Saturday, January 15, 2011

The Problems with Anger and Public Policy Changes

I have been thinking about "anger" lately. I know from study and personal experience that real anger can be defined as an emotion based upon a person's perception that an expectation hasn't been met. People tend to respond to this perception of "unrequited" expectation with feelings of loss, disappointment, frustration, helplessness and the like.

They also tend to believe they have been wronged and that the wrong is the result of a deliberate, personally directed, and controllable aspect of another person's or group's behavior. In other words, a single, discrete, exogenous cause. They then feel they want to take retaliatory actions against this exogenous cause, the "other" person or group.

Even when there are multiple reasons for the failure to meet expectation, people rarely find and focus on more than a single reason. They find it easier to merge all the reasons into one and put their focus on that one, treating it as if it embodied the rest. It comes down to practical time and attention management as well as intellectual blindness.

No argument can be sustained that feelings of anger improve the quality of the decision-making process. A serious problem with feeling anger is that it causes people to lose their ability to monitor themselves and observe things objectively. To cover the loss, the person falls back on intuition rather than facts.

Objectivity, however, is only the first thing to go. To make it worse, the loss of objectivity is followed quickly by loss of empathy. Prudence is then kicked out the door; hatred of the "other" roars in through it.

The overall significant reduction in a person's ability to process information, to think or reason and exert control over his behavior can have serious negative consequences. People may very well be wrong about the focus of their anger being the cause of the wrong. They may end up misdirecting their anger against the wrong person or group and doing harm to innocents.

Now, all of that was about "real" anger. There is another kind of anger, a much more dangerous kind: feigned anger.


It is not uncommon that people can't tell if the outward expressions of anger they see is genuine or not. This is important to know because psychologists tell us that people have a tendency to follow the dictates of those people they consider to be strong. Further, people also have an unconscious tendency to equate "angry" people and strong people. This happens whether the anger is real or feigned. All that is necessary is the observation of the appearance of anger.

Because of this, feigned anger is a tool useful for manipulation of others. It is used to influence emotions and thereby shape people's behavior. The use of feigned anger has a long history of being successful in changing attitudes and influencing decisions.

People use feigned anger to avoid or get out of discussions. Military Drill Instructors use it in training recruits in Boot Camp. Labor union representatives use it to intimidate management during negotiations. Police use it in interrogations of suspects to break down their resistance. Politicians use it as a distinct strategy to influence the direction of social changes they advocate and rush public policy changes through to passage before people can regain their pre-anger state of objectivity. You can probably come up with a bunch more.

The point is, it's really important to keep in mind that, in the presence of anger, decisions should not be made, and public policy should not be changed. Bad situations do not result in good laws. The long-lasting damage that can be done is real; even when the anger is not.

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