Is Anger Ever Appropriate?

[Written in response to the questions, "In what situations is anger desirable? Is it ever acceptable or encouraged?"]

I can think of a handful of situations where feeling and showing anger is appropriate and useful. In a situation where:

1.) You're communicating with someone too immature to understand rational argument;

2.) You don't feel any enmity or hostility towards the person;

3.) They have done something wrong and you need to communicate the seriousness of the offense;

In this situation, it could be useful to allow yourself to feel anger in such a way that the other person can tell. For example, if your three-year-old child breaks the family rules and runs outside the house alone and into the street, I don't think it would be harmful for the child to perceive that "mommy and daddy are really mad that I broke the rules and they say I could have been killed." Similarly, if one child is harming another child (hitting, biting), I can imagine that it might be more appropriate for certain children to feel that "mommy and daddy are mad that I hurt [other child] and they said I shouldn't ever hurt them ever again" instead of "mommy and daddy are sad that..." It probably depends on the child, but I can certainly imagine children who would pay more attention to anger than to grief.

When the Lord shows anger in the scriptures, all the cases I can think of fit this pattern. He is dealing with someone immature (like the Israelites), he still loves them, and they've done something very wrong.

If the other person weren't immature I think anger might still be okay to feel (as long as #2 and #3 are still satisfied) but it's not helpful per se. If your spouse does something that makes you mad, you can say, "I really, really didn't like it when you [did XYZ]", but you wouldn't lose any effectiveness if you weren't angry when you said it. In the case of an immature person though I think being calm can result in them missing your point. Immature, irrational people respond more readily to emotion than to logic, and if you give them the logic without the emotion they won't hear what you're saying. "That behavior is inappropriate in this context" doesn't mean the same thing to them as "STOP IT!!!!!".

-Max

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Robert Cialdini

[from an email discussion]

Cialdini's writings are extremely interesting. Here's an interesting story from one of the early chapters of Pre-Suasion, emphasis mine:

In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. Consider how a small procedural difference has improved the bottom line of the consulting business of a Toronto-based colleague of mine. For years, when bidding on a big project, it wasn't unusual to get price resistance from the client, who might propose a 10 percent or 15 percent reduction. That was frustrating, he says, because he never felt comfortable padding the budget to cover this kind of potential pushback on costs. If he did agree to the cut, his profit margin became so thin it barely paid to take the business. If he didn't acquiesce, he either lost the job or produced partners who were initially disgruntled because he wasn't willing to work with them on price.

 

Then, during one proposal meeting, he accidentally hit upon a maneuver that rid him of the problem forever. It wasn't a step-by-step attempt to specify or justify each of the expenses involved in his services; he'd long since given up on that approach, which only brought scrutiny to the bill. Instead, after his standard presentation and just before declaring his ($75,000) fee, he joked, "As you can tell, I'm not going to be able to charge you a million dollars for this." The client looked up from the written proposal he'd been studying and said, "Well, I can agree to that!" The meeting proceeded without a single subsequent reference to compensation and ended with a signed contract. My colleague claims that this tactic of mentioning an admittedly unrealistic price tag for a job doesn't always win the business—too many other factors are involved for that—but it almost always eliminates challenges to the charges.

 

Although he stumbled onto it, my friend is not alone in experiencing the remarkable effects of merely launching a large number into the air and, consequently, into the minds of others. Researchers have found that the amount of money people said they'd be willing to spend on dinner went up when the restaurant was named Studio 97, as opposed to Studio 17; that the price individuals would pay for a box of Belgian chocolates grew after they'd been asked to write down a pair of high (versus low) digits from their Social Security numbers; that participants in a study of work performance predicted their effort and output would be better when the study happened to be labeled experiment twenty-seven (versus experiment nine); and that observers' estimates of an athlete's performance increased if he wore a high (versus low) number on his jersey.

The remarkable thing about this story to me is that it shows a case where persuasion expertise can help a businessman be more ethical (no pressure to pad the initial asking price).

The whole book is full of fascinating stories and ideas. I highly recommend it to anyone who regularly interacts with human beings in a professional or personal capacity. 

-M.
 

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

What is Dungeons and Dragons? (Not collaborative storytelling)

It's popular to describe D&D as "collaborative storytelling", but I think that's misleading.

You can derive a story from the events of the game, after it's over, but that's true for many games from Cops and Robbers to Clue. Fundamentally, roleplaying games like D&D are about giving players meaningful decisions to make within the context of a fantasy adventure, which means making choices with consequences that are clearly related to the player's intent. The more meaningful decisions you make during an evening of D&D, the more memorable the experience: players will tell stories about what they did and what happened because of what they did.

Nobody wants to collaboratively re-enact all the events of Lord of the Rings, even if it is a great story in book form. If you don't get to make choices which change the outcome, that's not a game, and you'll have no story to tell after the game is over. But if Frodo and Sam get killed by Ringwraiths back at the Shire, and then the Ringwraiths send the Ring back to Sauron on a flying dragon which gets ambushed by giant eagles ridden by Legolas and Gandalf who then flee westward over the oceans with the Ring to buy time while Aragorn and the dwarves make peace with the goblins of the Misty Mountains and persuade them to betray Sauron and join the West in exchange for mining rights and patents of Gondorian nobility... if that actually works and you save the world that way, you might have a story you'll want to remember.

-B.C.

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Ethics of being good-looking (continued)

Maybe it's just childish to take appearances too seriously? Don't forget they are temporary and mutable. But maybe it's not wrong to mutate them to be pleasant sometimes? And it can help you influence lower levels.

~B.C.

Radioactive Taiwan: Followup

[Back in 2004 I heard about a case where a bunch of apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally constructed out of (mildly) radioactive metal. This was not discovered until ten thousand people had spent one to two decades living in those buildings. The common perception of radiation, called the LNT theory (Linear-No-Threshold), says that radiation is always bad for you even in small doses, and suggests that cancer rates among these people should have been sky-high. Instead cancer rates were unusually LOW, about 3% the normal average even for people living in non-radioactive buildings. There was a followup study done in 2007 that I skimmed, which concluded that the effect seemed to be real and that cancer rates for all types of cancer except leukemia really had drastically dropped (leukemia rates went slightly up) and that more study was needed.

Today it occurred to me that I never found out if further research had been done, so I went looking. I found a bunch of papers including this one from 2018. I'm no expert but it looks like the phenomenon seen in the radioactive Taiwanese incident is holding up in other studies, and LNT is losing favor in the scientific community. -Max]

Abstract

The effects of low-dose radiation are being increasingly investigated in biological, epidemiological, and clinical studies. Many recent studies have indicated the beneficial effects of low doses of radiation, whereas some studies have suggested harmful effects even at low doses. This review article introduces various studies reporting both the beneficial and harmful effects of low-dose radiation, with a critique on the extent to which respective studies are reliable. Epidemiological studies are inherently associated with large biases, and it should be evaluated whether the observed differences are due to radiation or other confounding factors. On the other hand, well-controlled laboratory studies may be more appropriate to evaluate the effects of low-dose radiation. Since the number of such laboratory studies is steadily increasing, it will be concluded in the near future whether low-dose radiation is harmful or beneficial and whether the linear-no-threshold (LNT) theory is appropriate. Many recent biological studies have suggested the induction of biopositive responses such as increases in immunity and antioxidants by low-dose radiation. Based on recent as well as classical studies, the LNT theory may be out of date, and low-dose radiation may have beneficial effects depending on the conditions; otherwise, it may have no effects. [emphasis added. -Max]

Keywords: low-dose radiation, hormesis, adaptive response
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121451/

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.