Anger and anxiety and politics

If you're mad, chances are you're reading this column to get madder. Or you're in search of something to agree with.

Perhaps you're a little worried, instead. I hope so.

Let me explain. If you're concerned about the world around us, it means you may be reading this newspaper and this section to figure stuff out, to uncover more information. I'd like to think that's me on a good day.

It means you haven't already decided what you think about what you're reading. And since an open mind is an important - but increasingly rare - thing in this closed-minded world, it's also worth celebrating.

There's actual, if complicated, science backing up this thesis.

About a month ago, I came across a piece at Miller-McCune.com, which despite its strange name is one of my new favorite magazines. Miller-McCune's Lee Drutman - writing way ahead of the pack - rounded up a series of academic articles on emotion and political information (see goo.gl/0EnKa).

Among other things, the studies Drutman reviewed had interesting things to say about the role of anger and anxiety in our political lives.

A group of political scientists from the University of Michigan and the University of Memphis conducted "experiments in which they found that respondents react differently to fictitious news reports on outsourcing and a viral outbreak," Drutman writes. "News articles that identify individuals and organizations as the culprits generate significantly more anger than those that ascribe it to impersonal causes. Without someone to blame, respondents mostly just grow fearful and anxious."

To that study, Drutman connected work by another group of Michigan researchers, who found that anger was a powerful motivator for political action. And, finally, to research from Ohio State University that found "that when citizens get angry, they close themselves off to alternative views and redouble their sense of conviction in their existing views. Fear and anxiety, on the other hand, seem to promote openness to alternative viewpoints and a willingness to compromise."

There's some A to B to C reasoning here, but the gist is that anger is destroying our ability to make good political decisions. Or at least make well-informed political decisions.

But, disturbingly, the angriest folks are the ones most likely to be involved in the political world. That'll be no surprise, I suspect, to just about anyone.

There are an awful lot of people afoot on our planet who are sure that what they believe is right and that what somebody else believes is wrong. And they have no difficulty expressing that disagreement - no matter how minor or major - at the top of their lungs, as if shouting or vitriol is somehow persuasive.

Worried people, instead, are likely to spend their time trying to figure out what's going on in an exceedingly complicated world. That carries its own risk of paralysis, made worse by the sheer amount of information available.

Sadly, some of that information is produced by the angry people, who long ago decided what they believe and no amount of evidence to the contrary will shift them.

And so you have the angry and certain trying to persuade the worried and uncertain. That will never go well.

Perhaps the only solution is for all of us to start worrying about our anger. Or start getting mad about our anxiety. Either way, apparently, we could use a little of both.

Donald Luzzatto is The Pilot's editorial page editor. Email: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.