Mind Hacks

Hack #99. Spread a Bad Mood Around

Have you ever found yourself in a confrontational mood for no reason? It could come down to what you’ve been reading.

We know our moods are affected by the world around us. It’s easy to come home from a day at work when everything’s gone wrong and stay grumpy for the rest of the evening. Then there are days when your mood is good or bad for no apparent reason at all. I’ve had miserable-mood days because I’ve finished a really great, but sad, novel in the morning and not even connected my mood with the book until that night. Thinking about mood like this, the regular way, makes us consider moods as long-timescale phenomena that we just have to live with, like the weather. Like the weather, moods in this frame seem impenetrable to understanding. Instead, it’s good to take a different approach: how do moods begin? What’s the smallest thing we can do that has an effect on our mood?

That’s what this hack is about, showing that the words we encounter can make us ruder people in a matter of minutes—and not words that are meant to elicit a strong emotional response or ones that are taken to heart, but ones in the context of an innocuous word puzzle.

In Action

Puzzles are an excellent way to get people to keep words in mind for a substantial time. One such puzzle is the scrambled sentence test. Given a scrambled sentence of five words, such as “he it hides finds instantly,” you have to make as many four-word sentences as you can, as fast as you can.

John Bargh, ...