How do we decide what to do when we are not sure? Much research has been carried out and the emerging picture is that we rely very much on our emotions. Our moods, as well as our general disposition, have a profound effect on our risk perception. This predominance of feelings over reason in decision-making is of course why advertisers play so much to our emotions.

The prevailing wisdom used to be that negative feelings caused risk aversion while positive feelings encouraged risk taking. An anxious person is less inclined to take risks whereas someone in love is more likely to be adventurous. But the modern thinking is that things are more complicated. For example, both fear and anger would normally be considered as negative feelings and yet they have opposite effects on risk perception. Fear (and its stablemates like anxiety) engender risk aversion while an angry person is more likely to take risks.

There seems to be a great interest in anger recently. I watched the two-part series on BBC TV called Losing It written and presented by Griff Rhys Jones. It was, in the words of the Radio Times reviewer David Butcher, "not only studded with pearls of wisdom, [but] laugh-out-loud funny, too". Fascinating! Apparently, when you get angry and lose control you hand over that control to the object of your anger. Now why would anybody do that?

The Battle of the Titans

So the stage is set for the conflict between two powerful emotions. In the red corner stands Anger and in the blue corner sits Fear. Both of these giants hold considerable sway in modern culture and politics. In all decisions great and small, those two imposters vie for dominance. One person can experience both feelings at the same time but it is the dominant emotion that controls the decision.

Huddy and colleagues at Stony Brook University (see below) recorded the feelings of a sample of Americans before and after the invasion of Iraq. They found that most people felt both anger and fear to some degree but their attitudes to the war depended on which emotion was dominant. Where anger had the upper hand, support for the war was strong. Where fear overwhelmed anger, support for the war was weak.

I see a similar scenario playing out this week in Washington. The decision is whether or not to bail out financial institutions with $700bn of public money. On Monday the House of Representatives voted against it. Fear of losing their jobs next month seems to have been uppermost in their minds because on Main Street the dominant feeling is anger at the 'fat cats' on Wall Street. (For some Republicans, anger at the Speaker's partisan remarks probably influenced their decision too.) Fear and anger. Couldn't there be a better way?

Reference

The following article, published in 2007, is an example of the burgeoning literature on the subject of fear, anger and risk. The article cites 67 references.
On the Distinct Political Effects of Anxiety and Anger by Huddy, Feldman and Cassese of Stony Brook University, New York