Portrait of the angry decision maker: how appraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition

Abstract

This paper reviews the impact of anger on judgment and decision making. Section I proposes that anger merits special attention in the study of judgment and decision making because the effects of anger often diverge from those of other negative emotions. Section II presents an Appraisal-Tendency Framework for predicting and organizing such effects. Section III reviews empirical evidence for the uniqueness of anger's relations to judgment and decision making. Section IV connects the Appraisal-Tendency Framework to associated mechanisms and theories. Drawing on the evidence, Section V presents the question of whether anger should be considered a positive emotion. It also proposes the hypothesis that anger will be experienced as relatively unpleasant and unrewarding when reflecting back on the source of one's anger but experienced as relatively pleasant and rewarding when looking forward. Section VI synthesizes the evidence into a new portrait of the angry decision maker. Anger merits such attention for several reasons. First, anger is one of the most frequently experienced emotions-at least among individuals in the United States. Averill (1982) concluded in a survey of prior studies that ''Depending upon how records are kept, most people report becoming mildly to moderately angry anywhere from several times a day to several times a week'' (p. 1146).1 Similarly, Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, and Fischhoff (2003) found, in a nationally representative sample of US citizens, that out of all the possible emotions experienced by US citizens, anger was the most commonly experienced emotion in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Fischhoff, Gonzalez, Lerner, and Small (2005) found that the same pattern held a year later with the same sample. To be sure, the diverse elicitors of anger experiences have been widely studied. Here, by contrast, we study the outcomes of anger-specifically judgment and decision-making outcomes. Admittedly, this is a unique approach. The most frequently studied outcome of anger is aggression (e.g., Berkowitz, 1990Berkowitz, , 1993, but here we are concerned with how anger influences perceptions, beliefs, ideas, reasoning, and ultimately choices. Anger has the potential to grip a nation over a sustained period (Fischhoff et al., 2005;Lerner et al., 2003) and thus it is important to understand how it may shape individual choice over time.A second reason for focusing on anger is that it has an unusually strong ability to capture attention. All emotional stimuli grab attention more so than do neutral stimuli (Derryberry & Tucker, 1994;Pratto & John, 1991). But anger has uniquely captivating properties both for the person experiencing it as well as for the person perceiving it (Solomon, 1990;Tavris, 1989). Hansen and Hansen (1988) have demonstrated what they call ''The Anger Superiority Effect''-a tendency for people to pay particular attention to angry faces. Angry faces are spotted quickly and mistakes are rarely made regarding them, as compared with other emotion expressions. And o...

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