There it is again, that little devil of anger sitting on your shoulder, jabbing you in the neck with that damn pitchfork. You know that little guy is going to keep prodding you until you fight with your significant other. We’ve all heard that it’s unwise to argue when you’re angry because you’ll end up shouting something you don’t really believe and can’t take back, and generally making a mess of the world as you know it. But due to the lovely inner workings of your brain, not only are you more likely to lose control of your behaviors when you’re angry, but you may also lose control of your beliefs. How you interpret your partner’s intentions, character, and genetic similarity to slime mold depends on your mood—and you’d better bet that when you’re mad, you’re primed to believe the worst.
It’s like this: Imagine you’re driving through a crowded grocery store parking lot when a man on a cell phone walks out in front of you. While still holding the phone to his ear, he holds up a hand toward you, palm out. What does he mean by this gesture? And what is the appropriate response? Should you show him your palm in return, or should you show him the reverse side of your longest finger? How you interpret the man’s gesture—an apology, a thank-you, or a command—depends in large part on your own mood. If you’re in a bad mood, you’re more likely to see this man’s palm as an insistence on his entitlement to walk through traffic while yakking on his phone; if you’re in a good mood, you’re more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt and see his gesture as an apology for the inconvenience and a thank-you for not turning him into a pavement pancake.
This is due to something called the “mood congruency” effect, and it means that when you feel bad and nasty, you think other people feel bad and nasty. That makes sense, but the thing is, not all flavors of “bad and nasty” look the same in your brain. Anger lives in your amygdala—it’s the “lizard brain” flavor of bad mood that cranks your pulse, blood pressure, and secretion of epinephrine. But sadness lives in the hippocampus—it’s a more cognitive experience of bad mood that draws on memory and your interpretation of experiences, without necessarily affecting your body. Do angry people interpret social cues differently than sad people? Let’s ride along with Galen Bodenhausen, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, and take a look.
First he asked college students to “vividly recall an episode that had made them feel very angry, and describe in detail how the event occurred.” Others did the same thing with a sad memory. A third group was allowed to keep whatever mood they brought with them to the lab. Then he had students imagine they were sitting on a peer review panel judging cases of student misconduct, one involving cheating and one involving assault. In half of these cases, the fictional defendant was given an obviously Hispanic name. How did these sad, mad, or neutral students judge their Hispanic or race-neutral peers? Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, when college students were angry, but not when they were sad or neutral, they were much more likely to see guilt in peers with Hispanic names, but no more likely to see guilt in cases that included an accused person with a race-neutral name.
To Bodenhausen, this is evidence of “heuristic information processing”—when you’re angry, instead of using your rational brain, you go with your gut, and in this case students’ guts included stereotype. In other words, anger made students lose their minds.
Then he did the same thing with persuasion. Bodenhausen again made college students happy, sad, or neutral and then had them read an essay arguing to raise the legal driving age from sixteen to eighteen. Half the college students were told that the essay had been written by “a group of transportation policy experts from Princeton University,” and half were told it had been written by “a group of students at Sinclair Community College in New Jersey.” How persuasive did college students find these arguments? It turned out that sad students left their rational brain in charge and formed their opinions largely on the content of the written argument; for angry students, the source of the argument trumped the content. Bodenhausen found the same thing when he varied the sources’ trustworthiness rather than expertise: when information came from a biased source, angry students let their distrust of the source overwhelm the information, whereas sad and neutral students distrusted the source but still based their opinions on the content of the argument.
What this means is that anger blunts your ability to be rational. You probably already knew that. But anger blunts rationality in a very interesting way, as if it opens a direct channel of communication to your biases and instincts and heuristics—to all the beliefs and decision-making rules of thumb that are your fallbacks when not overwritten by your conscious mind. When you’re angry, you judge the person and not the content. You’re also persuaded by the person and not by the content.
If you argue with your partner while you’re angry, your opinion of that person as idiotic and untrustworthy trumps anything smart or real or insightful he or she could possibly say. On the other hand, if you’re trying to stay focused on your side of a problem even in the face of a charismatic and persuasive partner, your anger may make you more persuadable. You can argue when you’re sad and still stay logical. But arguing when you’re mad puts your lizard brain in the driver’s seat and, too often, your best interests in the trunk.