(2019-01-01) Duhigg The Real Roots Of American Rage

Charles Duhigg: The Real Roots of American Rage.

I. An Angry Little Town Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed. “Describe the most angry of these experiences

The survey was interested in the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail.

Greenfield, population 18,000, was an unusual place to plumb these depths. It was a middle-class town

The author of the questionnaire was James Averill, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

he was convinced that his academic colleagues misunderstood anger

“Everyone basically thought anger was something that mature people and societies ought to suppress,”

He felt bursts of indignation on a regular basis, as did everyone else he knew. And though he rarely acted on these impulses, he suspected that anger wouldn’t be lurking in his psyche unless it served some important purpose.

Averill decided that the best way to understand anger was to survey ordinary people

replies soon began flooding his mailbox, so many that Averill had trouble reading them all. “It was the best-performing survey I’ve ever conducted,” he told me.

People were eager to talk about their daily indignations, in part because they felt angry so frequently. “Most people report becoming mildly to moderately angry anywhere from several times a day to several times a week,”

Most surprising of all, these angry episodes typically took the form of short and restrained conversations

contrary to Averill’s hypothesis, they didn’t make bad situations worse. Instead, they tended to make bad situations much, much better. They resolved, rather than exacerbated, tensions

expressing anger resulted in all parties becoming more willing to listen, more inclined to speak honestly, more accommodating of each other’s complaints

The ratio of beneficial to harmful consequences was about 3 to 1 for angry persons,” Averill wrote. Even the targets of those outbursts agreed that the shouting and recriminations had helped.

Anger, Averill concluded, is one of the densest forms of communication.

it does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront problems we might otherwise avoid.

in early 2016, Averill was watching newscasts about the presidential primaries

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation,” Haley told voters

Soon afterward, reporters swarmed Donald Trump to ask how he felt about such a public renunciation. “Well, I think she’s right, I am angry,”

Everyone believed Trump would be out of the race soon. But Averill wasn’t so sure. “He understands anger,” he thought to himself, “and it’s going to make voters feel wonderful.”

America has always been an angry nation. We are a country born of revolution.

Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted. It has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives. It

is directed less often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize. These far-off targets may or may not have earned our ire; either way, they’re apt to be less invested in resolving our differences. The tight feedback loop that James Averill observed in Greenfield has been broken.

The scholarship of Averill and his successors shows how ordinary anger can be sharpened, manipulated, and misdirected—and how difficult it is for us to resist this process

Lately, evidence of anger’s destructive power is everywhere

on both the left and the right, a visceral disdain for one’s political opponents has become common, as have feelings of schadenfreude when the other side suffers a setback

Donald Trump made the most of this animosity during his campaign, as Averill predicted he would; he has mastered the levers of emotional manipulation better than any of his political opponents. But our predicament predates the current president. In 2001, just 8 percent of Americans told Pew they were angry at the federal government; by 2013, that number had more than tripled

we have to appreciate how anger works.

Ordinary anger can deepen, under the right circumstances, into moral indignation

can still be a powerful force for good. If moral indignation persists, however—and if the indignant lose faith that their anger is being heard—it can produce a third type of anger: a desire for revenge

We are further down this path as a nation than you may realize

In the mid-1960s, California residents, if they happened to look at the back pages of their local newspapers, were likely to see a smattering of articles about a small group of angry grape pickers

Among some workers, however, there was chatter about a new leader. Cesar Chavez was a migrant himself

Chavez had a basic theory about organizing: The key to solidarity, he believed, was appealing to workers’ emotions—particularly their sense of moral outrage.

A great deal of research has explored Chavez’s thesis that moral outrage can achieve widespread change

He made his followers see their discontent as part of a larger story about right and wrong. “Cesar understood that outrage can create cohesion,”

You can’t organize a group of victims. If people only see themselves that way, there’s no sense of agency, no sense of power.

As Chavez’s followers began their march to Sacramento, local police came to block their way. The sight of uniformed cops looming over poor migrants drew attention, and the police soon dispersed.

The march did not succeed in extracting every concession Chavez wanted—the strike would go on—but it forced the nation to pay attention to the plight of migrant workers. By the time the protesters arrived in the state capital and celebrated an Easter Mass, Chavez had become the face of the California labor movement, and one of the most famous agitators in America.

“The thing people forget is that the political left were really the ones who perfected the politics of anger,” Ganz told me. “It’s the progressives who figured out that by helping people see injustice, rather than just economics, we become strong.” Movements don’t emerge from small acrimonies.

But moral outrage must be closely managed, or it can do more harm than good

For anger to be productive, at some point, it must stop. Victory often demands compromise. “You have to know how to arouse passions to fuel the fight, and then how to cool everyone down so they’ll accept the deal on the table,” Ganz said.

In 1968, a couple of years after Chavez’s march to Sacramento, with the strike against grape growers still ongoing

began sabotaging produce trucks.

Buildings were set ablaze.

Chavez had consistently preached nonviolence. As the discontent worsened, however, he realized that he was losing control. And so, on a grim February morning, Chavez announced that he was fasting

The fast continued for a week, then two weeks, then nearly a month.

He broke the fast 25 days later

III. The New Anger Merchants

its power is not reserved for the righteous

Corporate America, for example, has long sought to profit from our anger.

Sutton nosed around and found a debt-collection agency whose executives were as fascinated as he was by the new scholarship on anger.

“The trick they were teaching was to use anger strategically,” Sutton told me. “They had it as a formula: when to fake anger, when to cool down, when to give people a bit of forgiveness.” Even when the debtors on the other end of the line sounded friendly, the collectors were trained to pretend they were angry at them.

The point wasn’t to intimidate the debtors into paying—the strategy was more sophisticated than that. As soon as a debtor started screaming back, the collector would switch tactics and become soothing and accommodating

“It was incredibly effective,” Sutton told me. “People would be so charged up from getting mad and then so relieved you weren’t blaming them anymore, and so they’d agree to nearly anything.”

If the bill collectors figured out how to use interpersonal anger to their advantage, the cable-news business perfected the monetization of moral outrage.

In 1987, a television reporter named Geraldo Rivera began hosting a daytime talk show. It failed to attract much attention in its first year. Then he tried a new formula, inviting white supremacists, skinheads, and black and Jewish activists into his studio, all at the same time. A brawl broke out. The set was trashed; punches were thrown; Rivera’s nose got broken. The episode was a hit.

Cable news didn’t immediately sink to the same depths, but the influence of the daytime shout-fests was undeniable, especially once Fox News and MSNBC entered the fray, in 1996.

Broadcast news had been constrained by regulations that enforced fairness and encouraged decorum. Cable executives, however, could do whatever they wanted. (fairness doctrine)

On MSNBC, commentators such as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow found ratings success by playing on their viewers’ discontent, even if they stopped short of borrowing Bill O’Reilly’s most demagogic tactics. In 2012, Bill Clinton ruefully observed that the network had become “our version of Fox.”

The point is to keep viewers tuned in, which means keeping them angry all the time. No reconciliation, no catharsis, no compromise.

The more recent rise of social media has only further inflamed our emotions.

This isn’t to say that these platforms can’t harness our anger toward more productive ends. The democratic nature of social media has given previously marginalized groups new outlets to express their outrage and to translate anger into action

But the political actors who use anger to more cynical ends still have the upper hand.

“Willie Horton was the start of it all,” Jarding said. In 1988

IV. The Revenge Impulse

In the fall of 2017, Larry Cagle, an English teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, became so furious that he started plotting to throw his school into chaos.

He emailed a few colleagues and asked, What if everyone called in sick on the same day? “All it would take was six teachers

just as he’d surmised, the school went into crisis, with classes canceled and the principal’s office deluged with phone calls from parents asking why their child had spent the entire day in the gym

the governor, concerned about a contagion effect, pushed through a pay raise for educators—an average of $6,100 per teacher. But the bill included only limited funds to improve the schools.

The teachers were far from mollified. They decided to hold a massive, statewide walkout.

thousands of teachers across the state left their classrooms on Monday, April 2, 2018.

“I knew it was hurting my family,” Cagle said, “but all I could think about was punishing the people who had made me angry for so long.”

Researchers call the phenomenon in which anger, rather than making things better, becomes a cycle of recrimination, rumination, and ever-expanding fury the revenge impulse.

Though anger and the desire for revenge can feel intertwined, they are two distinct emotions. Simply becoming angry doesn’t prompt a revenge impulse.

when both the process and the outcome seem unfair, that’s when we see riots.

It makes a certain evolutionary sense that the desire for revenge would be coded into us as an emotion of last resort.

It also makes sense that this emotion ought to be rare, because the desire for revenge can be exceedingly destructive

To Larry Cagle, it often felt like the school system, the state government, and even his union were conspiring to stoke his anger, without any promise of relief.

After the strikes had kept schools closed for half a month, the teachers’ union called a press conference. Its leadership had decided to throw in the towel.

The teacher strikes of 2018 won concessions in some states. In Oklahoma, the results were mixed

the protests have yet to produce higher salaries than what was promised before the walkout, or additional school resources.

It seems like our current madness should be reaching its apex, that relief ought to be on the horizon. But the sources of our anger run deeper than the present political moment.

So where do we go from here?

V. A Better Use for our Fury

The plan, on the face of it, seemed crazy. A group of Israeli social scientists wanted to conduct an experiment disguised as an advertising campaign

The goal was to persuade the residents to abandon their anger toward Palestinians and agree that Israel should freeze construction of Jewish settlements

The proposed experiment ran counter to most of psychology’s conventional teachings. The best-known theory regarding how to reduce conflict and prejudice within a population was known as the “contact hypothesis”: If you can just get everyone who hates each other to talk in a controlled, respectful manner, this doctrine holds, they’ll eventually start speaking civilly

The researchers figured that the contact hypothesis had clearly been developed by someone who had never visited Israel.

So the researchers came up with a clever idea. Don’t tell everyone in Giv’at Shmuel that they’re wrong. Tell them that they’re right: A perpetual war with Israel’s neighbors made a lot of sense. If anything, the people of Giv’at Shmuel ought to be angrier.

Over a six-week period, according to polling, nearly all of its 25,000 residents saw them.

Three days after the experiment started, the so-called Lone Wolf Intifada began, a wave of violent assaults across Israel that the researchers figured would make the people of Giv’at Shmuel even more polarized. And yet, when the researchers conducted polls in the suburb at the end of the advertising campaign, the residents who had held the most extreme views at the outset of the experiment appeared to have softened.

year after the ads had ceased, by which time some residents had trouble recalling the specifics of the campaign, polls still showed greater tolerance.

The campaign worked, the social scientists believe, because instead of telling people they were wrong, the ads agreed with them—to embarrassing, offensive extremes. “No one wants to think of themselves as some angry crank,”

we can’t maintain this fever pitch, or we will risk forfeiting the gains that good anger can bring

“Above all, he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire into smug, passive satisfaction,” King said to the crowd about Du Bois. “The supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”