The Rightful Place of Anger

Anger does have its rightful place. It can be a life-saver, and well as life-taker. While we must exercise great care regarding our own anger management, and beware of seeking to self-justify our anger, anger can nevertheless be of essential service.

Anger can help us get through tough, draining situations, such as abuse. The angry person, who is able to keep their anger under control, rather like keeping their car moving along the desired direction, is more likely to be a survivor. I learned that while withstanding an abusive stepfather. He did teach me that in a fight, those who keep their anger under control have the best chance of winning.

I remember how my anger at a couple of Drill Instructors helped me get through the Marines Corps boot camp at Paris Island, South Carolina. And I sure was not alone in that department. Anger can assist in keeping you strong and together – as well as ultimately using up your energy.

In its way, anger affirms self-worth. When you are mad, you have assigned value to yourself and your position. Right or wrong, that is the position you are defending. Be aware, however, that anger tends to absolutize your perception of yourself and others at the time.

Talk about anger and perception. Recent research suggests that, despite its reputation as an inducer of rash behavior, anger may actually assist people to make better choices – even those who are not the best in the thinking department. This is possibly due to angry people basing their decisions on cues regarding what “really matters” rather than on things which could be viewed as irrelevant or a distraction.

Research previously indicated that anger biases the way people think, and can turn them into bigger risk-takers, who are less trusting and more prejudiced. But there has been little research on how anger affects the way a person thinks.

So Wesley Moons, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and colleague Diana Mackie conducted three experiments on college students to determine how anger affects thinking – whether it makes people more careful and analytical about their decisions, or whether it prompts people to make faster, rasher decisions.

The researchers found that angry subjects were better able to discriminate between strong and weak arguments and were more convinced by the stronger arguments. Those who were not angry tended to be equally convinced by both kinds of arguments, suggesting they were not as analytical in their assessments. The angry students were also more adept at weighing the arguments in terms of the credibility of those who had made them. This was true even for students who were by disposition not very careful or analytical thinkers.

These findings suggest that anger actually assists people to focus on the cues that matter most to forging a rational decision and to ignore cues that are irrelevant to the decision‑making process. Anger assists us to narrow our focus onto what really matters most at that moment. Their anger then prompts them not just to sit by, but to take action. And apparently anger can help them to take the right action.

That being said, we must continue to be cautionary with our anger. Better to listen to it than act on it. The constant challenge is to be angry at the right thing, at the right person, in the right way, to the right degree, at the right time and length of time. And it may take most of a lifetime to learn that.