According to the hydraulic model of anger, anger builds up in your mind until you let off steam. If you do not release steam, the steam engine will explode. If the tension is not relieved, someone may get hurt. It sounds beautiful. Perhaps you can even remember moments in your life when you went berserk, banged your fist on a wall, or smashed dishes, and you got better. In fact, everything is more complicated …
In the 1990s, psychologist Brad Bushman from the US state of Iowa set out to investigate whether this expression of feelings actually worked. He did two experiments:
Experiment #1
Brad Bushman divided 180 students into three groups. One of them was reading an article about a fictitious study showing that expressing anger was effective in helping. The second read that it is useless. The third was reading an article that was not related to the topic of the study.
The students were then asked to write an essay on a topic that might provoke strong feelings—about their attitudes toward abortion. Bushman said that these essays would be graded by other students, but no one actually graded the essays. Half of the students were told that their essays were excellent. The other half received their essays with the words written in them: “This is the worst thing I have ever read!” The students were then asked to choose an activity: play a game, watch a comedy, read a story, or punch a pear.
What are the results?
People who read an article about the effectiveness of anger release and who became angry when they received their essays were much more likely to pick the pear than the angry ones in the other groups. In all three groups, people who were praised mostly chose non-aggressive activities. Believing in catharsis makes you want it.
Conclusion: “Exposure to media information supporting the benefits of catharsis influences subsequent behavior choices. Angry people wanted to punch the punching bag more after reading a fake article that called venting anger on inanimate objects a useful and effective technique,” wrote Brad Bushman, Roy Baymeister, and Angela Stack, summarizing this study of catharsis.
Experiment #2
Bushman decided to go even further and let the angry people get their revenge. He wanted to see if after the catharsis the flash of anger would die down and the mind would be freed.
The second experiment was much the same as the previous one, but this time the people who received an essay labeled «This is the worst thing I’ve read!» were divided into two groups. People in both groups were told that they would compete with the person who judged their work. One group was allowed to hit the punching bag before that, the other was left to sit and wait for two minutes. After punching the punching bag and just waiting, the competition began.
His rules were very simple: press the button before your opponent. The loser was deafened by a nasty sound. The winner could choose a loudness for him on a scale of ten, where «zero» is 0 decibels, and «ten» is 105 decibels.
Can you guess what happened?
- The mean loudness score chosen by the punching group was 8,5 and the waiting group was 2,47. Angry people did not release their anger when they hit the pear, but fueled it. A group that had time to cool off lost their desire to take revenge on the offender.
- In subsequent experiments, people were asked to choose how much hot sauce their opponent should eat. Those who pounded a pear chose a full plate, but those who cooled down did not.
- When the participants filled in the gaps in the words, the punchers saw the word “fist” in the word “ku**k” much more often than, for example, “piece”.
Bushman repeated this experiment for some time, but the results remained unchanged.
Conclusion: “If you think that experiencing catharsis is good, then you will seek it when you get angry. By venting your anger, you will remain angry and will likely continue to be aggressive so that you can vent your anger again. Once you get used to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it.”
A more effective approach to a problem is to stop. Stop boiling and gradually cool down until you feel like killing all the people. At the same time, “calming down” does not mean doing nothing with your anger. Bushman invites you to delay the answer, relax or do something incompatible with aggression.
So, “The results obtained contradict any argument that punching a bag helps, because after this people feel better (as advocates of catharsis often claim). People really liked to hit the bag, but this only increased their aggression towards the offender. Punching a bag does not have a cleansing effect: it increases aggression in the future, not reduces it. wrote Brad Bushman, Roy Beimeister, and Angela Stack in their study of catharsis.
Experiment #3
In this experiment, ↑ Brad Bushman (Bushman B., 2002) angered student participants by asking his student assistant to insult them. Immediately after this, the subjects were placed in certain experimental conditions, and there were three options:
— in the first they were allowed to beat a punching bag for several minutes, asking them to think about the offender at the same time;
— in the second variant, students who threshed on a pear were asked to think of these actions as physical exercise;
— in the third, the participants were simply allowed to sit quietly for several minutes and not beat anyone.
Which of the students experienced the least anger at the end of the experiment? Those who sat quietly.
In addition, Bushman later gave the participants the opportunity to express aggression against the person who offended them through a loud unpleasant sound. The students from the first group, who thrashed the punching bag with thoughts about the “enemy”, at this stage turned out to be the most aggressive and brought down the loudest and sharpest sounds on the offender. But the third group — those who, after the insult, just sat quietly, showed much less aggression. So the idea is clear. Physical activity—punching the bag—doesn’t appear to relieve anger or lessen subsequent aggression against the person who provoked the anger. In fact, the data paints the opposite picture for us.
And what happens when acts of aggression are directed directly at the person who provoked us? Does this satisfy our need for aggression and therefore reduce our tendency to harm that person further? And in this case, as in the punching bag experiment, systematic research shows that the opposite is happening. A striking example of such a study is the experiment of Richard Greene and his colleagues. In this experiment, each participant found himself face to face with another student, who, you guessed it, was actually the experimenter’s assistant. First, the assistant pissed off the participant and made him angry. At this stage of the experiment, which involved the exchange of opinions on various issues, the participant received an electric shock when the partner did not agree with his opinion. Further, ostensibly in the course of a study on the “impact of punishment on learning”, the participant acted as a teacher, and the assistant acted as a student. During the first training task, some of the participants were asked to electrocute the helper whenever he made a mistake; other participants only noted his mistakes. In the next task, the opportunity to shock the assistant was given to all participants. If we take it as an axiom that the effect of catharsis really works, then we should expect that those people who previously subjected the assistant to electric shocks will use less intense discharges a second time and in smaller quantities. But that did not happen; in fact, people who had previously electrocuted the helper became even more aggressive in the second task.
Researchers have also systematically observed similar behavior during events that occurred under normal conditions in the real world: when verbal acts of aggression served to facilitate subsequent attacks. Thus, the opportunity to vent our anger on a person increases our ill will towards that person.
As Elliot Aronson comments on this, «the lion’s share of the facts testifies against the catharsis hypothesis. At first glance, this may seem strange, because on a certain level the idea of catharsis is not without meaning. I mean that it is consistent with folk wisdom, which advises in anger, first of all, to “let off steam”, “to give vent to your anger”, etc. What is the reason for the contradiction between folk wisdom and science? I think it comes from the fact that we humans are cognitive animals. Accordingly, our aggression depends not only on tension — on what a person feels — but also on what he thinks. Put yourself in the place of the participant in the situation described in the two previous experiments. Once you give another person an electric shock or speak disapprovingly of your leader, it becomes much easier to do it a second time. In a sense, your initial hostile act makes you feel the need to justify it. What for? As shown in the previous chapter, when a person harms another, cognitive processes are triggered to justify the act of cruelty. Thus, cognitive dissonance is reduced, but at the same time the ground is being prepared for further aggression.” (Elliot Aronson, Social Animal. Introduction to Social Psychology, St. Petersburg, Prime-Eurosign, 2006, pp. 253-254.)
What to do with your own aggressiveness
Developed, mentally healthy and mentally mature people solve this issue without any problems, see →. A realistically thinking person, who is accustomed primarily to thinking, and not to experiencing, violent negative emotions do not often appear. In a well-mannered person, the negative emotions that have arisen do not turn into a storm, it is easy to cope with them, they are quite manageable. There is no need to throw out anything to someone who does not inflame himself: what happened can be understood, and what worries or infuriates you can be said. Restraint in behavior, the ability to restrain one’s negative feelings is an indicator of internal culture and good breeding, an indispensable attribute of a business and simply successful person. If you do not wind up emotions inside yourself, then restraint in behavior and expression of your feelings is not at all harmful↑.