Fear and Anger Lead to Different Perceptions About Risk
Several of us at TWI been looking at how the interplay between thinking and feeling leads to effective (or ineffective) action. For the most part we have looked at this anecdotally.
Here is an interview with Harvard Kennedy School Professor, Jennifer Lerner. She is the director of the school's new Laboratory for Decision Science. Professor Lerner studied this phenomenon in the lab, and then nationally after 9/11.
Some snippets:
In our early laboratory studies, we found that experimentally induced fear and anger did indeed have these opposite effects on risk perception. However, this lab research was not a sufficient test of our hypothesis...
In the aftermath of September 11th, we realized that, tragically, we were presented with an opportunity to find out whether our lab research could predict how the country as a whole would react to the attacks and how U.S. citizens would perceive future risks of terrorism. We did a nationwide field experiment, the first of its kind....
The results mirrored those of our lab studies. Specifically, people who saw the anger-inducing video clip were subsequently more optimistic on a whole series of judgments about the future--their own future, the country's future, and the future of the world. In contrast, the people who saw the fear-inducing video clip were less optimistic about their own future, the country's future, and the world's future....
Again, the entire interview is HERE.