Anger is eliminated with the disposal of a paper written because of provocation

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57916-z

by geox • 2 years ago

179 186 2 years ago

nature.com

fylham• 2 years ago

Cool result! But does it replicate?

fwip2• 2 years ago

Well, it was published today, so you'll have to wait a little while to find out.

samatman• 2 years ago

The replication crisis won't be over until everyone who matters observes a social obligation to treat any unreplicated paper as interesting fiction.

The first time is data. Only the second is science. Exceptions can be made, but not for this one.

krastanov2• 2 years ago

It was published in "Scientific Reports", a known low-quality journal. They are not necessary predatory like some of the truly bad journals, e.g., work in this journal still is supposed to pass the "not a low effort triviality and not obviously wrong" check and there are even some really cool things published in this journal. However, I generally take publications in this journal with a significant grain of salt.

Also, just FYI, "Scientific Reports" is not in a specific subfield -- I have published on quantum computing in this journal. That is not too strange, there are plenty of "generalist" journals that are good, but I thought it could still be useful context to know.

lebean• 2 years ago

It's totally legit. They made the participants sign an honesty pledge before answering the questionnaire!

BeetleB2• 2 years ago

No doubt, with pictures of trusted, respected authority figures on the walls in the room they were present in.

canadiantim• 2 years ago

Give it a try yourself and let us know

dr_kretyn• 2 years ago

Well, it's been hand wavily described on 50 students with similar socio-economical backgrounds how much more replication would you like? There are also some references to statistics terms so it must have statistical power.

Fin_Code• 2 years ago

I think this has more to do with putting your thoughts in order but an interesting result.

junlegi2• 2 years ago

One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists is about this phenomenon.

Inflammatory writ by Joanna Newsom.

    And as for my inflammatory writ?
    Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsJDdyDK8M

alcide• 2 years ago

You made my entire week. Years ago, I stumbled on a song of theirs and could never find it again. After recognizing the voice, I went through the catalogue and there it was: Peach, Plum, Pear. Thank you!

junlegi2• 2 years ago

That makes mine!

I had a similar experience having first heard monkey and bear on the radio, but the dj failed to name the track and artist.

Then some time later I heard Inflammatory Writ on an internet radio provider so was able to see the artist’s name.

In addition to immediately recognizing that distinct voice, I also recognized her beautifully dense poetry.

A true bard.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cV6-aJlswCs

yosito• 2 years ago

I suppose this method has its limits, but it is interesting to study ways that anger can be eliminated. I wonder if there are techniques for illuminating anger due to significantly injurious behavior.

javier_e062• 2 years ago

On writing your feelings.

I remember a WAMU radio show talking about a woman who was abused by her father.

She wrote the 5 steps of forgiveness which as I more or less recall go something like this:

The 5 steps of asking for forgiveness.

The offender to the offended should:

1. Describe in detail exactly what he/she/they did that cause the offense. 2. Describe in detail how those actions made the offended feel. 3. Explain in detail why he/she/they took such actions. 4. Describe in detail what corrective actions he/she/they should take. 5. Describe in detail what the offended could do to move forward.

Now the interesting part is that the woman's father was already dead when she wrote the steps. She wrote a letter using the 5 steps as if she was her father, who denied to his death that the abuse ever happened, asking for forgiveness.

It helped her.

I wished I could remember the name of the book or the radio show but it was years ago.

blastro2• 2 years ago

Yes, forgiveness is really for the offended, not the offender. It can be a heavy weight to carry.

0xdeadbeefbabe2• 2 years ago

Doesn't the offender carry a heavy weight anymore?

CooCooCaCha4• 2 years ago

I get confused by the way people use the word "forgiveness".

For me, forgiveness can only occur when I understand someone's point of view and determine that there was information I wasn't aware of or they made a mistake and what they did isn't really who they are.

But when I read about forgiveness it seems like people also use the term to refer to a process of gaslighting yourself and/or making up a fake story to detach yourself from reality.

Frankly, I see a lot of therapy this way. Some people go through terrible things, and some people's lives suck, but a lot of therapy sounds like brainwashing yourself to deal with it.

diputsmonro• 2 years ago

I would say that "brainwashing yourself to deal with it" actually is a useful therapeutic technique. Often the person who committed the offense can't be made to understand or care about the damage they've caused, and the next best thing then is to help the injured person move on as best they can.

And while "brainwashing" sounds like an intellectually dishonest technique, we need to remember that the brain is not a perfectly logical instrument. The trauma that people seek help for carries an emotional toll usually in excess of the simple logical "disagreement". Therapy for such trauma is usually an emotional process, not a logical one.

I would agree though that "forgiveness" is maybe not the best term for this.

EPWN3D• 2 years ago

Frankly, I see a lot of therapy this way. Some people go through terrible things, and some people's lives suck, but a lot of therapy sounds like brainwashing yourself to deal with it.

If it works, then who cares? Maybe you were wronged, but maybe you don't want to go through life feeling that way, so you let it go by sympathizing with the person who wronged you. And you move on. There's a limited amount of justice you'll be able to get in life, so it's a good idea to pick your battles and not stew on every single sleight because you want to avoid "brainwashing" yourself.

barrkel2• 2 years ago

You can't change the past. The opposite of forgiveness is hanging on to a past hurt. Past hurt cannot be changed. Forgiveness isn't gaslighting, making up a fake story, or brainwashing. It's letting go of something you can't change.

dbspin2• 2 years ago

The route of the word forgive is from early German, 'fragebaną'. Meaning to release or give up. Forgiveness is not about understanding the motivation of the person who's hurt you. Nor is it about their penitence - although both can make forgiveness easier. Forgiveness is about letting go of the anger and resentment that continue to cause pain, long after the offending action is over (and even after the offender is dead). The purpose of forgiveness is not 'brainwashing' or detachment from reality. It's about letting go of suffering to proceed through life with less pain. Which allows us to be kinder and more humane people, since we're no longer at risk of externalising our own suffering.

Lendal• 2 years ago

If your history was so traumatic that you cannot forget and you cannot move on, then your only option, assuming you want to salvage what remains of your life, is to change it. Change your history. Is it cheating? Yes. But what is the alternative? You want to continue to live with the misery and suffering? It's not ever going to go away. Those kinds of memories do not fade. Time alone does not heal anything, and you only get one life. Do whatever you can do to salvage it.

growingkittens2• 2 years ago

I have always found analog writing to be a powerful cognitive tool.

Writing changes your thoughts from abstract to concrete - and once a thought is "out of your head" on paper, it becomes an entity that you can perform additional thought operations on (which you can then write down...etc.).

Analog writing also leaves visual evidence of your thought process across a page. Most digital writing tools allow you to make the thought process disappear completely as you work. Having evidence of your thought process allows you to evaluate your thought process. Very important in any kind of problem solving exercise.

As a child, I found that writing down a thought that bothered me made it go away and freed my brain up to do kid stuff.

BeetleB2• 2 years ago

The study found that merely writing it on paper was insufficient, though. The point of the study is crumpling it up and throwing it is superior.

growingkittens2• 2 years ago

The study looked at keeping a paper around (underlying situation: a reminder active in a workspace) vs. throwing it away (underlying situation: removing a constant reminder).

They didn't study anything in-between, such as removing the reminder without throwing it away.

wrp2• 2 years ago

This seems related to a much-replicated result from the practice of "expressive writing," also referred to informally as the "writing cure." Broadly, you feel better about things after having written about them. Remarkably, even physical ailments seem to be affected.

dotancohen6• 2 years ago

Physical ailments? What keywords should I be googling to read more about this? I'm not finding anything.

wrp2• 2 years ago

This is a collection of good quality articles. As I recall, there was one paper about physical ailments.

The Writing Cure (2002) https://books.google.com/books?id=3GeSRAAACAAJ

This is the most recent study I found by the main editor of that volume.

Randomised controlled trial of expressive writing and quality of life in men and women treated for colon or rectal cancer (2014) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2014.97...

This is the most recent review article I found.

Expressive writing interventions in cancer patients: a systematic review (2013) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17437199.2014.88...

Using citation search in Google Scholar should get you more recent publications.

Trasmatta9• 2 years ago

Anger suppression is important in our daily life, as its failure can sometimes lead to the breaking down of relationships in families. Thus, effective strategies to suppress or neutralise anger have been examined

This attitude is a problem in our society. Anger ends up being destructive because we think we have to suppress it or neutralize it. This just increases its strength over time until it explodes out violently. I doubt the strategy in the paper is any more than a temporary suppression of the emotion.

We need to recognize that anger is a valid emotion just like any other. Anger becomes dangerous because we demonize it without trying to understand it, which just gives it strength in the long run.

webstrand• 2 years ago

Often it is simply impossible to do anything constructive with anger. So techniques like the one in the article are useful, it's not a dismissal of anger as a valid emotion. The goal is to reduce redirected aggression.

Trasmatta9• 2 years ago

Anger becomes unproductive because we shame it and suppress it over and over and over. If we knew how to express anger in a healthy way, we wouldn't need to do that (with the exception of edge cases, like a physical hormonal imbalance)

waterhouse• 2 years ago

The evolutionary use of anger is to disincentivize others from mistreating you.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

Anger ends up being destructive because we think we have to suppress it or neutralize it. This just increases its strength over time until it explodes out violently.

Dunno.

One are going to end up in alot of avoidable verbal and physical fights if ones anger is not suppressed.

Just such a simple thing as the comment answer timer on HN helps alot.

Trasmatta9• 2 years ago

Anger results in verbal and physical fights because it gets suppressed and shamed for long enough until it explodes out. A better route is understanding the anger and the underlying emotion it's protecting (often shame) before it becomes a problem.

jimkleiber11• 2 years ago

Yes possibly there will be more fights. Anger is a fighting emotion. But that doesn't mean fighting is bad either. We often suppress fights and conflict, especially verbal ones, and avoid them until they accumulate so many facets and get so loud that we can't ignore them and then hit each other with years of grievances.

I think it's not only ok to verbally fight but helps us resolve conflict instead of avoid it.

And I think if we can resolve it at the verbal level it doesn't have to become physical.

But I think the cultural suppression of fighting/conflict is even deeper than the suppression of anger. A friend just asked for our definitions of peace and I said I currently believe it's a mythical concept where conflict doesn't exist.

chaos_emergent6• 2 years ago

The very fact that you believe that anger leads to verbal and physical fights proves OP’s point. When anger can be let out without the culture at large thinking of it as a threat that needs to be neutralized, and instead a charge that needs to be addressed, anger isn’t harmful, it’s constructive and instrumental.

Anger normally points out a boundary that’s being breached in which valuable things to a self - like autonomy, comfort, connection - are compromised. That we have so many angry people and that our culture encourages anger management rather than anger processing points to its rejection writ large

suduxhdvc• 2 years ago

Plenty of counterexamples. Road rage is one

jimkleiber11• 2 years ago

I think road rage is a prime example of what OP mentioned: anger bottling up because it repeatedly wasn't expressed and then it shoots out like a hose, 100% of the anger being directed at someone who maybe contributed 2% to the person's underlying anger.

Trasmatta9• 2 years ago

Why does anger become so bad that it results in road rage? Because we suppress it and shame it, until it has no choice but to surface destructively. And then rather than try to understand the anger, we just double down on suppressing it more, which leads to ever increasing levels of explosive anger

Etheryte• 2 years ago

I would say exactly the opposite, road rage is a classic example of what the parent comment means. Bottling up anger as if it's somehow wrong to feel angry or express it is exactly how you get to people blowing up in a colossal manner once the lid goes off. Road rage happens when someone overreacts to a small transgression which is exactly what you get with bottled up rage.

jeremywho• 2 years ago

You don't think road rage can be the a manifestation of suppressed anger from other parts of ones life?

Agingcoder• 2 years ago

Well, I’ll take both fixing the symptoms ( loved one can’t control their anger and hurts everyone around them ) and the syndrom ( therapy sessions to understand the cause of the anger ).

Now, based on my experience dealing with such situations around me, some people have difficulties considering they should even talk to a therapist. They will violently reject the very idea they might have a problem, and will keep hurting people around them. Controlling anger allows having a discussion in the first place, which then can turn into the understanding you’re talking about.

jimkleiber11• 2 years ago

I strongly agree. I don't think it's only anger that we suppress, but rather emotions in general, especially higher intensity ones. I think emotions are one of the most powerful tools we have for communicating with each other, especially when we pair the physical expression with words detailing the deeper contexts, and yet we seem to somehow think emotional expression is maladaptive. It confounds me and frustrates me and saddens me all at the same time.

Trasmatta9• 2 years ago

Yes, strong emotions are almost always shamed. We need to learn to process those emotions and accept them, not suppress them. Suppressing never works forever, because the emotion is still there, and it will surface one way or another eventually.

dasudasu• 2 years ago

Monks of various religious dispositions, or even just secular meditation adepts, seem to disprove this easily.

Trasmatta9• 2 years ago

I see it exactly opposite. A Buddhist monk would learn to experience, feel, observe, and detach from their anger, not suppress it or shame it. This is more in line what what I think we need to do.

The more you resist the anger the more it will persist.

2devnull3• 2 years ago

Monks are doing it on easy mode. They have nothing to anger them, zero triggers. It’s the whole point of hermeticism. Remove all sources of stress. Desire nothing. Of course they aren’t angry, they have nothing; nothing to feel angry about.

chaos_emergent6• 2 years ago

A friend of mine went to a Zen Buddhist monastery for a month to start practicing to deal with his anger. After the month he told his teacher the reason why he came - to dissipate his anger - and his teacher told him that he had nothing to teach him because the fact that he was feeling his anger was the practice of mindfulness. The teacher told him he’d be better off leaving the monastery and working on the object of his anger (human-induced climate destabilization).

I think you’re appealing to the boiled down and stripped away “mindfulness” movement in the west that focuses on creating what I call “Vipassana Zombies” - people who can feel their sensations just enough to recognize and ignore them. A lot of Buddhist teachings are about empowerment and action, and they’ve been grossly misunderstood.

chaos_emergent6• 2 years ago

Totally agree, and I’d go further to say that the reason we don’t want to go near anger as a society is because we don’t know how to grieve. To tap into grief means allowing people to need resources like time and human attention that we’ve over leveraged into economic activity.

jimkleiber11• 2 years ago

My mom passed away about 15 months ago, and while I have worked in emotional expression for 12 years, her passing had me feeling the most raw. I think one main thing that happened with grief for me is that I felt things so intensely, the full spectrum, and it became really hard to not suppress those feelings.

So I think the broader picture is not just grief, but feelings, especially intense feelings. If I feel sad, I want to cry, not work. If I feel tired, I want to sleep, not work. If I fall in love, I want to be with that person, not work. I think many if not most feelings can get in the way of our maximum productivity states. Maybe low level anger and focus, with a little bit of playfulness, can keep us productive, but stray too far outside of that and we don't look as productive.

I would argue, however, that we might be more productive in the long-term, because otherwise we may burn out, communicate less effectively, and become more desensitized to what people need and want, both from consumers and fellow producers.

omoikane• 2 years ago

This attitude is a problem in our society

Need to clarify which society is meant by "our".

The authors of this paper are Japanese, and the participants are local university students. I would assume suppression of anger is the norm for most people involved in this study, since Japanese culture generally aims to preserve harmony.

This is in contrast with some cultures that are more direct in their communications and perhaps not suppressing much at all. It's possible that they would see different results when the experiment is done with a more diverse group of participants.

pompino• 2 years ago

If you wish to convince others of your views, you'll have to provide a lot more than assertions.

As per the article - [..] can sometimes lead to [..]. I don't know how clearer the article can be, there is no proposed "solution" here that solves everything in every scenario. Its simply testing a hypothesis.

nprateem• 2 years ago

I've been doing this for years. It's a twist on writing a letter you never send. Scribbling it out or chucking it away is an obvious next step.

CodeWriter23• 2 years ago

So many comments here focused on the writing component. So few on the letting go component.

mzs2• 2 years ago

Yup, I do this thing where I imagine myself writing down the thought, but not actually the contents of what I am writing, and then throw it in the bin, and here I actually perform the action. It's a little hard to do the throwing away motion when others are around, but I can discreetly move my hand. For whatever reason this work very well for me.

rcthompson• 2 years ago

It's an interesting idea, but they really made that title as unparseable as they possibly could.

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Just throw it away? This looks like much more fun: https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/the-making-of-a-dumpster-fire/

You send it an email. It prints it out, dumps the printout into a dumpster, and burns it in the dumpster.

I don't know if it's still online though...

kiechu• 2 years ago

I often write an angry comment just to not send it.

csours• 2 years ago

I'll sometimes write a post or comment and then delete it. It's probably not as good as writing on paper, but it helps.

I wonder how well it would work to have a placebo button that only shows on your own session

EvanAnderson• 2 years ago

I do this, both purposefully (on HN) and, in a manner, inadvertently.

Writing an email and saving it as a draft gives me a memory of having sent the message. Occasionally I get asked about emails I've committed to sending, felt certain I already did, and subsequently found them saved as unsent drafts (inevitably because I got interrupted while I was writing).

pierrebai• 2 years ago

I suppose it may also apply to voodoo dolls. Make an effigy, put pins in it, burn it for emotional release.

kwhitefoot• 2 years ago

But what if voodoo actually works!

drpossum• 2 years ago

Fine, but when I delete PR comments about my code that upset me it just makes my coworkers mad.

theonething• 2 years ago

Am I the only to think that most PR comments are just people bike shedding to make themselves seem useful in code review?

WizardClickBoy• 2 years ago

I not infrequently find myself prefixing my own code review comments with some variant of "I'm mostly asking this to make myself sound smart, but..." and then usually (not always) I delete the comment. But it's not a high proportion of my total review output, assuming I'm impartial enough to tell the difference.

My point is, it definitely happens, but if it applies to _most_ PR comments I think the code review practices of your project may need improving. My experience has been that most code review comments are either seeking to impart or gain knowledge that the commenter genuinely finds useful.

debacle• 2 years ago

Most modern anger is derived from helplessness. I don't get angry when I spill my coffee or someone cuts me off on my commute, but I recently discovered that I've been overcharged for my cell phone plan for the last 18 months and it made me seethe, mostly because I know that it's going to take a half dozen phone calls over at least as many hours to come to any real resolution, and that millions of people are likely in the same predicament.

Writing all that down made me more, not less, angry.

fwip2• 2 years ago

Well, the study does say that you've got to shred it to reduce the anger levels.

jimkleiber11• 2 years ago

An exercise (whether writing or verbal) that helps me redirect or alleviate some of the anger is to simply ask "How do I imagine that person might be feeling?"

The trick is, when I'm feeling angry, I don't often want to answer. But when I do, it can help me realize that the current situation may also be hurting or frustrating the people who had been the targets of my anger, and then maybe we can work together to get rid of the problem. This seems to help me when calling customer service, because now I'm not fighting against them but fighting alongside of them.

fragmede4• 2 years ago

Anger is only a problem when it shortcircuits logic and reason and makes you behave irrationally and in ways you later regret. But used effectively, it can give you the energy you need to get through all 18 of those really frustrating phone calls before you give up.

jwrallie2• 2 years ago

It happened to me, I called and talked for an hour and managed to get my money back. I finally got the person on the other side of the phone to agree to “discuss with my superior” after asking them to describe what the word theft means and explain me that adding a service without my request and charging me for a year did not fit in the description.

Then one day later I requested to move my phone number to a different company.

Then they called me back telling me they could permanently lower my bills, and made me even more angry :)

I’m still happy I never paid them another cent, but in the back of my mind I know the company I moved on is doing more or less the same tricks.

ChainOfFools• 2 years ago

"The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it [his purpose] into action [...]"

"Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul..." - Screwtape

0xdeadbeefbabe2• 2 years ago

Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it

Hah, the down voters probably feel the same way about writers

office_drone• 2 years ago

That's a great use of inversion - the mental model detailed by Farnham Street (https://fs.blog/inversion/)

Y_Y2• 2 years ago

Contrary to the poorly-written title, the subjects did not write a whole academic paper about the provocation.

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

Are you sure? Maybe this is it

peterfirefly• 2 years ago

Will it replicate? I somehow doubt it.

oneepic• 2 years ago

Readers can always try this technique for themselves. It costs $0.

fragmede4• 2 years ago

yes but it'll only work for the readers that believe it'll work.

throwaway74432• 2 years ago

It doesn't appear that they separated those who believe it would work from those who didn't, to see if there was a placebo effect. That would have been useful.

A_D_E_P_T• 2 years ago

Though not mentioned in the paper, Lincoln was famously aware of this technique.

"Whenever Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write [on the rear side of the sheet of paper]: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg."

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/the-lost-a...

lIl-IIIl• 2 years ago

According to the paper setting the letter aside did not subdue anger in the participants. The anger subsided in those who threw it away or shredded it.

midnightmonster• 2 years ago

...did not subdue anger in the participants _as much as throwing it away did_.

Just writing it down and filing it also seemed to help, just not as much.

Stephen_0xFF• 2 years ago

Abe wrote ‘Never sent. Never signed’ which might’ve helped.

wesleychen• 2 years ago

It sounds like he retained the paper rather than disposing it.

red-iron-pine• 2 years ago

when you're a public figure notes like this are a CYA

fuzztester2• 2 years ago

retention is the problem.

disposal is the solution.

paper is the tool.

mr_toad• 2 years ago

I guess you have to know when to sign & send and when not to. Because if you never voice an opinion people will just walk all over you.

porompompero4• 2 years ago

Doing it for decades. It works better if you burn the letter. I even jump over the fire. No joke.

tommiegannert• 2 years ago

Have you considered flash paper? It would be difficult to jump over it in time, so just wondering... :)

porompompero4• 2 years ago

Well burning letters is a difficult thing, because often there is not a suitable place for it.

dotancohen6• 2 years ago

If you are serious, I would love to ask you something that could possibly help me. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username if you don't mind.

porompompero4• 2 years ago

If you are serious, check the mailbox for messages at your site :)

psunavy03• 2 years ago

"Dost thou think in a moment of anger,

'tis well with thy seniors to fight?

They prosper who burn in the morning

the letters they wrote overnight.

For some there be, shelved and forgotten,

With nothing to thank for their fate,

Save that (on a half-sheet of foolscap,)

Which a fool 'Had the Honour to state.'"

- Capt. R. A. Hopwood, Royal Navy (Retired), "The Laws of the Navy," 1898

huitzitziltzin• 2 years ago

I thought this kind of small-sample, theory-free, tell-any-story-you-want statistical significance mining exercise was out of style! This study is like an unwelcome blast from the 2010's or earlier!

taylorius3• 2 years ago

I wonder if that technique could apply more broadly.

For example, if a person suffering from a bout of depression, were to write their depressed feelings "there is no point, no hope" etc.. then rip the paper up and throw it away, might it have any effect on their mood?

nxobject• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, whenever I keep a journal through difficult times, my handwriting's so bad that I can't read it after a while, and the journal ends up being "write-only" as well. I wonder whether the ripping-it-up would be more cathartic.

puppable• 2 years ago

I've had times where I've written those sorts of thoughts on a small sheet of notepad paper, which I would then tear out and burn in the kitchen sink. More frequently, I'll just write what I'm thinking into an empty, personal use chat window in lieu of venting to others. In either case, I think they definitely have some effect.

DFHippie3• 2 years ago

I wish my son had tried this.

taylorius3• 2 years ago

It sounds like something bad happened with your son. I'm very sorry to hear it if that's the case - if you want to say more, please feel free.

technolo-g• 2 years ago

Writing down “distorted thoughts” to visually recognize them as a bit out of whack (or not) and measure the level of distortion is the one of the premises of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

CraftingLinks• 2 years ago

I do that with reactionary tweets. I either delete them before posting, or sometimes shortly after. It definitely works.

fny• 2 years ago

Is there a reason why so many studies (this included) fail to report the effect size? The way "significant" is used in literature, readers (even the educated ones) interpret the research as suggesting some groundbreaking result.

Here, for example, only a 1-ish point change occurred on a six point scale from 3 to 2. I say 1-ish because the confidence intervals are rather wide and even intersect somewhat (see discussion.)

So anger is not eliminated rather you'll be somewhat less angry.

aftoprokrustes• 2 years ago

In my experience (10 years in academia), people who understand statistics enough do look at effect size rather than significance levels. But unfortunately, even in one of the top european universities, a lot of researchers (who are ~70% PhD candidates with only basic stats training) tend to misinterpret significance as meaning "large effect".

There is another cause, more pernicious, which is that in the absence of a big effect, "a significant effect of X on Y was found" sells better than "no large effect was found", because there is a bias towards reporting positive effects in the litterature. In my field, it is actually usual for people to take big surveys, iterate dozens of statistical models with any kind of interactions, and only report one where some interesting parameters end up being significant, and derive policy recommendations based on this. Which is a recipe for non reproducible results.

SerpentJoe• 2 years ago

There are at least two reasonable readings of "anger is eliminated", with one being true if anger is reduced at all, and both being true if anger is reduced to zero.

Lerc• 2 years ago

I think the reason is rather simple. Funding.

I feel this is one of the two basic tricks that many many papers do to preemptively justify their existence. The other being the shoehorning of the hotbutton issue of the day and imagining some way the study addresses that issue.

It was kind of weird watching the transition from when every second paper could obliquely assist in the fight against AIDS to now when they seem to assist in the fight against climate change.

I feel like it is a minor dishonesty committed to combat the unreasonable requirement for every scientific discovery to be immediately applicable.

d--b• 2 years ago

I think this kind of tricks definitely work the first time. But my gut feeling is that if you do it several times the effect decreases as the mental image of throwing the thing in the bin becomes more familiar.

porompompero4• 2 years ago

Right the opposite. Try.

tudorw• 2 years ago

ilinx

ketanmaheshwari• 2 years ago

Haven't read the paper but it reminds me of a popular scene in a Bollywood movie where the leading lady tells her acquaintance to physically burn the picture of his ex and flush it down the toilet. To which the guy says it is silly but still does it on insistence from the lady. After the act, he says he actually felt better doing what felt silly at first!

progrus• 2 years ago

Also works with the drafts folder

rlue2• 2 years ago

Has no one noticed that there seems to be no control group in this study? Every participant wrote a statement that got torn to shreds; every participant had to write their emotions about it.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that watching cartoons for ten minutes or just sitting in silence would produce a comparable reduction in anger. Really disappointing that a pair of career academics could get away with such an astounding oversight (and get published in Nature, no less).

galleywest200• 2 years ago

Based on the graphs presented in this study, it seems not everyone had one shredded or destroyed. Some had the letters retained.

rlue2• 2 years ago

That was a figure of speech meaning “to receive very harsh criticism”.

resource_waste3• 2 years ago

Ouch, Nature publishing pop science. A few years ago my PhD/Academia Engineer path cousin validated if a study was 'real' by simply looking at the word Nature.

I thought this was absurd and scrolled down to methods/data. I had never heard of Nature before, or rather, I had no reason to trust it.

I find it interesting/unfortunate Academia can get away with being Authority based.

azinman2• 2 years ago

There’s no reason to throw away authority. Should something be not questioned because it was published in Nature? No, of course not. But should it be given the benefit of doubt? For sure. It’s extremely difficult to publish in nature, with a super rigorous process behind it. Peoples careers are made by publishing in such a journal, and extremely few are so lucky.

Not all journals or researchers are equal. Reputation is an important filter. In the very long run truth will emerge. In the short term, however, it’s one of our best signals.

woooooo• 2 years ago

Everyone uses heuristics to save time and attention.

In theory, being published in a top journal means multiple specialists in the subject matter reviewed the paper and therefore it's more trustworthy than a random authority's assertion.

fnordian_slip• 2 years ago

As krastanov pointed out in the comment above you, "Scientific Reports" is not the same as publishing in "Nature" itself.

But about your cousin's method: If you have never heard of "Nature" even though it is one of the biggest names out there, then you have no reason to trust it, of course.

On the other hand, if you have already read hundreds of papers published by them in your field, and those were above average in quality, trusting that name does make a lot of sense imho.

bdjsiqoocwk• 2 years ago

If the effect you're testing is that throwing away a piece of paper subdues anger, then those who don't are the control group.

krastanov2• 2 years ago

It got published in "Scientific Reports", not in "Nature". Scientific Reports is a journal that belongs to the Nature Publishing Group, *but* it is a known low-impact journal. When you get your acceptance-for-publication confirmation in that journal you are specifically told to never refer to it as "Nature's Scientific Reports", rather only as "Scientific Reports", so even their own publishing group does not want to associate too closely with it (to avoid risking its brand value)

everybodyknows• 2 years ago

And yet the website domain name is "nature.com", not even a HTTP subdomain involved.

gillesjacobs• 2 years ago

Always beware these type of Social Science studies that make for great popsci headlines.

The kind of result that makes careers: seemingly elegant and simple study design, common sense hypothesis and overall great marketability.

Diederik Stapel was one of the largest science fraudster in history and this kind of stuff was his bread and butter. More recently Francesca Gino was caught falsifying the data of the "honesty pledge at the top of form" that is highly similar in concept to this.

Now for the career-ending question: Will it replicate?

err4nt• 2 years ago

In ancient history these are known as 'execration texts' and we have examples from Egypt going back as far as 4600 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execration_texts

robinduckett• 2 years ago

n = 57 people

ararar• 2 years ago

What if this is the basis of "magic"? The secret power of curses that were burnt or cast into a lake or cave that "worked" by diminishing the anger in the caster rather than cursing the target.

dogweather• 2 years ago

No control group; that's too bad.

boppo1• 2 years ago

I have found that some of the things people did that made me angry were very wrong and I should not have forgiven them, I should have moved on with my life in directions that minimized my exposure to them (as opposed to bending over backward to maintain a friendship.) How does one apply the letter method without becoming a doormat?

jwrallie2• 2 years ago

Managing your anger does not mean forgiving or not taking action, it just means you have freedom to do it so on a rational basis rather than emotional.

So you write your angry letter, burn it, then do what needs to be done, free from angry.

It could be from a place of empathy: I wish you to be happy, but I wish you to be happy very far away from me.

Or from a more selfish perspective, you simply want to know you did the best you could so that you don’t need to have any guilt on it.

tamimio• 2 years ago

I don’t know about that, I personally suppressed my anger with some individuals and they took it as a sign of weakness, looking back, I don’t regret it, despite setting boundaries, I feel like sometimes and with certain type of people, you should show them some anger as a deterrent.

placebo• 2 years ago

While I agree that people who take goodwill as a sign of weakness should be deterred, I think that anger as a means to achieve that is a double-edged sword. Perhaps a good method is to use the paper trick and dispose of the anger after it has served its purpose ...

vlark• 2 years ago

So much social media drama would subside if people wrote their hot takes but never posted them.

Anger is eliminated with the disposal of a paper written because of provocation

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