Dear Braelyn,
Everyone feels grumpy sometimes—even a cheerful cat like me.
Sometimes exhaustion makes us crabby. When we really need sleep, our brains struggle to do their jobs—like managing our emotions. Sometimes hunger makes us cranky. Our brains need a steady supply of sugar energy. When the available sugar drops too low, we feel terrible—or even hangry. Sometimes stress or problems like anxiety and depression make us grumpy.
In all those scenarios, anger lets us know we need to change something. We need to sleep, eat or get some help with our problems.
I asked my friend Anthony Lopez why we feel anger in the first place. He’s a political scientist at Washington State University. He studies how anger evolved and how that helps us understand things like war.
He told me that humans (and human-like cats) are social animals. When we live and work together, conflicts happen.
“Anger evolved to help you resolve conflicts in your favor, especially when you perceive that you’re being valued less than you ought to be,” Lopez said. “If you feel undervalued or taken advantage of, then the anger system helps motivate you to advocate for yourself and for a better outcome.”
That means anger helps us solve disagreements. It helps us identify that we feel wronged and motivates us to talk about it.
Let’s say you and I sit down to eat some delicious cheese. We pop open the can. I carve out a tiny chunk for you. I plop a ginormous wedge on my plate. You might feel a rush of anger.
That anger isn’t just an emotional reaction to unfairness. It’s also a tool that helps us fix the problem and stay friends.
“Part of the purpose of anger is to repair relationships,” Lopez said. “So, you can reach into the mind of the other person and say, ‘This isn’t right. We’re friends, and you shouldn’t have done this.’ Anger is meant to try to reconcile that, so we have the same understanding of your value and my value and our friendship.”
When you point out I’ve unfairly split the cheese, I’ll probably hear your anger and realize I messed up. Maybe I’ll hand you half my cheese and say I’m sorry.
But what if I don’t? What if I did it on purpose and won’t back down?
Lopez said we have two options in a scenario like this: withdrawal or punishment.
You could decide that you don’t want to finish our snack together—or maybe you don’t want to be friends with me anymore. That’s withdrawal.
You could decide to grab my cheese and eat it. Or punch me in the nose. That’s punishment.
Anger helps you recognize there’s a problem, negotiate to fix it, and take action if the negotiation doesn’t work.
It turns out this isn’t just a human thing. All animals respond to threats to themselves or their resources—even if they can’t use anger to verbally work out a solution.
Lopez told me that vampire bats share food. They slurp up animal blood then fly home and barf some up into their friends’ mouths. If one bat doesn’t share, the other bats will withdraw. They won’t share with that bat in the future—even if it’s super hungry.
I guess you could say that, like us, bats evolved to be mad good at managing conflicts.
Sincerely,
Dr. Universe