Anger in Society

People in society display anger in various ways, for seemingly unrelated reasons. Three major sources of unnecessary anger in society include when individuals don’t get what they want, have a difference of opinion, and when they feel their time is being wasted. A paper by Edward O’Brien, Brad Bushman and Phyllis Anastasio explores the role of your sense of entitlement on the perception of the passage of time. The idea is pretty straightforward. At any given time, everyone feels some kind of entitlement. Standing in the check-out line at a retailer, you might feel particularly entitled to better service. So a 10-minute wait for a slow cashier may seem like an hour. On the flipside, if you were sitting in a waiting room at the White House before having a chance to meet the President, you may consider yourself lucky to be there. Which case, a 10-minute wait may not feel so long.

In one of the studies, the authors just looked at the correlation between peoples sense of entitlement and their perception of time. The authors gave people a number of questionnaires including one that measured the sense of entitlement. Then they had students do either a boring task, copying a matrix of letters. Or a less boring task, using that same matrix of letters to find people’s names. The students did this task for exactly 10 minutes, and then they were asked how long the task took. To make the time judgment harder, there were no clocks in the room, and students had been asked to remove their watches before starting the study. When people did the relatively fun task, there was no relationship between the amount of time people felt they spent doing the task and their general sense of entitlement. In contrast, when students did the boring task, the more people generally felt entitled, the longer they felt they spent on the task.

What does all this mean? Time is one of the most precious resources we have. The greater your sense of entitlement, the more that you want to avoid wasting that resource. As a result, the more entitled you feel, the more anger you feel when your time is wasted. Even though nobody enjoys that frustration, this mechanism may be a good one to have. If we did not experience frustration when our time was being wasted, we might persist doing things that do not deserve our effort.