Donald J. Robertson Profile picture
Sep 15, 2020 12 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Some problems with allowing the emotion of anger to motivate your words and actions...
1. Anger biases our attention so that we narrow down the scope of our focus and selectively leave out information that would lead to a more accurate and balanced appraisal of complex situations.
2. Anger tends to be associated with a slew of cognitive distortions such as mind-reading, over-generalization, etc.
3. Anger is associated with poorer problem-solving ability, especially in complex situations like those requiring creative thinking / social problem-solving.
4. Anger leads people to underestimate risk and they're therefore more prone to place themselves and others in danger, e.g., boxers or martial artists becoming enraged and dropping their guard to lash out at their opponent, thereby making themselves more vulnerable.
5. Anger leads to ruminative thinking styles, which are known to exacerbate negative emotions like anxiety and depression, and can waste hours of a person's time, taking their attention away from other vital tasks.
6. Anger tends to lead to poorer and less effective interpersonal communication styles, i.e., more aggression and less assertiveness. You often won't get your point across and if you do you'll potentially alienate other people in the process.
7. Anger leads to impulsive behaviour and snap decision making, which often has poorer outcomes.
8. Anger impairs empathic understanding, which is necessary in order to deal with other people, even our enemies, effectively. Think of a great general or a detective so enraged that he can't get inside the head of the enemy he's trying to outsmart.
9. Anger leads to violence and verbal abuse. Even when it starts small, anger is notoriously prone to escalation.
10. People who are angry, as even Socrates noted, tend to make their enemies worse, e.g., by taunting and provoking them to do more of the things that triggered the anger in the first place. (The Internet is rife with this sort of mind-game.)
11. Anger is associated with coronary heart disease and other chronic health problems.

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More from @DonJRobertson

Jun 29, 2023
Last comment about Jordan Peterson, just because I tend to respond to things in my field that are trending on Twitter. (Otherwise nobody new ever reads what you're writing here!)
I really notice that the way his fans talk about him has changed dramatically over time. When he first appeared they would make a big deal out of how he was an "expert" and a prof. of clinical psychology, although he seldom actually wrote about clinical psychology per se.
He would cite scientific studies, which critics found tenuously related to the conclusions he drew from them. (Lobsters anyone?) And his fans would go on about how he allegedly backed up everything he said up with science and logic. (He didn't.)
Read 11 tweets
Mar 17, 2023
Andrew Tate on Stoicism. Just watched a 5 min YouTube video where Andrew Tate is interviewed about Stoicism. I might write a short article about this because, well, it neatly encapsulates an extremely common and very insidious misconception about Stoic philosophy.
Basically, he claims to be into Stoicism and that what he learned from it is that feelings, such as intense rage, are feedback, and that they should be channelled into constructive activities like exercise. That's a very common piece of self-improvement advice found online.
Although it sounds, at first glance, like good advice to many people, it's not what Stoic philosophy teaches, and really runs totally contrary to the essence of Stoicism. IMHO, it's also quite bad psychological advice, for the simple reason that I'll explain below.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 5, 2023
Jordan Peterson preaches a self-improvement doctrine of extreme personal responsibility, clean your room, etc, but he also implicitly encourages his fans to disown responsibility for their negative emotions by blaming them on other people rather than their own underlying beliefs.
It seems very obvious to me that his whole schtick encourages a victim mentality, which seems in total contradiction to what he claims to be teaching. There's virtually no reference, e.g., to the role of beliefs in shaping emotions like anger.
I think that's why, surprisingly, he avoids any mention of cognitive therapy, the leading evidence-based form of psychotherapy, despite being a former professor of clinical psychology himself, and writing extensively about self-help for confidence, anxiety, depression, etc.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 5, 2023
People think that Stoicism is joyless but they're wrong. They're confusing the Greek philosophy called Stoicism with the modern concept of (lowercase) "stoicism", the unemotional coping style. Marcus Aurelius describes the following three sources of happiness in Stoicism...
1. The primary source of happiness (positive emotion) in Stoic philosophy comes from contemplation of our supreme good, which is the concept of moral wisdom or virtue itself, and our capacity for virtue; by clarifying our own values, for instance, we experience deeper happiness.
2. We likewise experience happiness by learning to appreciate the capacity for wisdom and virtue in other people, despite their imperfections, which Marcus Aurelius demonstrates at length in Book One of The Meditations.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 4, 2023
Russell Brand is a good example of precisely what Socrates warned us against. He said that the Sophists gave long speeches, refused to let anyone interrupt them or ask questions, changed the subject, launched into prepared speeches, etc., to avoid justifying their claims.
He frequently raises his voice and shouts over the top of people who are trying to question him or disagree with him, makes dubious assertions, and then goes off at tangents to avoid answering questions about them, worse, actually than most politicians.
I think regardless of what the guy is saying, it's pretty easy to show that he's using rhetoric in a way that resembles the ancient Sophists, e.g., it's an objective fact that he often talks over other people, and changes the subject to avoid questions, etc.
Read 7 tweets
Mar 3, 2023
Q: Would you consider it hypocritical for someone to pay a ghostwriter to write a self-help book on #Stoicism, so they can pretend they wrote it themselves and publish it under their own name?
I think I've been asked about this maybe three times now. It's not something I would ever agree to do personally. I don't think it's a big deal for a celebrity to have their memoirs ghostwritten but Stoic philosophy is an ethical system that is supposed to value truth.
I was asked once to write Stoic content for a famous influencer, which they wanted to pass off as their own pearls of wisdom. I declined. It just seemed much too insincere on their part to be claiming to teach principles of a philosophy they didn't care about enough to even read.
Read 4 tweets

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