MANAGEMENT


it might be quite relevant. It could be that I’m upset with a co-worker, and I’m dealing with that co-worker in a second case. That emotion that I’m feeling could be informative and relevant in terms of how I’m dealing with that person. When we think about conflict settings, what we’re showing is that even incidental anger — anger from an unrelated source — can really impair perspective-taking. It’s certainly the case that integral anger — anger I feel about a particular situation or person — is going to influence how I deal with that same situation or person.


“What we’re finding is that when people feel angry, they’re collapsing in on themselves. They become far more egocentric.” –Maurice Schweitzer


Knowledge@Wharton: Why does anger impact perspective-taking in these cases?


Yip: It was something that we thought very carefully and deeply about — what might explain why anger diminishes perspective-taking? In our work, we found that when people feel angry, they experience elevated levels of arousal, and that interferes with their ability to think carefully and deliberately, which reduces perspective-taking. We can look at emotions according to valence and magnitude, and what we’re finding here is that anger is a negative-valence, high-arousal emotion.


Knowledge@Wharton: Can you define valence in this context?


Yip: Valence refers to whether it’s positive or negative. In this case, anger is a negative emotion that also tends to be higher in terms of energy


24 DOMmagazine.com | july 2019


or arousal. When people feel or experience greater arousal, they tend to be more likely to rely on heuristics. What’s valuable about our work is that we were also able to shed some insight into the puzzle about how emotions influence cognition. Prior work has found that when people feel happy, they tend to exhibit impaired perspective-taking. Similarly, when people are anxious, they tend to struggle with perspective-taking. Our work finds that when people feel angry, they tend to struggle with their perspective-taking. And what ties this all together is the role of arousal.


Schweitzer: Essentially, what we’re finding is that when people feel angry, they’re collapsing in on themselves. They become far more egocentric. In other work Jeremy and I have done together, we’re finding that anger is this high-arousal emotion. My heart’s beating fast. I’m on high alert. We’re focusing in on ourselves and more likely to think about our own interests, and it gets in the way of trying to think about things from somebody else’s perspective. We’re trying to disentangle what we know in our heads from how other people are seeing and experiencing things. And it’s really hard to make that mental leap, to really put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes. Perspective- taking requires this cognitive effort, and we’re finding that the emotions we feel, this anger that we feel, is impairing that process.


Knowledge@Wharton: It leads to what you call conflict spirals. Can you explain that?


Schweitzer: Imagine your neighbor’s dog bit a member of your family. You might be angry about that. Anger is a common theme in many conflict situations. What we’re finding is that anger harms perspective- taking, which is exactly the kind of skill you might need to try to resolve


a conflict. Whether it’s at work or at home, if you’re feeling anger within a conflict situation, it might make it even harder to resolve that. Imagine we’re going to court. If I


can’t take the other side’s perspective, I might be sure that the judge is going to rule in my favor. Now I’m going to be less likely to accept any overtures to try to settle before we go to court. I’m going to escalate this conflict.


“The important point here is to cultivate an awareness of our emotions and pinpoint the sources of them, so we can judge whether they are relevant to the social situation at hand.” – Jeremy Yip


Knowledge@Wharton: I’m curious to know how you would study an emotion like anger in a lab setting. Can you explain a couple of the experiments that you did?


Yip: We conducted six experiments in the lab. Our basic approach to these experiments was that we would induce the emotion. We used many different ways to induce emotion. For example, we provided people with negative feedback, or we had them watch a video in which an injustice occurred, or we had them recall a time that they felt most angry and right about it. They then completed measures of perspective-taking. And here’s where we were able to introduce some new ways of assessing perspective-taking. In particular, we assessed


perspective-taking through a scheduling task. We told participants that they needed to write an email to arrange a meeting time with a very important client who was based in California, which was three hours


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