Anger might seem a reasonable emotion to provoke change, as it typically emerges after deep dissatisfaction with how things currently are.  New research from Carnegie Mellon explores whether that’s actually the case or not.

The researchers explore the way people responded to two specific types of injustice.  The first of these involved bad things happening to good people, whilst the second involved good things happening to bad people.

In the first of these scenarios, it’s usually common for people to want to help, but they only tend to help in a relatively small way.  So if a natural disaster strikes a community, people might send a small donation, but they won’t go to the community and volunteer to help rebuild it.

The researchers believe this small contribution helps us to feel as though justice has been restored and we can tick off our internal box saying we’ve done something good.

Unjust rewards

This doesn’t tend to happen when good things happen to bad people however.  This kind of situation often provokes an angry response from people, but they don’t tend to do anything about it.  The authors believe this is largely because we feel that the forces that created this unjust situation are beyond our control, or at the very least would be incredibly costly in terms of the effort required.

So rather than actually doing things, we tend to just get angry and hope that eventually karma will even itself out.  Now, it should be said that on the rare occasions when this anger does materialize into action, the action is far more substantial than in the previous scenario.  People typically spend all of their resources and energy rather than the token amount seen before.

Not only does this response aim to wipe out the ill-gotten gains received by the bad person, but also aims to prevent them from gaining in such a way in future.  For instance, the researchers provide the example of people who believe Donald Trump won the presidency through ill-gotten means.  They believe people opposed to that would not regard indictment as sufficient and would instead want his entire fortune removed for justice to be adequately served.

Suffice to say, these outcomes are pretty unlikely, so in reality, most angry people simply stew in their anger instead.  The researchers believe that both scenarios illustrate our desire to see an adequate response to each specific situation, and so giving a small donation feels like a sufficient response when bad things happen to good people, but is wholly insufficient when good things happen to bad people.

All of which might be food for thought when we’re striving to illicit behavior change in our organizations.