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I'd like to introduce Maurice Schweitzer and he is a professor here at Wharton of
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operations information and decision-making and his co-author of This research paper uh Jeremy Yip and he
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is a research scholar here at Wharton and they're going to talk about a very
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intriguing I think paper uh that they've just completed and it's called mad and
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misleading incidental anger uh promotes deception which is is not something you read about in a
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research paper every day matter of fact you'll tell us how this is the first
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time this particular topic has been looked at uh but it is intriguing and it's about how emotions influence
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ethical Behavior Uh or the potential influence of anger on deception and you look at the workplace in particular
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which uh which is especially relevant to our viewers so please um one of you describe in in brief terms the overview
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of that research sure I'm happy to um so our work establishes this link between
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feeling angry and deceiving others deception is a common behavior that occurs in organizations and poses a
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significant Challenge in a variety of interpersonal interactions for example in job interviews candidates May provide
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misleading statements in order to create a positive impression or in negotiations
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negotiators will Lo about their bottom line in order to claim more value and so what we investigated here was whether
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incidental anger anger that's triggered by an unrelated situation can promote
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the use of deception and what we found was that people who feel angry are more likely to lie to others we also find
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that empathy mediates this relationship between feeling angry and deceiving others such that when people are angry
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they' become less concerned about how their actions impact others and this disinhibits them to engage in
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self-serving deception so one of the interesting ideas that I think I picked up uh
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reading the study was that it's not as if someone did something to you and you're mad at them and now you you have
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an incentive to to be deceptive about something it's it's some other free
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floating Anger from over here that gets transferred to another situation is is that right
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yeah so that's a really important point so what we study is what's called
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incidental anger so anger that's triggered by some unrelated event so you might have had an argument with your
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spouse and then you have a meeting at work or you might have had a disagreement with one partner and then
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you end up meeting with a different partner if the situation is completely unrelated that anger should not
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influence our Behavior but we find that it actually does so what turns out to be
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important is that here this this anger bleeds into this unrelated situation and we become more likely to engage in
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deception just because we were angry before and that anger still influences and guides our
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Behavior why does it lead to deception and not just you know being hostile or or well maybe you're also hostile but
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what is it that about anger that leads to that behavior what's interesting is
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that we found is that the anger as Jeremy was explaining before disinhibits us we become less empathetic so we care
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less about other people in general and we're now more free or liberated to pursue our self-interest so it's really
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a self-interested behavior and across our studies we find that when people feel anger they're really less concern
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con ered about other people and they're not interested in retaliation or just
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randomly harming other people it's really just a diminished concern for others and the pursuit of self-interest
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now just gets carried away and it's no longer checked by our empathy for others
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that's how we usually operate we're feeling angry we just care less about
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others and what we find is that now anger becomes much the the deception becomes much more
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likely to occur so being angry makes you more egocentric in a way and less sensitive absolutely that's okay well
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that's interesting um what were the key takeaways from the study Jeremy in your view or at least
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the the main ones in our investigation we focused on self-serving deception these are lies that Advantage the liar
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at the expense of a Target when people are telling self- serving lies they're often engaging in
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this calculus between what are the costs and benefits for themselves but also what are the costs and benefits for
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others what we find is that anger influences these calculations where angry people are become more focused on
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themselves or the benefits to themselves and they discount the harm that they may
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cause others and that leads them to engage in deception so our key findings are that when you feel angry even when
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it's triggered by an unrelated situation you're more likely to lie we also find
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as Maurice mentioned that angry people are less empathetic and that uh disinhibits them to engage in
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self-interested Behavior such as lying and then we also found that the influence of anger on Deception is
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unique to anger and not to just any negative emotion so we contrasted the influence of anger with the influence of
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sadness on Deception and we actually found that only angry anger predicted deceptive Behavior it's
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interesting because when I think of deception um maybe this is just my impression it it's it seems more like a
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little devious it's like something you you pre-calculate and you know have thought about as opposed to like an
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immediate reaction but but anger is emotion that I could see would make someone just act more quickly without
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thinking and so so it's like a little disconnect there for me how does how does that work how did that come out um
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in your research because I know you did four studies actually to to come up with
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your conclusions is that right yeah yeah that's right so so we did a series of
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studies and in all these s we find the same pattern this anger is triggered by an unrelated event you get very negative
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feedback or you watch something that's very disturbing uh across several different inductions we find that this
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anger that's triggered that triggered immediately then does bleed into this somewhat more strategic behavior that is
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it changes our calculus and the key idea as jermy was explaining we just become less empathetic we care less about
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others and we're more focused on our self-interest and that narrowed focus is
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what guides us to to exhibit this self-interested Behavior which in our case was deception it's ethical but it's
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also advancing our self-interest at the expense of others that's what we found
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so it's easy to see how that would apply in so many areas of life and politics
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and World relations and everything else but in the workplace in the HR office what what are the implications and and
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is there anything that people can do about this I mean is this just an interesting observation but what do we
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do with the observation well we urge leaders managers and employees to recognize that
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in our angry moment moments we may lose our moral compass we suggest that managers pay
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close attention to monitoring their employees when they notice that they're angry because their angry employees are
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more likely to cheat so so check the stationary closet if there you have someone angry on the
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floor for missing pens and that sort of thing uh but that's that's I mean I'm
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joking of course but that's that's sort of the idea is that that there's a
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propensity now in someone who's angry to to do something that isn't going to be good
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for the organization well I think yeah I think as Jeremy's pointing out it's
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important for us to recognize it's true for us that is our own moral compass
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becomes less clearly pointed North when we feel angry and it's true for others
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that is other people are going to behave more strategically more self in a more self-interested way and in a less
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ethical way when they're feeling angry and again it could be some unrelated trigger that has made them feel that way
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but you're suggesting that there's a there's a benefit to developing
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organizationally some kind of a self-awareness in people that will benefit the organization is that right
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maybe you could elaborate on that idea a little bit right so I think the goal is
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to make people themselves aware employees themselves aware of their inclinations when they are feeling angry
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it um deceptions conceptualizes a cognitive process and what we're showing here is how emotions can have a profound
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influence on that process uh but we also want to urge leaders and managers to recognize this behavior in their
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employees and perhaps intervene in that there's other related research that's
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shown that when people become aware that their emotions are incidental or irrelevant that that can also diminish
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the effects of that emotion on behavior and I know I guess maybe we touch on this but this is different than a
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retribution where someone actually does something to you and you have a specific
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reason to be angry at that person and might seek to have some kind of Retribution but what what in the study
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in all of your research in this area what surprised you what surprises came out of it that you didn't
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expect I think one big surprise was when we looked at the so we contrasted how people angry people with neutral people
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when there was an incentive that was present and when there was an incentive that was absent and what we found was
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that we were able to disentangle the motive to harm others from the motive to pursue the self-interest so when people
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are angry they're not being punitive and harming anyone around them instead what
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we're finding is that when people are angry that anger curtails empathy and that leads to more self-interested
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behavior in this case self- serving lies that's interesting um what sets This research apart from
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other research in these areas well I think I think one key idea here is this this link is Jimmy was explaining
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between emotion and cognition so how we feel even if it's unrelated to the current situation influences how we
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think and how we Act and in this case we're linking anger with deceptive unethical Behavior so
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this is the first work to do that we often feel angry in the workplace we often feel angry when we're in a
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conflict with somebody else and our work is the first to demonstrate that when we
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feel an anger it could actually lead us to engage in underhanded and more self-interested behavior in ways that we
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might not normally condone and certainly as an organization we should be highly aware of so I kind of suggest that
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conflict resolution interventions and courses uh would benefit an organization in a couple ways not just that you have
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less conflict and maybe more cooperation but also you could ctail some of the deception that might come out of the
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conflict yeah acceptive Behavior right absolutely so that is we should recognize the the feelings that we have
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the that others have are going to guide their behavior in predictable ways and we should be sensitive to that J
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mentioned Rec recognizing emotions might help diminish their effects but we should also be sort of broadly aware of
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how we're feeling is likely to influence how we think and behave and in some
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cases it we might be able to curtail unethical Behavior by by muting that that that that
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anger so before I ask you what you'll be looking at next if you're going to look
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if you're going to pursue this further uh let me just ask is there anything I
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haven't asked that would be of major importance in this study that we haven't
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covered that you can think of or did we do such a great job that that's a great question we actually
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think about that one I think one of the questions that you asked was really important that is
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it's not that when we're feeling angry we want to retaliate against other
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people or that we want to pay it forward that somebody was angry you know angry at me
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or somebody blocked my goal and I want to go take it out on somebody else that's not what we observed what we
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found was that people just became much more self-interested self-serving and became less constrained
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by concern for others in advancing their own goals and I think that's one of the
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things that I think was most surprising about this work so if that's the way
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things work around here then I'm going to look out for number one is that is
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that kind of it that's right okay so in terms of what you might look at next
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then what what are the possibilities well these findings have informed uh some of our current work where we're
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investigating the relationship between anger and perspective taking and what we're beginning to find that's
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consistent with some of the work that we've just discussed is that when people
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feel angry they become more egocentric perspective taking is a different type of cognitive process where people adopt
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another person's Viewpoint in a situation and we are learning that people who feel angry tend to view a
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situation an to anchor on their own Viewpoint and not adjust to or accommodate other people's
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viewpoints all right well thank you both for coming in thank you that [Music]