On Science Friday this week, I happened to overhear this great research title: Portrait of The Angry Decision Maker. The SciFri show was about the science of decision making, and the podcast is worth a listen. Jennifer Lerner (Harvard) is an entertaining radio guest. She co-authored the Portrait paper along with Larissa Tiedens (Stanford). The researchers say their findings indicate that anger has different effects than other negative emotions: We take bigger risks when angry, and are more optimistic about probable outcomes.
Is anger always a bad thing? This had me wondering if anger is really a negative emotion -- I've seen business-related articles about people starting companies when motivated by anger (anger over bureaucracy at their current job, for example). There's certainly nothing wrong with keeping a clear head -- and I'm definitely not advocating TWA (Texting While Angry) -- but I believe a little anger can be a good thing. Lo and behold, when I looked at the article online, the authors were wondering the same thing, asking "whether anger should be considered a positive emotion."
The full title of the research is Portrait of The Angry Decision Maker: How Appraisal Tendencies Shape Anger's Influence on Cognition (pdf here, and html version here). It offers empirical evidence about anger's "unique relationship top judgment and decision-making". Portrait also "proposes the hypothesis that anger will be experienced as relatively unpleasant and unrewarding when reflecting back on the source of one’s anger but experienced as relatively pleasant and rewarding when looking forward." Sounds about right.
Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing liked Portrait also, saying it's a "fascinating look at the role of irrationality on decision-making, and a damning rebuttal of the idea of rationality in the marketplace".
(BTW, I love the name of Doctorow's site, Craphound.)
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