Why is it divided into those who feel 'angry' and those who feel 'fear' when faced with an emergency such as war?



Russia invades Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and US President Biden tells Russia that 'the choice is sanctions or World War III', and there is a possibility of a big war involving the world. It has risen considerably, and various emotions such as fear and anger of war are swirling on SNS. Professor Michael Bang Petersen of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Alas in Denmark explains on Twitter the psychological state of people facing war.



Professor Petersen said, 'I lived in the Cold War, but I have never felt the threat. Many Westerners have never experienced anything like war. But people are only experienced. It is not an existence. The human mind is designed by natural selection, and the inherited genes are adapted to the 'different world.' '

A 'different world' is a world in which violent and collective conflicts, as if human ancestors lived, were commonplace. Professor Petersen argues that group conflicts have been universal since ancient times and are so important that they have formed the basic psychology of human beings.



In the paper 'Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality,' Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said, 'Morality is a form of cooperation. There are those in which an individual seeks to be sympathetic or fair to a particular person, or those in which an individual acts in accordance with the social norms of the entire group. ' According to this theory, our ancestors have shown a willingness to cooperate while having a collective conflict. Professor Petersen argues, 'We are designed to detect when things lean to either side and to use different social strategies depending on the situation.'



Success in living cooperatively can be achieved by solving the problems of others. Success in living violently depends on dominance: fear, intimidation, and aggression. According to a study by Professor Petersen, it was found that when a person is in a state of conflict, he or she quickly shifts to a world where he or she lives violently.

However, being in conflict does not necessarily mean that you will live violently. A study conducted during the 2014 invasion of Crimea, which triggered the invasion of Ukraine, found that those who were angry in the face of the invasion of Russia were more likely to show support for the dominant leader. That. However, those who felt more fear than anger tended to dislike the leader.



'Emotions are coordination systems designed to refocus the entire cognitive structure for a particular task,' says Professor Petersen. Professor Petersen argued that emotions are about changing what we focus on, how we value the costs and benefits of behavior, and how we prepare our bodies to act.

Anger is the emotion to act in 'dominance' of a violent world, and fear is the emotion to act in 'obedience', Professor Petersen said. You rarely have either anger or fear, and they are usually compatible. However, Professor Petersen speculates that whether anger or fear outweighs each person and is a key factor in determining it. He also argues from his own research that people with a personality that emphasizes threats from other groups are more likely to support domination.



'The anger at Putin's atrocities encourages millions of citizens of the Western world to take control, and will have a lot of psychological and political implications,' said Professor Petersen. As a result, people support aggressive attitudes, increasing support for dominant leaders and disseminating false information to their enemies, while those with greater fear are aggressive. There will be a political division here because we will no longer support this attitude. '



'If you support a policy that you have never remembered and that you have never supported, it essentially reflects the activation of deep psychology in a world where you are competing for superiority and inferiority between groups. But that psychology is designed for a world invaded by a small group, not for a world with nuclear weapons. Depth psychology and the world do not match you. It means that intuition does not always lead to the optimal solution. The key to the future is to balance the emotions of group aggression with calm reason, 'Petersen explains. I did.

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