No, they do not. Nobody[1] wants to be angry. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "today is going to be a good day because I'm going to be angry."

But given the correct input, everyone feels that they must be angry, that it is morally required to be angry. And this anger then requires them to seek out further information about the thing that made them angry. Not because they desire to be angry, but because they feel that there is something happening in the world that is wrong and that they must fight.

[1]: for approximate values of "nobody"

I disagree. Why are some of the most popular subreddits things like r/AmITheAsshole, r/JustNoMIL, r/RaisedByNarcissists, r/EntitledPeople, etc.: forums full of (likely fake) stories of people behaving egregiously, with thousands of outraged comments throwing fuel on a burning pile of outrage: "wow, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/father/mother/FIL/MIL/neighbor/boss/etc. is such an asshole!" Why are advice/gossip columns that provide outlets for similar stories so popular? Why is reality TV full of the same concocted situations so popular? Why is people's first reaction to outrageous news stories to bring out the torches and pitchforks, rather than trying to first validate the story? Why can an outrageous lie travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on?

You’re literally saying why people want to be angry.

My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.

But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.

Yes, I think this is exactly it. A reaction that may be reasonable in a personal, real-world context can become extremely problematic in a highly connected context.

It's both that, as an individual, you can be inundated with things that feel like you have a moral obligation to react. On the other side of the equation, if you say something stupid online, you can suddenly have thousands of people attacking you for it.

Every single action seems reasonable, or even necessary, to each individual person, but because everything is scaled up by all the connections, things immediately escalate.

I don't wake up thinking "today I want to be angry", but if I go outside and see somebody kicking a cat, I feel that anger is the correct response.

The problem is that social media is a cat-kicking machine that drags people into a vicious circle of anger-inducing stimuli. If people think that every day people are kicking cats on the Internet, they feel that they need to do something to stop the cat-kicking; given their agency, that "something" is usually angry responses and attacks, which feeds the machine.

Again, they do not do that because they want to be angry; most people would rather be happy than angry. They do it because they feel that cats are being kicked, and anger is the required moral response.

At some point, I think it’s important to recognize the difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. Social media seems adept at exposing revealed preferences.

If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Regardless of what words they use.

And for example, I never heard anyone who was a big Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones fan who said they wanted to be angry or paranoid (to be fair, this was pre-Trump and awhile ago), yet every single one of them I saw got angry and paranoid after watching them, if you paid any attention at all.

Because their purpose in seeking it out is not to get angry, it's to stop something from happening that they perceive as harmful.

I doubt most people watch Alex Jones because they love being angry. They watch him because they believe a global cabal of evildoers is attacking them. Anger is the logical consequence, not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is that the perceived problem is solved, i.e. that people stop kicking cats.

We can chicken/egg about it all day, but at some point if people didn’t want it - they wouldn’t be doing it.

Depending on the definition of ‘want’ of course. But what else can we use?

I don’t think anyone would disagree that smokers want cigarettes, eh? Or gamblers want to gamble?

None of these people said to themselves, "I want to be angry today, and I heard that Alex Jones makes people angry, therefore I will watch Alex Jones."

A lot of people really do, and it predates any sort of media too. When they don't have outrage media they form gossip networks so they can tell each other embellished stories about mundane matters to be outraged and scandalized about.

But again in this situation the goal is not to be angry.

This sort of behaviour emerges as a consequence of unhealthy group dynamics (and to a lesser extent, plain boredom). By gossiping, a person expresses understanding of, and reinforces, their in-group’s values. This maintains their position in the in-group. By embellishing, the person attempts to actually increase their status within the group by being the holder of some “secret truth” which they feel makes them important, and therefore more essential, and therefore more secure in their position. The goal is not anger. The goal is security.

The emotion of anger is a high-intensity fear. So what you are perceiving as “seeking out a reason to be angry” is more a hypervigilant scanning for threats. Those threats may be to the dominance of the person’s in-group among wider society (Prohibition is a well-studied historical example), or the threats may be to the individual’s standing within the in-group.

In the latter case, the threat is frequently some forbidden internal desire, and so the would-be transgressor externalises that desire onto some out-group and then attacks them as a proxy for their own self-denial. But most often it is simply the threat of being wrong, and the subsequent perceived loss of safety, that leads people to feel angry, and then to double down. And in the world we live in today, that doubling down is more often than not rewarded with upvotes and algorithmic amplification.

Things that they have no fear about, and so do not register as warranting brain time.

> eager to get to the outrageously stuff.

The things which are creating a feeling of fear.

It’s not necessary for the source of a fear to exist in the present moment, nor for it to even be a thing that is real. For as long as humans have communicated, we have told tales about things that go bump in the dark. Tales of people who, through their apparent ignorance of the rules of the group, caused the wrath of some spirits who then punished the group.

It needn’t matter whether a person’s actions actually caused a problem, or whether it caused the spirits to be upset, or indeed whether the spirits actually ever existed at all. What matters is that there is a fear, and there is a story about that fear, and the story reinforces some shared group value.

> It's a pattern of behavior which old people in particular commonly fall into,

Here is the fundamental fear of many people: the fear of obsolescence, irrelevance, abandonment, and loss of control. We must adapt to change, but also often have either an inability or unwillingness to do so. And so the story becomes it is everyone else who is wrong. Sometimes there is wisdom in the story that should not be dismissed. But most often it is just an expression of fear (and, again, sometimes boredom).

What makes this hypothesis seem so unbelievable? Why does it need to be people seeking anger? What would need to be true for you to change your opinion? This discussion thread is old, so no need to spend your energy on answering if you don’t feel strongly about it. Just some parting questions to mull over in the bath, perhaps.

Thank you for raising this idea originally, and for engaging with me on it.

Why are you so insistent that people don’t do what they clearly seem to do?

Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?

Is it the apparent lack of (actual) agency for many people? Or the concerning worry that we all could be steering ourselves to our own dooms, while convincing ourself we aren’t?

I’m not rejecting the idea that people fixate on stimuli that produce anger. The question is why they do that, and the answer is unlikely to be “people just want to be angry”.

> Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?

Because it runs counter to the best available literature I am aware of and is a conclusion based on a superficial observation which has no underlying theoretical basis, whereas the hypothesis I present is grounded in some amount of actual science and evidence. Even the superficial Wikipedia article on anger emphasises the role of threat response here. Mine isn’t, as far as I can tell, some fringe position; it is very much in line with the research. It is also in line with my personal experience. “People just want to be angry” is not.

It is important to understand that the things people try to avoid through gossip, exaggeration, and expressions of anger are not all mortal threats. They can also be very mundane things like not wanting to eat something that they just think tastes bad. So make sure not to take the word “threat” too narrowly when considering this hypothesis.

I don’t have any skin in the game here other than an interest in the truth of the matter and a willingness to engage since I find this sort of thing both interesting and sociologically very important. If you or anyone have some literature to shove in my face that offers some compelling data in support of the “people love feeling angry” hypothesis, then sure, I would accept that and integrate that into my understanding of human behaviour.