Mind & behavior · 1990
Do people describe being angered differently from angering someone else?
Yes, participants’ personal accounts tended to differ in how they explained the behavior and its lasting effects. Accounts of being angered portrayed the other person’s behavior as harder to understand and the harm as lasting. Accounts of angering someone else presented the behavior as understandable and the incident as isolated, without lasting implications. These were differences in subjective interpretations, not evidence of whose account was objectively correct.
Details
Researchers compared participants’ personal accounts of being angered with accounts of angering someone else. When describing angering someone else, participants generally portrayed their behavior as meaningful and understandable. When describing being angered, they tended to portray the other person’s behavior as arbitrary, needless or hard to understand.
The accounts also differed in the context they emphasized. Accounts of being angered placed the incident in a longer story of continuing harm, loss or grievance. Accounts of angering someone else tended to frame it as a closed, isolated incident without lasting implications.
Several findings fit the authors’ hypothesis that someone may initially hold back anger, then respond to accumulated provocations, while the other person notices only the immediate incident and regards the response as an unjustified overreaction. This was a possible explanation, not an established sequence of events. The abstract does not establish whether the accounts described the same conflicts from both sides or whose account was more accurate. It also does not report participants’ number or characteristics.
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