One thing that strikes me here is you seem to be talking more about “angry people” (i.e. people who are somehow persistently tending towards “angry”), as opposed to “anger, a transient state that an otherwise healthy person is in.”
One purpose of anger AFAICT is to build game theory into the psychology of social organisms, without them having to have a fully idealized game theoretically sound approach.
It’s useful to have punishment and threats as a tool in our coordination toolkit. Punishing someone generally requires you to burn resources of some kind. Sometimes it’s locally worth it to punish someone, because even though you will burn resources, you’ll almost immediately start reaping rewards from the next steps in an iterated PD or Stag hunt. Other times, the payoff is extremely diffuse, and it’s honestly just worse for you to spend resources of tit-for-tatting. BUT, it’s still overall better for defectors to know that they risk the possibility of someone “disproportionately, ‘irrationally’ punishing them”, so they don’t bother defecting in the first place
At least one of anger’s roles, I think, is to facilitate that.
I think a downside of anger is that our native implementation of it isn’t designed to handle complex coordination problems of the modern world. So I think there are reasons to be dissatisfied with that native implementation, and to want to change it in some way. But I wouldn’t try to remove anger from your arsenal, or encourage others to do so, unless you/they have actually fully “replaced” the job that anger was doing. (and honestly I’m not sure I know anyone who is at this level, I think anger is doing lots of subtle things, and trying to replace native emotional software is pretty likely to go wrong in various ways).
The problem of “the guy who yells at you for digging the hole and then yells at you for filling it back” isn’t that he’s angry, it’s that he has miscalibrated anger and some maladaptive patterns with it.
I’d say ‘anger’, as many other such psychological constructs, is ambiguous and can refer either to a trait / feature (an anger-prone person, a person who tends to become angry easily) or to a state (a person who is momentarily angry).
The same distinction can be made vis-à-vis other emotions (sadness, happiness, disgust, anxiety...) and perhaps personality traits.
I’d propose the terms ‘momentarily angry’ and ‘anger-prone’ (and similarly for the other emotions: momentarily sad and sadness-prone, etc) if there’s a need to disambiguate, but not being a native English speaker I’m not really sure of them being fit.
One thing that strikes me here is you seem to be talking more about “angry people” (i.e. people who are somehow persistently tending towards “angry”), as opposed to “anger, a transient state that an otherwise healthy person is in.”
One purpose of anger AFAICT is to build game theory into the psychology of social organisms, without them having to have a fully idealized game theoretically sound approach.
It’s useful to have punishment and threats as a tool in our coordination toolkit. Punishing someone generally requires you to burn resources of some kind. Sometimes it’s locally worth it to punish someone, because even though you will burn resources, you’ll almost immediately start reaping rewards from the next steps in an iterated PD or Stag hunt. Other times, the payoff is extremely diffuse, and it’s honestly just worse for you to spend resources of tit-for-tatting. BUT, it’s still overall better for defectors to know that they risk the possibility of someone “disproportionately, ‘irrationally’ punishing them”, so they don’t bother defecting in the first place
At least one of anger’s roles, I think, is to facilitate that.
I think a downside of anger is that our native implementation of it isn’t designed to handle complex coordination problems of the modern world. So I think there are reasons to be dissatisfied with that native implementation, and to want to change it in some way. But I wouldn’t try to remove anger from your arsenal, or encourage others to do so, unless you/they have actually fully “replaced” the job that anger was doing. (and honestly I’m not sure I know anyone who is at this level, I think anger is doing lots of subtle things, and trying to replace native emotional software is pretty likely to go wrong in various ways).
The problem of “the guy who yells at you for digging the hole and then yells at you for filling it back” isn’t that he’s angry, it’s that he has miscalibrated anger and some maladaptive patterns with it.
I’d say ‘anger’, as many other such psychological constructs, is ambiguous and can refer either to a trait / feature (an anger-prone person, a person who tends to become angry easily) or to a state (a person who is momentarily angry). The same distinction can be made vis-à-vis other emotions (sadness, happiness, disgust, anxiety...) and perhaps personality traits. I’d propose the terms ‘momentarily angry’ and ‘anger-prone’ (and similarly for the other emotions: momentarily sad and sadness-prone, etc) if there’s a need to disambiguate, but not being a native English speaker I’m not really sure of them being fit.