Study Shows Anger Can Create Prejudice
Feb. 19, 2004 -- All it takes is a feeling of anger to make us instantly prejudiced against people who are not members of our own social group, new research shows. We can create prejudice "out of thin air."
The other person doesn't have to do anything to us to induce that prejudice. We don't have to know who that person is, or anything about him or her, except for the fact that he or she is in some way different from ourselves.
Anger, perhaps against a friend over a spat earlier in the day, or at another motorist who cut us off on the way home, makes us more likely to react negatively towards someone who is not part of our inner circle.
That prejudice, according to researchers, is created spontaneously because our brains are predisposed to be angry at anything that might threaten us, and threats most often come from sources outside our inner circle. Thus if you're angry, over just about anything, and have some immediate conflict with someone from another culture, or race, or religion, you're more likely to deal with that person in a prejudicial way.
Wide Implications
The findings, according to the researchers, have implications for such fields as law enforcement and national security where decisions must sometimes be made instantly in the face of great danger.
"To our knowledge, the present findings stand as the first evidence that specific emotions are capable of shaping people's automatic evaluations toward social groups," psychology professors David DeSteno of Northeastern University in Boston and Nilanjana Dasgupta of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, say in their study published in the May issue of Psychological Science.
"We believe that anger, due to its basic association with intergroup competition and conflict, evoked a psychological readiness to evaluate outgroups (or groups that are different from whatever group we belong to,) thus creating an automatic prejudice against the outgroup from thin air," the researchers conclude.
Dasgupta studies "non conscious prejudices," and DeSteno specializes in the study of emotions, so this research combines both those fields. Since their days in graduate school, the two have mulled over how to tackle this very difficult problem. Prejudice is a hard thing to measure under any circumstances, but how do you break it down to determine if even unrelated emotions can create prejudice against someone who we have never even met?
They zeroed in on three states of mind — anger, sadness, and neutrality — to see if they could measure any difference in how those feelings affect our prejudices. They randomly selected college students and residents from New York City to participate in the study.
Red vs. Blue Groups
The participants were divided into two groups by arbitrarily telling some they tended to overestimate numerical values, such as the number of flights out of an urban airport every day, and those who were told they underestimated the values.
"The idea simply is to use a relatively trivial and meaningless distinction, yet it allows us to form two groups," DeSteno says. "One is not better than the other."
That reduces the chance that any response might come from a deep-seated prejudice, as opposed to a new prejudice, because none of the participants had any reason to believe the members of the other group were a threat or inferior.
Members of each group were given wristbands of different colors, red for one group, blue for the other, thus forming two distinct teams, or social groups. Then they were asked to write a paragraph describing something that made them angry, or sad, or neutral (like the description of a dorm room.)
To determine whether any of those emotions generated a prejudice, the researchers used photos of each participant against a red or blue background corresponding to the person's group identification. Thus the participant could instantly recognize someone who was like themselves, or different, even if the person was a total stranger.
The participants stared at a computer that could measure in thousandths of a second how quickly each participant could decide which group the person on the screen belonged to.
"We would flash on the screen a word that was clearly positive or negative," DeSteno says. "For example, love, or beauty, or negative words like war, violence and death."
Quick Association
The researchers then measured the difference in how long it took for each participant to determine which group each photo belonged in while concentrating on something that made them sad, neutral, or angry. They were looking for any difference that could be attributed to the person on the screen belonging to the participant's own group, or the other.
When they measured for sad, the researchers saw no difference.
When they measured for neutral, again, zilch.
But when they measured while the participant was angry, there was a clear difference of several thousandths of a second. That may not seem like much, but the human mind responds at light speed.
And here's the nugget in all this.
"In the angry condition, people were much slower to respond to an outgroup picture when it was preceded by a word like love than if preceded by a word like death," DeSteno says.
In other words, while feeling angry, the participants more quickly associated love with members of their own little group than with members of the other group, although they knew practically nothing about the other participants. They more quickly picked the member of the other group when the prime word was negative.
Anger "actually created an automatic prejudice where none had previously existed," the researchers say in their report.
"It's a clear marker," DeSteno says. All it takes is a little anger to invoke an instant prejudice against someone who is, in some small way, different from ourselves.
Lee Dye’s column appears weekly on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.