Feeling Our Way Out of the Recession

Anger, by contrast, usually makes people more willing to take risks. Harvard public-policy professor Jennifer Lerner has shown this in a series of papers. She and her colleagues gave random groups of people a classic risk test in which they were asked how they would respond to a disease outbreak expected to kill 600. The subjects were told that if program A were adopted, 200 people would be saved and 400 would die, and that if program B were adopted, there would be a one-third probability that all 600 would live and a two-thirds probability that all would die. Program B is riskier: you might save everyone, but you'll probably kill everyone.

Subjects with a demonstrated propensity toward anger were much more likely to opt for B. That may be a scary outcome when you're talking about public health, but our economy needs people willing to give up certainty for the possibility of grand success. Of course, some people take on too much risk: the day trader who loses his house; the hedge funder who turns an investor's life savings into dust overnight. But right now policymakers should not be afraid of stoking our anger--and therefore our risk-taking. As Lerner has written, anger is associated with a desire to "change a situation for the better."

3. Don't be scared Fear is the enemy of action. Lerner and Keltner showed the corrosive effects of fear in a 2001 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Those who scored high on measures of fear, they found, were consistently less willing to take risks during games and more likely to predict their lives would turn out badly. The fearful are far more pessimistic, and it's a short journey from pessimism to withdrawal.

These findings have policy implications. Keltner has noticed that so far, government and media types have portrayed the prospect of a Greater Depression as "something to be enormously fearful of." He says, "If you listen to these messages, this problem is framed as an abyss, a downward spiral."

Which doesn't mean that Barack Obama should begin weeping at press conferences to make us sad or bang his fist on a lectern to goad our anger. But his Administration might want to avoid messages that portray the recession as a frightening monster rather than as a maddening, depressing but solvable problem.