Anger Sells

First, a disclaimer about my disposition: I don’t like anger. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but I’m of the opinion that, like any strongly felt emotion, it can cloud people’s judgment. Want to get angry at the Slayer concert? Knock yourself out (literally). But if you’re trying to make some sort of judgment about the world around you, I think that being angry can only lead you astray.

And yet, I have to admit, right now, after reading about last night’s mass murder, I feel angry, angry and fatigued, because I know the cycle: violence happens, then people want something to be done about the violence, but that typically involves restricting or monitoring others in some way (restricting gun access, making your mental health history available to authorities, monitoring your web use, censoring (or at least condemning) certain kinds of expression). Then a group of people will become angered by the effort to control or restrict them, citing their right to be free and how it is being infringed. When I think about the seeming inevitability of the cycle, I get tired. I also think, “What can I do about it?”

Maybe my small contribution as a researcher and media educator can be to further understanding of the role of anger in this whole cycle. Being angry at some group of “unfamiliar others” (e.g., not some ex-boss or some ex-girlfriend who pissed you off) seems like a necessary-but-not-sufficient criterion for committing mass murder. The violent acts seem to grow from expressions of anger and hatred, and they seem to inspire anger and hatred.

Maybe there’s something about the way media allows us to stay “immersed” in an angry state that perpetuates this cycle. We all get angry from time to time, sometimes at individuals, but other times at groups of people we don’t know personally (Republicans, Democrats, politicians in general, liberal media, Fox News, Comcast, etc.). How much time do you spend in that angry state, and does exposure to certain media messages keep you in that angry state? My guess is that in order to engage in an act of mass violence, you need to have been in a prolonged state of anger against unfamiliar others, and that media (mainstream media messages and interpersonal content via online communities) likely plays some role in helping to sustain that anger. In this respect, I suspect it is different than violence against people you know, which might be prompted by one incident and happen in the heat of the moment.

But here’s why it’s hard to just say that expressions of anger are uniformly bad. Sometimes, you have anger at an injustice, and the anger seems to be what motivates people to take action. Without the emotional “fire” of anger, people might not take action, and injustice would be allowed to persist. But, of course, that concept of “injustice” is subjective: the people perpetrating the initial act of aggression often see themselves as bringing justice to the world. So, too, do the angry people who respond.

Maybe it’s what you do when you get angry – some people act aggressively while others take political action. While it is obvious that those who respond to mass violence do not (thank god) respond with acts of aggression that are of the same degree, I can see the responses as acts of aggression (albeit on the less harmful end of the continuum). Often, people don’t respond to acts of mass violence by being motivated to vote, which is in many ways a slow, complex process involving numerous compromises and, as such, not exactly anger-sating. They are often verbally aggressive toward others that they feel are somehow part of the “other side”. I see protests as somewhere in the middle: sometimes, they are acts of political and civic action; other times, they are not much different than coordinated verbal aggression directed at an ideological “other”.

Moreover, any attempt to say “don’t be angry” or “don’t expose yourself to anger-inducing media” to anyone will likely meet with the response: “you’re just trying to pacify and distract us from the injustice!” Who am I to say that anyone else shouldn’t be pissed off at the state of the world, or should avoid news that makes them angry and watch more cat videos instead (or this damn dog getting licked by cows, which is pretty cute), or at least maintain some balance between the two?

But still, I do want to talk to people about how anger in media, at least potentially, at least sometimes, only appears to be about rectifying injustice and improving the world, when in actuality, it is just a kind of emotional button-pushing, just working on a vulnerability in our brains, this ancient instinct to be tribal, to find a threat, to identify some Other as the source of evil or injustice. I cannot tell anyone what kinds of messages are button-pushing and what kinds will help motivate people to take action that will make the world a better place. To do so would be imposing my concept of “justice” on them, and I just don’t think people dig that.

But maybe they’d be receptive to this message: If you’re in the business of producing or circulating media content, you’ll never go broke overestimating consumers’ appetite for content that appeals to their sense of righteous anger. Put simply: anger sells. And we all like to think it’s not the media we consume, but that it’s the media the other guy consumes. So, take a step back. Take a good, long, hard look at the media content that you consume that you know makes you angry. Be open to the possibility that the messages you choose might just be, at least in part, button-pushing. Even if it (and you) is/are on the right side of justice, maybe there’s some part of it that just ends up keeping you angry and keeps you pushing the buttons for more. Keep asking, “what can I do to make the world a better place?” And if the answer is “shoot someone”, think a little harder.    

Survival of the Angriest

My basic sense of the discourse about politics (articles, comments on online news websites, blogs, TV shows, radio shows) is that a certain rhetorical mode or style unifies those on the far right and far left. It is characterized by anger at authorities on the opposite end of an ideological or demographic spectrum. The "bad guy" in this mode could be those who support a patriarchal society, those who support a racist society, Obama, Bush, Congresspeople, university administration, corporations such as Comcast or Walmart, "Wall Street", unions, mainstream media, etc. I'll call this, for lack of a better term, the "anger-laden" rhetorical style. It succeeds by invoking strong, negative emotions in information consumers (arguably, you could include discourse that invokes or reflects anxiety, but prior research suggests that anger and anxiety operate differently when it comes to news). We could contrast this to a drier, scientific, inquiry-based style (a la fivethirtyeight.com), or a style that attempts to present both sides of an issue in a relatively affect-less way (a la The New York Times or the BBC). I recognize, of course, that no sources are totally bereft of affect-invoking content or style, but that when compared to, say, FoxNews or the Huffington Post, it becomes clear that inquiry-based or relatively affect-less sources employ a style that depends less on pushing the anger buttons of the audience.

I sense that in the arena of news or discourse about public issues, the ratio of anger-laden style information to other styles of information has changed, and that this change is associated with increasing partisanship among political leaders (even while the partisanship of the overall US population changes very little).

It is entirely possible that the angry, negative-affect-laden rhetorical style was always dominant (see the rhetoric of some popular newspapers' editorials, muckrakers, etc.), but I would counter that by noting that the decline in consumption of mainstream news sources (which are more apt to favor an affect-less style) and the ascendance of non-mainstream sources (which are more apt to favor an anger-laden style) is undeniable.

Perhaps the ascendance of the anger-laden rhetorical style of conveying political/public opinion information draws in a segment of the population that didn't spend much time reading or viewing such information at all. In other words, there was always anger-laden, affect-less, and inquiry-based styles of conveying this kind of information, but fewer people overall were spending less time with any kind of political information than is the case now. Now, we have more consumption of such information, which sounds great, but actually the people who are new to the conversation are driving the demand for (and the supply of, in a market-based news environment) anger-laden information. So yes, very few people ever consumed affect-less information and they were probably always outweighed by consumers of affect-laden information, but not to the extent that they are outnumbered now that there has been an influx of new news consumers and new news sources to meet the increased demand. The ratio of affect-less to affect-laden information shrunk in response to the demands of an influx of new consumers

This change in that ratio could push moderates out of the online conversation about politics and away from offline political participation. The moderates would still exist, and any public onion poll would detect their presence and reflect an overall population that didn't go through the increase in partisanship that our leadership has undergone. There might be a spiral-of-silence effect happening with the moderates: they see that their voice isn't represented in the articles themselves or the comments sections and so they spend their time on other things: their own families, their own hobbies and interests.

Of course, any such argument lamenting this shift toward affect-laden information leaves one up to the accusation that one is pining away for "the good old days" when sensible, logical elites dominated public discourse and the political arena while the hot-headed rabble kept to the fringes. It is impossible for me to deny the historical reality that elites often dismissed arguments they didn't agree with simply by dismissing rhetorical styles that privileged emotional, subjective experiences over scientific or quasi-scientific approaches. I certainly recognize the value (and inevitability) of emotion in public discourse, and the fact that all arguments contain some combination of objectivity and subjectivity, of "hot" emotion and "cold" logic.

But I just don't see the current use of an anger-laden rhetorical style as the reflection of pre-existing public opinions and rhetorical styles that were heretofore excluded from public discourse. I see it as driving a shift in political thought and behavior, one that excludes anything other than anger (including positive-affect messages favoring compassion, affection, or understanding). And even though it is problematic to assert (either explicitly or implicitly) the superiority of cold rationality, I think its total exclusion (or even a significant reduction) from public discourse would only lead to an increased inability to see the world through anyone else's eyes, and that this wouldn't be a good thing.

But I'm in idle speculation mode here. I seek evidence of this, and I don't have much to point to right now that would suggest I'm on to something or that I'm dead wrong. Does the ascendance of anger-laden information (if it even is truly ascendant) reflect increased political participation and/or does it increase the polarization of elected officials and the disenfranchisement of moderates, lessening any chance we have at mutual understanding?

The Two Webs

There are two dialogs on human behavior (which includes political, economic, and social behavior) taking place on the web. In effect, there are two webs.

One web consists of data on human behavior and commentary about this data. This one connects some folks in academia to folks in policy circles and the private sector around the world. This is Big Data.

The advantages of this mode of inquiry is that it harnesses the power of new media technologies to provide more information to help improve our predictive power when trying to understand something as enormously complex as individual and collective human behavior. Many of the critiques of quantitative study of human behavior were grounded in the fact that studies simply didn't have enough information to predict and explain the variance in behavior. Whereas other sciences (physics, chemistry) had enough information about a system to predict outcomes within that system, social sciences did not. But if we were to assume, for a moment, that a team of researchers had access to every single bit of information about every human thought, feeling, or behavior for thousands of years, then that team's ability to predict human behavior would be comparable, I think, to those in other sciences. With better predictions come better answers to questions: how best to minimize suffering, or the spread of disease, or human's impact on the environment, or whatever.

Of course, this mode of inquiry is not without its flaws (or at least perceived flaws). The collection and analysis of so much data on human behavior is viewed as being exploitative in some way: those collecting the information benefit and those who are the subjects do not. There are privacy issues: privacy is seen as a prerequisite to mental and emotional health as well as a means of maintaining some power over determining the course of your life (the actual value of privacy would be difficult to determine within this purely quantified conversation about human behavior). There is also the fear that someone with enough information about human behavior will be able to manipulate people to suit their ends (but if those collecting and analyzing data discuss findings freely and don't hoard secrets, this critique doesn't make much sense to me). It can easily be abused by people thinking there's a causal relationship when then there is only a correlational one. Statistics, when misused, create the illusion of certainty. Statistics could always be misused, but the more powerful and widespread they become, the more likely misuse might be and the damage that could be done.

You might call this the rational web. It views behaviors and events as probablistic (or it should, anyway) and it takes into account the degree to which outcomes are affected. If, say, it was determined that people's political party identification determined the amount they were paid when controlling for occupation, abilities, etc., you could find an answer to the question of how much difference it made in terms of pay (maybe Republicans make $4000 more on average when controlling for other relevant variables). In fact, there is an expectation that you answer the "how much" question.

The other web consists of rhetoric: emotional appeals to pre-existing, deeply held beliefs about human behavior. The most commonly used technique here is to select a few emotionally charged stories and try to get the audience to empathize with them. As access to the web has increased, it has become easier to find a subject (that is, the individual at the center of the story) whose situation exemplifies the pre-existing beliefs about human behavior held by the author of the story and the intended audience. Its easier to find the emotionally charged stories, the one or 3 or 100 personal stories that, when you look at parts of them the right way, support your pre-existing belief that, say, capitalism or socialism is harmful or that a certain policy does more harm than good. This technique connects some other folks in academia with the public at large, particularly disenfranchise members of the public worldwide.

Here, I think one possible danger of the wide-spread use of this technique might be that the echo chamber effect (where certain factions become less able to take the perspective of others and become more hostile towards others) gets stronger. Confirmation bias runs amok, and fewer people take into account new information in order to make better decisions. Any holder of an opinion, no matter how wacky, can find others supporting their opinion. This social support, this sense that one is not alone in one's beliefs, is essential to the persistence or propagation of an idea or ideology. Even if one is in the minority, all one has to do is draw an analogy to a group that was in the minority that eventually became the majority (the rebelling colonists in early America or civil rights crusaders in the later 1950's) in order to justify one's beliefs.

You might call this the emotional web. Rather than being probablistic, it is principled. It rarely asks the question "how racist is a statement?" or "how much privacy is being sacrificed?" or "how much freedom is the right amount of freedom"? In this way, it seems irreconcilable with the rational web.

You can't easily categorize certain websites as one or the other. Two of my favorite news sites - the New York Times and Slate - have some stories that appeal to statistics and analyses of statistics and other stories (usually editorials) that appeal to emotion by cherry-picking individual stories. In fact, a journalistic standard seems to be to combine the two: start with an individual's story and then zoom out to the larger trend. Hook the audience with emotion and convince their inner skeptic with data.

Still, I can see, at the very least, certain blogs that are more emotional or more rational, and it would be interesting to see if certain people gravitated toward either emotional/rhetoric arguments or rational/data-driven ones. Last month, I saw a great paper at the International Communication Association's annual conference by Brian Weeks titled "Partisan enclaves or diverse repertoires? A network approach to the political media environment" that suggested that the self-selection ideological bias (dems watch only MSNBC, repubs watch only Fox News) is a misconception and that personal media repertoires are more diverse, at least ideologically, than many believe. They may be diverse (or rather, balanced) in terms of their emotional or rational content as well. But maybe they are not, in which case we really are two different groups of people having two fundamentally different conversations about human behavior. Definitely an avenue worth exploring.