Do the jerks in your office get all the promotions? Is their advice regarded more highly than yours? Studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology show that an individual's expressions of anger can cause observers to confer more status and power on him or her.
The author of the studies, Larissa Z. Tiedens, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, had previously determined that high status individuals are more likely to feel anger. "This seemed to be the next logical step," she says, "seeing whether people watching someone express anger believe that that person deserves status."
In one procedure, Tiedens asked employees at a software company to rate each coworker on how often he or she expressed certain emotions and how much they could learn from that person. In addition, the group manager noted how likely he would be to promote each employee. Those who expressed the most anger were more likely to be promoted and perceived as more knowledgeable.
Tiedens also asked two groups of MBA students to watch a job interview in which an applicant detailed how he once lost a client. One applicant said he felt angry about the experience, while the other expressed guilt. The participants favored the guilty applicant when deciding whom to hire, but believed the angry applicant deserved a higher-level, higher-paying job.
In a third experiment, Tiedens showed participants excerpts of President Clinton's grand-jury testimony about the Monica Lewinsky affair. Half the group saw a video clip of Clinton talking angrily, and the other half viewed him speaking contritely.
At the time of the study, Congress hadn't yet impeached Clinton, and polls and pundits suggested that he needed to express more remorse to avoid punishment. But Tiedens' study found that participants who viewed the angry clip were more likely to believe that Clinton should remain president.
Even so, participants were reluctant to believe that they had responded positively to the angry video. Says Tiedens, "When people hear these results, they say, 'I wouldn't do that.'"
Those of us in a position to grant status, at work or when voting, aren't always aware of our biases. "We often make inferences on emotional expressions that may or may not hold true," says Tiedens.
