http://www.livescience.com/health/070611_anger_rational.html

Anger Fuels Better Decisions

By Melinda Wenner, Special to LiveScience

posted: 11 June 2007 08:01 am ET

The next time you are plagued with indecision and need a clear way
out, it might help to get angry, according to a surprising new study.

Despite its reputation as an impetus to rash behavior, anger actually
seems to help people make better choices—even aiding those who are
usually very poor at thinking rationally. This could be because angry
people base their decisions on the cues that "really matter" rather
than things that can be called irrelevant or a distraction.

Previous research has shown that anger biases people's
thinking—turning them into bigger risk-takers and making them less
trusting and more prejudiced, for instance.

But little has been done to study how, exactly, anger affects a
person's thinking.

So Wesley Moons, a psychologist at the University of California at
Santa Barbara, and his colleague Diana Mackie designed three
experiments to determine how anger influences thinking—whether it
makes people more analytical or careful about their decisions, or
whether it leads people to make faster, rasher decisions.

In the first experiment, the researchers induced anger in a group of
college students by either asking them to write about a past
experience that had made them very angry, or by having their stated
hopes and dreams harshly criticized by another participant. In a
second group of students, anger was not induced.

The researchers later checked to be sure that the subjects were as
riled up as they were supposed to be.

The two groups were then asked to read either compelling or weak
arguments designed to convince them that college students have good
financial habits. The strong argument cited research from numerous
scientific studies, whereas the weak argument contained largely
unsupported statements. The subjects were asked to logically evaluate
the strength of the arguments they read and indicate how convinced
they were by them.
The researchers repeated the experiment with a second group of
students, this time giving the subjects an additional piece of
information: who had made the arguments. Some students were told that
the argument was made by an organization with relevant expertise in
financial matters; others were told that the argument was made by a
medical organization whose expertise was irrelevant to the financial
topic being considered.

In both studies, the researchers found that the angry subjects were
better at discriminating between strong and weak arguments and were
more convinced by the stronger arguments. Those who were not made to
feel angry tended to be equally convinced by both arguments,
indicating that they were not as analytical in their assessments.

The angry students were also better at weighing the arguments
appropriately depending on which organization had made them.

The researchers repeated the experiment a third time using a different
argument—one that supported the implementation of a university-wide
requirement for graduating seniors to take comprehensive exams. This
time, they tested only those subjects who were the least analytical,
or in other words, those who were the least likely to make logical
decisions. This way, the researchers would be able to see whether
anger also makes typically non-analytical thinkers more analytical.

Once again, they found that the angry subjects were better able to
discriminate between strong and weak arguments than the ones who were
not angry—suggesting that anger can transform even those people who
are, by disposition, not very analytical into more careful thinkers.

Their findings, detailed in this month's issue of the Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that anger helps people focus on
the cues that matter most to making a rational decision and ignore
cues that are irrelevant to the task of decision-making.

This could be because anger is designed to motivate people to take
action—and that it actually helps people to take the right action, the
authors wrote.

* Computer Detects Anger Before Fights Breaks Out
http://www.livescience.com/technology/061117_angry_sound.html
* Science of Road Rage Revealed
http://www.livescience.com/health/060605_anger.html
* Anger is Good For You
http://www.livescience.com/health/051103_anger.html

http://www.livescience.com/health/070611_anger_rational.html