Study: Anger Fuels Better Decisions

The phrase "anger blinds you" may have new meaning as a recent study has revealed that anger actually might help with indecision, according to LiveScience.

The reputation of anger has long been associated with hasty behavior, but anger actually assists people in making better choices, including those that are poor at thinking rationally. The reasoning behind this is that angry people base their decisions on signs that are significant, rather than distractions.

Previous studies of emotional anger have shown that it tends to bias people's thinking, and provokes them into taking bigger risks. Still, throughout all these studies, little has been focused on how anger affects a person's thinking.

To study this effect, 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 a person's thinking. The purpose of the experiment was to find out whether or not anger makes people draw more decisive decisions, or more hazardous decisions.

In the initial experiment, Moons, Mackie, and their team of researchers asked a group of college students to write about a past experience that had made them very angry, or have their dreams criticized by others. In a second group of students, anger was not provoked unlike the first group of students. To provide accurate data, the researchers made sure that the first group was as angry as they were supposed to be.

The researchers then asked the two groups to read either strong or weak arguments that were designed to convince the readers that college students have good financial habits. Afterwards, the college students were asked to evaluate the strength of the arguments based upon how convincing they were, as well as how logical.