Susan C. Cloninger and Steven A. Leibo
The phenomena of angry groups can best be understood by combining insights from a variety of disciplines, ranging from neuroscience to sociology, from history to political science. At the biological level, the legacy of evolutionary selection has produced a species with emotions that can fuel angry attacks, but also higher mental processes that can channel and sometimes check such expressions, as well as a social nature that predisposes individuals to group influence and leadership. Sociology details such group processes and the ways that leaders influence group behavior. The track record of such processes is written in the pages of history, across time and throughout the world, and political scientists describe the various forms that government and popular uprisings take.
Brain studies reveal that different brain circuitry is involved when a person experiences anger, in contrast to fear. Anger activates active, aggressive behavioral circuitry; with fear the person is more likely to avoid the situation or run away. Fear and anger may co-exist. Social influences—norms (of courage and justice, for example) and the rhetoric of leaders—can cause people to accentuate their “angry” aggressive potential and not follow their fear-motivated flight response. In addition, higher-level brain processes such as values and thought, can either over-ride or encourage the biological predilection to express anger in aggressive behavior.
Evolutionary theory describes the broad behavioral (as well as physical) tendencies that modern humans possess, as a legacy from the pressures of natural selection that our ancestors, in their time, faced. These pressures have shaped a social species in which leaders can coordinate the aggressive and defensive behaviors of group members to increase the chances of survival and reproduction. The coordinated behavior of groups brings a shared advantage to the group as a whole, against other human groups and the threats from the nonhuman environment that our ancestors faced. Humanity evolved largely within small bands of between 20 and 30 individuals, whose successful communal interaction made survival more likely. Everyone beyond that small group was seen as an outsider, the other. Indeed, there is considerable research to suggest that humans do not comfortably operate in groups much larger than 150 individuals whom they can know personally and perceive as one of their own. Humans, as a species, seem to be hard-wired to belong to groups that compete with other groups.
Social neuroscience is a field that studies the biological basis within individuals of what appear to be more complex social behaviors, finding that such phenomena are not simply learned but have a biological basis. Looking closer, empathy is a near-universal emotion that supports prosocial cooperative behaviors and so mitigates some of the potential negative impact of individual and group anger, and no doubt helped facilitate the small band environments within which humanity evolved. Some individuals, with more empathy, are inclined to sacrifice individual advantage for others in their group. In contrast, individuals with less empathy are likely free-loaders, profiting from the empathic tendencies of others without taking the attendant risks themselves. Various lines of research suggest that people who are labeled psychopaths are deficient in empathy, and show lower brain activity in the areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with moral-emotional processing and fear conditioning. This lack of empathy could provide them with an alternative adaptive advantage, enabling them to exploit others without the encumbrances of empathic hesitations, a particularly advantageous survival strategy under hostile social environmental conditions. The presence of selfish, psychopathic individuals in their midst might even enhance group survival, explaining the re-emergence of such psychopaths, even in leadership roles, throughout history. We may speculate that other members of the group can be served by the presence of such low-empathic, psychopathic individuals when their violent behavior is directed outside the group, as in warfare against enemies. Add charismatic leadership to the equation and their ability to harness other group members to their aggressive actions is multiplied. Indeed, we may speculate that threat from outside the group incentivizes the selection of such individuals to leadership positions in modern societies.
Besides stable individual differences such as psychopathy, neuroscience describes brain circuits present in everyone that may be activated at some times but not others. A “hot” emotional circuit leads more directly from angry feelings to violent behavior. A “cool” thinking circuit takes time to reflect, delaying or even preventing the aggression. Studies of social perception show quicker recognition of angry, threatening faces than happy ones, further short-circuiting the path from anger to action.
Fear, though, is also an immediate response to situations, and it has the opposite effects from anger: flee rather than fight. Social norms that hold fear in check further tip the balance toward aggression. To become aggressive, we must stay in the situation (“fear not” so you don’t flee). Shame, too, can be activated by social pressures to keep people from running away. Norms of courage shame those who are afraid, greasing the machinery of aggressive acts of war and mob violence.
The human capacity for thinking and reasoning, from our most developed brain areas, has been a major focus of social science research. Although people surely do not always carefully think through their choices before acting, thoughts do nonetheless matter. One important element of that process is the concept of efficacy, the belief that one is capable of effective action (such as giving up tobacco, or organizing an environmental movement). People who are physically capable of effective action will not attempt to do it unless they have a sense of efficacy; hopelessness becomes a self-defeating prophecy. Efficacy can be enhanced by working together with others in groups: collective efficacy. To combat drunk driving, the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, works within the political system. Its acronym, MADD, cogently conveys the emotional underpinning of this coordinated group effort.
People not only reason about how to achieve their goals, but they are also usually committed to some basic principles, including their own self-worth, fairness, and ideas about right and wrong, which can attenuate the impulse to act destructively. From a social psychological perspective, anger is often produced when people think they are worse off than others with whom they compare themselves, according to relative deprivation theory. Shared public understandings about the equitable distribution of wealth are thus important, and these are embedded in political systems to which people share allegiance.
Principles of right and wrong are not always active, however. Individuals can use a variety of strategies of “moral disengagement” to permit them, despite moral principles, to engage in terrorism, war, and other atrocities, as social psychologist Albert Bandura suggests. They may label their actions in more acceptable euphemistic terms, for example, or blame others for their actions, or dehumanize the victims of their violent acts. Robert J. Lifton, the well-known psychiatrist who has spent a lifetime studying genocidal behavior, has reminded us that given a sense of “virtue,” human beings are capable of the most reprehensible acts. Because of the possibility of moral disengagement, we suggest that situational influences that activate or de-activate moral principles also play a role in understanding angry behavior.
Turning to a social-historical perspective, easily one of the most important causes of “anger” in the modern world is the phenomenon of “nationalism” and “nationalist identity.” With the dawn of settlement some 10,000 years ago and the emergence of significantly larger communities from North Africa to Southwest Asia, humanity was usually forced to survive in far larger societies than our more distant ancestors, a situation that most certainly challenged their very strong need for a sense of belonging and familiar group membership. For millennia, that sense of belonging was filled by associations with a series of communities, from religious- and ethnic-based clans, to feudal relationships or geographical association, to be an Athenian, if you will. But modern society since at least the 18th century began to develop a new identity, a nationalist identity that has exploded the possibilities of geo-political anger as different communities, be they Greek or Turkish, British or Irish, into a force that has enormously expanded the platform for geopolitical anger. Complicating matters is the common phenomenon of conflating religious sentiment with nationalism, creating a nationalism within which the language of religion is used to provide legitimacy to what are largely nationalist territorial claims. The examples, of course, are widespread, but particularly obvious among more recent groups such as the Islamic State that evokes a pre-modern religious image of their supposed Caliphate, provoking an angry outburst against all that are perceived as enemies. Even more confusing are groups such as Irish Catholics and Protestants or Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians, whose differences are even less theologically expressed than that of the Islamic state, despite the identity differences their respective religious communities provide them. In other words, inter-group anger may masquerade as religious conflict but is not, fundamentally, that.
Although pre-modern governments often based their legitimacy on more other-worldly governing principals, from China’s famous Mandate of Heaven to the idea of a Divine Right of Kings in early modern Europe, the 18th century’s so-called Era of Democratic Revolution eventually spawned the idea that sovereignty ultimately resided in the masses, thus creating the idea of popular sovereignty. That increasingly accepted idea, that all governments ultimately drew their legitimacy from the “consent” of the masses, produced the French Revolutionary ideas of universal suffrage in the early years of the revolution and the autocratic Napoleon’s window dressing plebiscites of early 19th century. Many governments came to believe they needed to provide the appearance of popular consent. The support of the masses, they found, could be facilitated by calling upon the common human emotion of anger, as political leaders in both democratic and authoritarian societies have enthusiastically done. Indeed, directing popular anger against a political class or group has often proven to be one of the most effective tools of building a governing consensus regardless of the nature of a particular government.
By the early 20th century, the use of anger as a tool was especially exploited by those referred to often as the New Right of Fascism, which initially in Italy rallied its supporters by arousing anger against Italy’s perceived ill treatment at the Paris Peace talks and also the threat of socialism, which had just recently emerged in the form of communism during the Russian Revolution. A decade later, in Germany, the Nazis came to power largely on the votes of angry German voters, whose anger against the World War I peace treaties, the political left, and of course the Jews, whom they blamed for much of Germany’s problems.
With the rise of more democratic societies in the last 30 years, the role of anger has taken on an even more influential role in global politics as genuine democratic leaders, and pseudo-democratic and even authoritarian governments have felt the need to use anger as a tool simply because it is often more effective at arousing public enthusiasm than dry and usually “wonkiest” policy statements focused on societal policies. In short, it is often simply easier to blame someone or something rather than analyze reams of data.
The Internet has provided a particularly rich environment for provoking and inspiring anger. The very nature of social media, an offshoot of an increasingly global means of communication, allows people who would normally never encounter each other to do so inexpensively and quite easily. Although that can lead to a more globalizing world view, it is also capable of provoking an angry backlash when individuals of distinctively different perspectives are encountered, especially given the anonymous nature of the 21st century’s digital universe, within which expressions of anger can become increasingly inflammatory.
Preview of Chapters in This Volume
With the above in mind, we turn to an overview of the extraordinarily diverse series of articles that our contributors have prepared for this volume.
In Section One, several chapters offer diverse perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities. Donald Saucier, Russell Webster, Conor O’Dea, and Stuart Miller, based on empirical research from a variety of countries, describe dimensions of differences among individuals with respect to anger: political orientation (liberal or conservative), prejudice and related attitudes (authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), and social vigilantism. Certain constellations of extreme attitudes predispose individuals to anger and its behavioral consequences.
Stuart Miller, Amanda Martens, and Donald Saucier analyze the cognitive processes that contribute to angry inter-group behavior from the perspective of attribution theory. A variety of attributions about prejudice (including race, gender, and sexual orientation) are possible, depending on such factors as social identity, ideology, and perceived injustice, with different behavioral outcomes.
Jarryd Willis describes how controlled laboratory experiments on group polarization help us understand how groups move toward extremism. It is an advantage of laboratory studies, though they may seem artificial on the face, that they permit investigation of pre-determined parameters to advance our understanding, and perhaps contribute in the long run to wisdom about how to influence such processes in the real world.
Kate Dahlstedt and Edward Tick describe work with veterans through their Soldiers’ Heart Center. Kate Dahlstedt’s chapter focuses on women, both veterans and their families, who are often overlooked in our tendency understand anger, aggression, and war as predominantly male concerns. She joins with her husband Ed Tick in another chapter that describes their use of narratives from the humanities and ancient mythology to help understand and heal the suffering of those returning from war. They suggest that the American cultural response to veterans and to those who served in the Vietnam War in particular, unnecessarily brought additional pain instead of a heroic welcome and re-integration.
The next three chapters draw on the humanities. David Salomon describes and criticizes biblical stories of anger, including divine anger, treating, of course, the bible as a work of literature, rather than as a literal historical work. Rob Edelman focuses on the film genre, ranging from romance to drama, and on gender and racial issues as they are reflected in modern cinema. Edelman’s analysis attests that a variety of narratives of anger are possible. He comments on many recent films’ denial of anger in children, whose portrayal of children in anger-provoking situations is inadequate. The novels by J. K. Rowling about Harry Potter and his fictional adventures are described by Sybillyn Jennings as a variety of developmental trajectories or sequences that youth may follow during the development years to deal with anger.
In Section Two, we turn to a broader historical and geo-political focus. Frank Jacob’s chapter on angry exile groups in the aftermath of the French and Russian Revolutions offers insights into one of the most common phenomena of modern history. These lessons have implications for yet another enormous surge in emigration from conflict zones in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the Syrian/Iraqi civil wars now in the early 21st century.
Turning to more recent developments in the United States, the next two chapters explore the increasingly angry American right wing communities that have become so much more vocal in recent decades. Ryan Shaffer’s contribution on the extreme right and American Neo-Nazism brings our discussion of anger to bear on the post-war perception of a “zero-sum” competition over rights that, having been long dominated by Anglo-Americans, are now perceived as threatened by a diversifying America society. Carmen Celestini focuses on the sources and inspirations that drive the American radical right’s world view, analyzing the infamous fictional Turner Diaries that has since the 1970s captured the imagination of an enormous range of activists on the fringes of the American right, including White Supremacists and the militia movement.
Moving beyond the American fringe, Terry Weiner offers a case study of the Affordable Health Care Act, describing the use of anger as an inflammatory political tool within mainstream American politics. In this case, of course, the vitriolic campaign against the Affordable Care Act was not provoked by an obscure novel like the Turner Diaries but a concerted effort by right wing AM radio hosts and their conservative backers to arouse the public, in the midst of what became known as the Great Recession, against the principal legislative goal of the nation’s first Black president.
Moving toward a broader more international focus, Trevor Rubenzer offers an overview of the way anger has played out in Florida with respect to Cuban issues, both among the Cuban American community and against the Castro Regime in Havana and Washington for various policy decisions that the refugee community found wanting. Staying within the Western Hemisphere, we then turn to the American role in Latin America. The United States, a community that has long thought of itself as a benevolent nation associated with global leadership, human rights, and progress, is presented, by Jeffry Cox, in a very different light, as a nation that in the years after World War II, provoked an extraordinary level of explosive anger among its Latin American neighbors.
David Elliott describes anger that has risen over economic issues, from the extraordinarily complicated relationship between the relatively less sophisticated economy of Greece and the larger, wealthier northern European nations of the Larger European Union. Olakunle Folami and Taiwo Olaiya describe anger over economic and environmental issues in Nigeria, specifically the exploitative relationship between local communities in the Niger Delta and international oil corporations bent on gaining access to the region’s fossil fuel resources regardless of the impact on local communities. Mohammad Amjad turns our attention to Iran, analyzing recent politics within the context of the Iranian Islamic Republic and focusing on the role of such forces as frustration, deprivation, and anger in the political process within Iran since the early 1950s. He describes not only external factors such as Iran’s exploitation by outsiders for the purpose of exploiting the nation’s oil resources, but also the struggle against the Shah and in more recent years politics within Iranian theocracy.
Although anger as an emotion is not often associated with the popular image of a peaceful Buddhism, Jeannine Chandler’s contribution opens us up how anger has influenced the Tibetan community through the experience of exile and the formation of the Tibetan Independence Movement. Lastly, Cory Davenport’s work takes us into one of the most dramatic and frightening elements of contemporary society: the growth of terrorism, which has so profoundly impacted contemporary life on a global scale. Especially important is his specific focus on the role of anger as part of the radicalization process so common to the analysis of terrorism.