Hope This Makes You Mad

June 27, 2007 — -- Many say that anger always clouds our judgment. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, anger "blows out the light of reason."

Well, it turns out that old Ralph got that wrong, at least partly. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have found that in some cases, a little anger can actually sharpen our ability to analyze data carefully and make the right decisions.

We're not talking road rage here. We're talking about anger more on the level of miffed, or irked, or mad enough to think about telling the boss off. That's the level of anger that should help you to think twice about the boss and possibly figure out a better way to let him know he's acting like a jerk.

"The results of our study seem counterintuitive to people," said psychologist Wesley G. Moons, lead author of the study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Moons and a colleague, Diane M. Mackie, put a bunch of students through a series of experiments to see if they could "think straight while seeing red," as they put it.

In some cases the students were provoked, or insulted, causing them to describe themselves as angry. In other cases the students were asked to recall something that made them angry. Then they were asked to solve a problem, or analyze some data, to see how anger impacted their judgment.

Among the findings: People who normally think carefully before making a decision were unaffected by their personal anger. And people who don't always think through a situation were actually helped by anger. They were, for example, more likely to rely on data that was furnished by someone in the know than someone who is irrelevant and probably uninformed.

Under the influence of anger, Moons said, the participants "were not stupidly relying on anything that's available" to help them make a decision. "They were selectively using relative, useful information," he said.

How can that be true, since we've been told so often to hold off on making a decision until we cool down? The research suggests that anger, and possibly many other emotions, actually sharpens analytical thinking, helping us throw out irrelevant information, and figuring out a better way to deal with an issue.