How anger works

How anger works. Daniel Sznycer, Aaron Sell, Alexandre Dumont. Evolution and Human Behavior, December 3 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.11.007

Abstract: Anger appears to be a neurocognitive adaptation designed to bargain for better treatment, and is primarily triggered by indications that another individual values the focal individual insufficiently. Once activated, anger orchestrates cognitive, physiological, and behavioral responses geared to incentivize the target individual to place more weight on the welfare of the focal individual. Here, we evaluate the hypothesis that anger works by matching in intensity the various outputs it controls to the magnitude of the current input—the precise degree to which the target appears to undervalue the focal individual. By magnitude-matching outputs to inputs, the anger system balances the competing demands of effectiveness and economy and avoids the dual errors of excessive diffidence and excessive belligerence in bargaining. To test this hypothesis, we measured the degree to which audiences devalue each of 39 negative traits in others, and how individuals would react, for each of those 39 traits, if someone slandered them as possessing those traits. We observed the hypothesized magnitude-matchings. The intensities of the anger feeling and of various motivations of anger (telling the offender to stop, insulting the offender, physically attacking the offender, stopping talking to the offender, and denying help to the offender) vary in proportion to: (i) one another, and (ii) the reputational cost that the slanderer imposes on the slandered (proxied by audience devaluation). These patterns of magnitude-matching were observed both within and between the United States and India. These quantitative findings echo laypeople's folk understanding of anger and suggest that there are cross-cultural regularities in the functional logic and content of anger.

Keywords: AngerEmotionWelfare Tradeoff RatioCultureEvolutionary Psychology