Rage article editorial exercise
The NEWYORK TIMES
ANGER is a primal and destructive emotion, disrupting rational discourse and inflaming illogical passions — or so it often seems. Then again, anger also has its upsides. Expressing anger, for example, is known to be a useful tool in negotiations. Indeed, in the past few years, researchers have been learning more about when and how to deploy anger productively.
Consider a forthcoming paper in the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Researchers tested the effectiveness of expressing anger in three types of negotiations: those that are chiefly cooperative (say, starting a business with a partner), chiefly competitive (dissolving a shared business) or balanced between the two (selling a business to a buyer). In two experiments, negotiators made greater concessions to those who expressed anger — but only in balanced situations. When cooperating, hostility seems inappropriate, and when competing, additional heat only flares tempers. But in between, anger appears to send a strategically useful signal.
What does that signal communicate? According to a 2009 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, anger evolved to help us express that we feel undervalued. Showing anger signals to others that if we don’t get our due, we’ll exert harm or withhold benefits. As they anticipated, the researchers found that strong men and attractive women — those who have historically had the most leverage in threatening harm and conferring benefits, respectively — were most prone to anger.
The usefulness of anger in extracting better treatment from others seems to be something we all implicitly understand. A 2013 paper in the journal Cognition and Emotion found that when people were preparing to enter a confrontational negotiation, as opposed to a cooperative one, they took steps to induce anger in themselves (choosing to listen to aggressive versus happy music, for example).
The study also found that people induced anger in themselves only if there was an actual benefit at stake for them in the negotiation. This qualification was essential in demonstrating that it was the perceived strategic benefit of being angry (and not, say, just a reflex that we have when entering any confrontation) that prompted people to induce such an unpleasant mood in themselves.
There are other important caveats. While expressions of anger can elicit compromises, they can also lead to covert retaliation, according to a 2012 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. In two experiments, negotiators overtly made concessions when opponents expressed anger but, evidently feeling mistreated, covertly sabotaged their opponents afterward. Outside the laboratory, this dynamic might take the form of acquiescing to an angry colleague’s demand but then spreading negative gossip about him around the office.
Expressing anger can sometimes benefit all the parties involved, not just one of them, by clarifying boundaries, needs and concerns. Think of the loved one who doesn’t realize how strongly you feel about the relationship until you express feelings of frustration with it. In a 2009 article in Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, the authors found that anger is more likely to lead to such mutually positive outcomes when it is low in intensity; expressed verbally rather than physically; and takes place in an organization that considers it appropriate (like a labor union or a university athletic department).
Finally, anger can also motivate large-scale political progress. Researchers reported in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2011 that among Israeli Jews, inducing anger at Palestinians increased their desire to make necessary compromises in upcoming peace talks — as long as the attitudes of the Israelis toward Palestinians were not hateful. This finding suggested that while some angry people may try to remedy a frustrating situation with aggression, others — even those who are just as angry — may funnel their anger into less antagonistic solutions.
We tend to associate anger with the loss of control, but anger has clear applications and obeys distinct rules. It may be blunt, but it has its own particular logic. And used judiciously, it can get us better deals, galvanize coalitions and improve all our lives.
