Evil by Design: Interaction design to lead us into temptation

Anger

Anger as soon as fed is dead—

'Tis starving makes it fat.

Emily Dickinson

Anger is fear with a focus: an understanding of what caused the fear and often also the capacity to resolve the fear by acting to remove it.

It’s an active emotion; people want to deal with the cause of their anger in ways they don’t with other emotions. This happens on an intellectual and also a physical level, with biological changes as a result of feeling anger. However, just because people have the capacity to deal with the anger doesn’t mean they necessarily will. Anger often leads to brooding and plotting. Dante called it “love of justice perverted to revenge and spite.” That, in a nutshell, is what turns it from a virtue into a vice.

What causes anger? Typically, anger is caused by a negative event that someone or something else is responsible for. If we were responsible we would experience shame or guilt instead. If the cause were unknown, we would experience fear or anxiety. But if we have a target cause of the negative event, we feel anger.

Anger has different effects on judgment and decision making than do other negative emotions. Anger influences how we perceive, reason, and choose. Its effects spill over from the initial cause to other things we’re doing, affecting how we respond to situations that have no bearing on the thing that initially made us angry.

Anger can be a difficult emotion to harness. When we look back on instances when we were angry, we tend to think of them as unpleasant ...