No matter how gentle you may seem, you have the emotion of “anger”. Anger is also said to be a defensive emotion to protect yourself. This emotion is natural for us humans and cannot be eliminated. Anger has a very strong energy compared to other emotions such as “happiness”, “joy” and “sadness”. Both individuals and groups are easily swayed by this emotion. For example, there is a pattern of feeling angry when public manners are not observed. There is also a pattern of feeling angry more often when time is not kept. There is also the case of being interrupted at work. In various situations, situations arise in individuals and groups that cause anger to rise. Of course, there are people who think that “you should not show your emotions”. There are people who feel guilty about getting angry, but it is unnatural to try to eliminate it.
The recent US presidential election is said to have made heavy use of anger. Trump played the role of anger on behalf of the people. He criticized the Biden administration for not being sincere to those who are struggling with inflation and living in poverty, and those who are dissatisfied with existing policies. The theory that Trump’s anger was the reason for his victory in the presidential election seems to be gaining support. However, we need to wait and see how things go in the future to see whether the traditional policies or Trump’s policies will be better. The danger of angry populism is that it can become violent and uncontrollable. And this angry populism has the danger of encouraging negative emotions such as prejudice and intolerance and undermining democracy.
There is an experiment that suggests this danger. This experiment was conducted at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. In this experiment, 90 subjects began by having them work on schedules and data analysis in an environment that resembled an office. When they were writing urgent documents, a device was set up that would “disturb” them one after another on the screen. Some participants were constantly interrupted by chat notifications. Naturally, when work is not going smoothly, stress increases and anger arises. When you feel excessive stress, your body moves faster, but your work accuracy decreases. In this experiment, it was found that when you feel stressed, you type more violently on the keyboard and make more mistakes. Stress caused by anger reduces accuracy, but increases speed and strength. As an aside, it has come to light that there are many mistakes in the Trump tariff table this time. Anger may have led to the announcement being made earlier, resulting in more mistakes.
