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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.
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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. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19172819
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