes down to how anger is expressed. If the focus is on calmly discussing the reasons for one’s rage, then the outcome is often good. Part of this constructive response involves recognizing one’s own faults. Although angry people are often deemed irrational and self-righteous, recall that the research suggests that they may in fact be open-minded, and more likely than the non-angry to search for evidence negating their current beliefs. This is a likely contributor to successful outcomes in close relationships.
In her 1993 essay on the sin, novelist Mary Gordon describes herself in the grip of anger:
I lost it. I lost myself. I jumped on the hood of the car. I pounded on the windshield. I told my mother and my children that I was never, ever going to take any of them anywhere and none of them were ever going to have one friend in any house of mine until the hour of their death, which, I said, I hoped was soon.39
What we’ve seen in this chapter is that none of this windshield pounding is actually inherent in anger. Far from it. Rather, the mind-set that comes with the emotion is a functional response to challenges in the environment. Whether a response to goal blockage or injustice, anger promotes adaptive behavioural strategies: persistence, optimism, control, punishment. Of course, if anger grips us too tightly, it may morph these adaptive responses into the maladaptive – persistence into stubbornness, optimism into unwarranted riskiness, control into obsession, and punishment into vengeance. As with the other sins, anger must be exercised with caution and a little restraint.