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Why RF disallows real debate....

yuvgotmel

Well-Known Member
Why does the Politically Correct movement NOT want you to get angry?

BECAUSE YOU MIGHT MAKE A RATIONAL AND GOOD JUDGMENT IF YOU DID!


http://www.livescience.com/health/070611_anger_rational.html

Anger Fuels Better Decisions


By Melinda Wenner, Special to LiveScience
posted: 11 June 2007

The next time you are plagued with indecision and need a clear way out, it might help to get angry, according to a surprising new study.

Despite its reputation as an impetus to rash behavior, anger actually seems to help people make better choices—even aiding those who are usually very poor at thinking rationally. This could be because angry people base their decisions on the cues that "really matter" rather than things that can be called irrelevant or a distraction.

Previous research has shown that anger biases people’s thinking—turning them into bigger risk-takers and making them less trusting and more prejudiced, for instance.

But little has been done to study how, exactly, anger affects a person’s thinking.

So Wesley Moons, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and his colleague Diane Mackie designed three experiments to determine how anger influences thinking—whether it makes people more analytical or careful about their decisions, or whether it leads people to make faster, rasher decisions.

In the first experiment, the researchers induced anger in a group of college students by either asking them to write about a past experience that had made them very angry, or by having their stated hopes and dreams harshly criticized by another participant. In a second group of students, anger was not induced.

The researchers later checked to be sure that the subjects were as riled up as they were supposed to be.

The two groups were then asked to read either compelling or weak arguments designed to convince them that college students have good financial habits. The strong argument cited research from numerous scientific studies, whereas the weak argument contained largely unsupported statements. The subjects were asked to logically evaluate the strength of the arguments they read and indicate how convinced they were by them.
The researchers repeated the experiment with a second group of students, this time giving the subjects an additional piece of information: who had made the arguments. Some students were told that the argument was made by an organization with relevant expertise in financial matters; others were told that the argument was made by a medical organization whose expertise was irrelevant to the financial topic being considered.

In both studies, the researchers found that the angry subjects were better at discriminating between strong and weak arguments and were more convinced by the stronger arguments. Those who were not made to feel angry tended to be equally convinced by both arguments, indicating that they were not as analytical in their assessments.

The angry students were also better at weighing the arguments appropriately depending on which organization had made them.

The researchers repeated the experiment a third time using a different argument—one that supported the implementation of a university-wide requirement for graduating seniors to take comprehensive exams. This time, they tested only those subjects who were the least analytical, or in other words, those who were the least likely to make logical decisions. This way, the researchers would be able to see whether anger also makes typically non-analytical thinkers more analytical.

Once again, they found that the angry subjects were better able to discriminate between strong and weak arguments than the ones who were not angry—suggesting that anger can transform even those people who are, by disposition, not very analytical into more careful thinkers.

Their findings, detailed in this month’s issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that anger helps people focus on the cues that matter most to making a rational decision and ignore cues that are irrelevant to the task of decision-making.

This could be because anger is designed to motivate people to take action—and that it actually helps people to take the right action, the authors wrote.​
 

CaptainXeroid

Following Christ
First of all, the thread title has absolutely NOTHING to do with the article.:confused: The assertion that RF disallows real debate is 100% incorrect. We have political debates, Biblical debates, and general religious debates to name a few. All we ask is that people respect other people's religions and that they follow the Forum Rules.

Perhaps you could back up the thread title instead of just posting an unrelated article.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
First of all, the thread title has absolutely NOTHING to do with the article.:confused: The assertion that RF disallows real debate is 100% incorrect. We have political debates, Biblical debates, and general religious debates to name a few. All we ask is that people respect other people's religions and that they follow the Forum Rules.

Perhaps you could back up the thread title instead of just posting an unrelated article.

You make a very strong point Captain. The OP is unrelated to the thread title. However, perhaps one has to be angry to clearly see that. :D

On the OP: I suspect that testosterone plays a significant role in a person's thinking when they are angry. That's to say, it seems that anger releases testosterone. One of the many things testosterone is known to do is clarify and focus thinking.

Second, The experiments don't contradict the conclusion of other studies that anger leads to rash and impulsive decisions. That's because there is a subtle difference between the way the experiments are set up and how people are most likely to experience anger in real life. In the experiments, people are first made angry and then asked to think through something that has nothing to do with what made them angry. In real life, when people get angry, they usually focus on the thing that "made" them angry, rather than on an unrelated thought-task. Because of this difference between the experiment and real life, the experiment neither shows that people who are angry think more clearly about what made them angry nor does it show that people who are angry are less prone to make rash and impulsive decisions than people who are not angry.
 

!Fluffy!

Lacking Common Sense
In the first experiment, the researchers induced anger in a group of college students by either asking them to write about a past experience that had made them very angry, or by having their stated hopes and dreams harshly criticized by another participant. In a second group of students, anger was not induced.

The researchers later checked to be sure that the subjects were as riled up as they were supposed to be.

well that's about the most fun experiment i have ever heard of. i'm all for riling up random groups of people.

i wonder, what was the criteria for "as riled up as they were supposed to be"??
 

Mister Emu

Emu Extraordinaire
Staff member
Premium Member
i wonder, what was the criteria for "as riled up as they were supposed to be"??
And how did they check it? Do they have a rile meter? Did they ask "On a scale of one to ten how angry are you?"
 

Super Universe

Defender of God
One thing I have found on RF is that there are too many rules and great room for interpretation over whether something is against the rules or not.

People forget that this place is nothing but words. There is truly nothing that can be written that causes a reaction in another person, the person simply isn't able to handle their natural emotions (myself included, at times) and taking this much too seriously.

In my opinion, there should be no debate or discussion sections, it should all be free.

People should expect the posts to vary in opinions and lead on to wherever since that is what happens anyway.

The purpose shouldn't be to discuss or even to make your point but to learn WHY another person believes the way they do. We are not born with beliefs. We choose them because they fill a need, they feed an insecurity that we have.

The only time a moderator should ever get involved is if someone is using foul language or purposely "spamming".
 

Aqualung

Tasty
One thing I have found on RF is that there are too many rules and great room for interpretation over whether something is against the rules or not.

People forget that this place is nothing but words. There is truly nothing that can be written that causes a reaction in another person, the person simply isn't able to handle their natural emotions (myself included, at times) and taking this much too seriously.

In my opinion, there should be no debate or discussion sections, it should all be free.

People should expect the posts to vary in opinions and lead on to wherever since that is what happens anyway.

The purpose shouldn't be to discuss or even to make your point but to learn WHY another person believes the way they do. We are not born with beliefs. We choose them because they fill a need, they feed an insecurity that we have.

The only time a moderator should ever get involved is if someone is using foul language or purposely "spamming".

True dat even more.
 

Guitar's Cry

Disciple of Pan
The only time a moderator should ever get involved is if someone is using foul language or purposely "spamming".

I'm actually extremely grateful for the mods. I used to visit the Yahoo News message boards when they were still up because I enjoyed debating the issues. These boards were not moderated, and believe me, it showed. There's a reason they're no longer up.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
One thing I have found on RF is that there are too many rules and great room for interpretation over whether something is against the rules or not.

People forget that this place is nothing but words. There is truly nothing that can be written that causes a reaction in another person, the person simply isn't able to handle their natural emotions (myself included, at times) and taking this much too seriously.

In my opinion, there should be no debate or discussion sections, it should all be free.

People should expect the posts to vary in opinions and lead on to wherever since that is what happens anyway.

The purpose shouldn't be to discuss or even to make your point but to learn WHY another person believes the way they do. We are not born with beliefs. We choose them because they fill a need, they feed an insecurity that we have.

The only time a moderator should ever get involved is if someone is using foul language or purposely "spamming".

In an ideal world, there would be no need for a board like this to be moderated at all. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world.
 

Darkness

Psychoanalyst/Marxist
In my opinion, there should be no debate or discussion sections, it should all be free.

People should expect the posts to vary in opinions and lead on to wherever since that is what happens anyway.

So, Christians and Islamists should not have their sections where they can talk about their beliefs without annoying Infidels (I am an Infidel :D ) constantly harassing them?
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
So, Christians and Islamists should not have their sections where they can talk about their beliefs without annoying Infidels (I am an Infidel :D ) constantly harassing them?

Sounds like a great plan to reduce every debate to a question of whether god exists or not.
 

Cynic

Well-Known Member
I don't fully agree. there has been quite a bit of research on anger and how it affects thinking. This is especially so when it comes to studies on criminal behavior, and how this behavior emerges. The effects on thinking are quite explicit.
IMO, the usefulness of anger depends on the situation. Theoretically, aggression emerged because it helped our ancestors respond to the demands of a harsh and changing environment. Anger is useful as a response to hostilities in the environment.
Aggression is part of the flight or fight response, which is autonomic and supposedly "bypasses" the cognitive "centers" of the brain.
IMO, Anger does not necessarily help one make better decisions. You can be analytical, but also biased. I don't know about other people, but I know I get very biased when angry. It becomes difficult to listen to someone else's point of view, and empathy is integral to critical thinking.
I would like to see the test replicated using a much wider range of independent variables.
 
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