The Anger Bias

I don’t think it will come as a shock to my readers, or anyone who follows me on Twitter or on the Red Pill Reddit forum, that I’ve gone to bat in recent months to combat the (often deliberate) misperception that self-described ‘Red Pill’ men are inherently angry men. As such, we’re also meant to presume these ‘angry men’ have a potential for violence or at best self-loathing.

The idea, of course, is proposed that “the guys in TRP are just embittered, deeply hurt men who’ve taken the truths that Red Pill awareness has presented to them and converted it to a real, genuine misogyny”. Furthermore, the convention is proposed that these guys cannot come to terms with their own failures and want to blame them all on women, or at the very least an unkind, unforgiving, pro-female world in which they’ve always struggled (i.e. “losers want to blame their losing on women”). Thus, these ‘bitter terpers’ (TRPers) promote either hostility towards women, or they attempt to check themselves out of the sexual marketplace entirely by “going their own way”. In either case, it’s proposed that it’s men’s inherent anger that motivates them to an anti-woman mindset.

I addressed much of this misguided argument in my essay Anger Management:

But are we angry? I can’t say that I haven’t encountered a few guys on some forums and comment threads who I’d characterize as angry judging from their comments or describing their situations. For the greater whole I’d say the manosphere is not angry, but the views we express don’t align with a feminine-primary society. Men expressing a dissatisfaction with feminine-primacy, men coming together to make sense of it, sound angry to people who’s sense of comfort comes from what the feminine imperative has conditioned them to.

Most of the men who’ve expressed a genuine anger with me aren’t angry with women, but rather they’re angry with themselves for having been blind to the Game that they’d been a part of for so long in their blue-pill ignorance. They’re angry that they hadn’t figured it out sooner.

I understand that a lot of what is written in the manosphere can certainly be interpreted as coming from a source for anger. When I (or anyone else) outline the fundaments of hypergamy for instance, there’s a lot to be angry about for a man. Women get pissed because it exposes an ugly truth that the feminine exhausts a lot of resources to keep under the rug, but for men, learning about the feral reasons for feminine (and masculine) behaviors often enough cause a guy to become despondent or angry. That impression should never be the basis for a Man’s Game, nor is it ever really an aspect of internalizing Game that will benefit him personally.

Anger bias and attribution to men is an easy follow for a social order predicated on empowering and protecting the feminine. From an egalitarian mindset that insists on socially constructed equalism between the sexes it’s ironic that the attribution of a default anger to men, and the conventionally masculine, is something entirely unique to the male sex. To the feminine-primary mindset, all-is-one until a negative trait unique to the male biology serves a purpose, and a positive trait unique to women is flattering for them. Then the ideals of social constructionism are suspended insofar as biology agrees with a feminine-primary social order.

I would also argue that predisposed anger is just one attribute the Feminine Imperative finds useful in men to create operative social conventions. The default presumption of mens predisposition to anger is the basis of most domestic legislation (paternity, domestic violence, child custody, etc.) between men and women.

This is a convenient social constructivism based (ostensibly) on egalitarian equality until a particular emotion or personal quality is predominantly attributable to one sex in the positive or negative; then it’s the ‘differences’, not the similarities, between the sexes that make for social control. It’s funny how we’re all equal, blank-slates until anger is better attributed to “toxic” masculinity and some preternatural capacity for empathy in women are beliefs the Feminine Imperative reinforces in its cultural context.

Anger is a useful emotion for fem-centrism. It’s all too easy to classify men’s propensity for anger (and associated violence) as ‘toxic’ yet women’s anger is something transformative and empowering. This connects back to the social efforts of the past five generations designed to feminize men and masculinize women; the inverse traits that would be conventional to one gender are encouraged as positive traits in the opposite gender.

This may be somewhat remedial for my regular readers, but I’m reviewing this because it illustrates a dichotomy that a Blue Pill mindset is all too ready to accept. To the equalist ideology, biological gender-specific truths are only a minor factor in the human condition – unless the truth of that gender-specific biological fact is something advantageous to the feminine and disadvantageous to the masculine.

For instance, to suggest that women’s evolved neurological capacity for communication makes them more intuitive and sensitive to verbal and nonverbal sub-communication we’re supposed to embrace this biological fact as something that sets women apart as ‘special’ or evidence of women being “more evolved”. But when we suggest that men outclass women in cognitive spatial ability, or neurological gender differences in rational abstract thinking gives men a biological advantage in areas like mathematics, then male professors lose their tenured jobs for expressing these facts publicly. If a biological difference is flattering to women it’s an exception to the blank-slate ideology; if a difference is unflattering to women it’s considered evidence of an institutionalized sexism on the part of men.

For all purposes, a social order founded on the blank-slate ideology of egalitarian equalism (serving the Feminine Imperative) regularly, and ruthlessly, quashes any discourse of biological gender differences – unless those factual differences are flattering to the feminine and/or damning of the masculine.

Anger Bias

One biological difference equalism is happy to promote is the notion that men are biologically predisposed to anger, aggression and violence. The motivating impetus behind this anger is rarely something the equalist mind will consider, but that men are predominantly, naturally, more ‘angry’ than women is a meme that is actively encouraged. If anything, this biological fact is a root basis for the cultural concept of “toxic” masculinity.

However, the fact does remain, healthy men possess 12 to 17 times the biogenous serum testosterone that women do. This naturally predisposes men to be more muscular, hairy, lower voices, libidinous and yes, aggressive. It’s no secret that statistically men are biologically more prone to anger, aggression and potentially violence. In a feminine-correct social context this natural predilection is the basis of all masculine attributes being ‘toxic’, if for no other reason than it presents a threat to women’s social control.

For all this, the male gender-bias towards presumption of anger has a foundation in evolutionary psychology. Men will always be considered more angry than women because of an evolutionary adaptation known as Error Management. And in men’s case, this anger attribution is a species-survival adaptation. The following quotes originate from a study called, Seeing storms behind the clouds: Biases in the attribution of anger. This experimental study, and another similar study (If looks could kill), come to us courtesy of Dr. Martie Haselton and her colleagues in the evo-psych department at UCLA. These studies outline the inherent biases towards anger all humans theoretically harbor subconsciously.

Anger-prone individuals are volatile and frequently dangerous. Accordingly, inferring the presence of this personality trait in others was important in ancestral human populations. This inference, made under uncertainty, can result in two types of errors: underestimation or overestimation of trait anger. Averaged over evolutionary time, underestimation will have been the more costly error, as the fitness decrements resulting from physical harm or death due to insufficient vigilance are greater than those resulting from lost social opportunities due to excessive caution. We therefore hypothesized that selection has favored an upwards bias in the estimation of others’ trait anger relative to estimations of other traits not characterized by such an error asymmetry.

Anger attribution to physical and gender cues is an “adaptive rationality”. In other words, it’s probably better to err on the side of caution and misattribute anger to an individual displaying even marginal cues of a potential for aggression (for instance, they hold implements or tools that could cause physical harm) than to miss that cue and wind up dead or injured.

Moreover, we hypothesized that additional attributes that 1) make the actor more dangerous, or 2) make the observer more vulnerable increase the error asymmetry with regard to inferring anger-proneness, and should therefore correspondingly increase this overestimation bias.

This is an important distinction to make when we extrapolate this theory to a larger social scope. When the actors (men in our case) are made to appear more dangerous, or the observers (women & feminized men) are made to feel more vulnerable there is an increase in the perception that the actors are in fact more prone to anger (asymmetrical error attribution).

Adaptive rationality and error management

The “adaptive rationality” approach contends that the mind was shaped by selection to enhance fitness in ancestral environments rather than to yield accurate judgments. Therefore, human cognition can manifest seemingly irrational biases that are, in fact, “adaptively rational.”

I explored this topic in my essay, Vestiges.

Anger attribution is one domain in which this might occur. Perceivers can commit one of two errors: underestimate an individual’s trait anger (false negative) or overestimate it (false positive). On average, underestimations will have been costlier than overestimations in ancestral populations: assuming that an anger-prone individual was temperate placed the perceiver at risk of assault, whereas assuming that a temperate individual was anger-prone merely led to foregoing potentially profitable interactions. Thus, overall accuracy (i.e., committing false negative and false positive errors with equal frequency) did not maximize fitness over evolutionary time. Rather, in line with error management theory, we hypothesize that selection favored a biased tendency to commit the less costly false positive — overestimating trait anger. Although the same logic applies to the estimations of state anger, our predictions focus squarely on trait anger because traits predict future behavior, and it is costly to underestimate an individual’s anger not only in the moment, but also in future interactions.

For the Red Pill aware, what I’m suggesting is that there is an evolved predisposition to perceive men as generally more prone to anger, and thereby more susceptible to aggression/violence, than may in fact be the actual case with men individually. Largely, as a man, you will always be perceived as potentially angrier than a woman.

Contextual factors can influence this asymmetry, resulting in a concomitant increase in biases in the perception of a given emotion. Anger motivates aggression, hence an important contextual factor in anger perception is the capacity of the perceived individual to inflict harm. The greater the capacity to harm, the more costly it is to underestimate the extent to which the target is angry, and therefore the more that perception should be biased in favor of overestimation.

I would argue here that men’s state in western(izing) cultures is one that grossly exaggerates men’s overall potential for anger, and by extension violence. Presuming that Red Pill men are “a bunch of angry misogynists” is one such error, but it is also a useful one in that it plays upon this overestimation of anger in men on whole. This anger attribution in men will always be an easy method of poisoning the well or creating straw men arguments from which opponents of Red Pill awareness will dismiss valid, factual arguments.

As you might guess, this male anger bias is a simple tool to use – and one I unfortunately see being employed by many Purple Pill dating coaches who’d like to dissuade their clientele from the less marketable aspects of Red Pill awareness. Anything Red Pill that disagrees with their feminine-sanitized advice is conveniently dismissed as “negative” or the rantings of angry, bitter, burned men. It becomes “Truthful Anger”, but their emphasis is always on the anger part rather than the truth that would kick a leg out from under their positivity marketing scheme.

The default state of women and feminized men is one of a presumed vulnerability due to a persistent social characterization of a default female victimhood in popular culture and media. Likewise, men are portrayed as quick to anger – all in spite of generations of effort spent in Blue Pill conditioning of men to be ideally passive, supportive, non-assertive and entirely less masculinized. Despite all that sensitivity conditioning, from the earliest ages, the default presumption that’s still popularly reinforced is that men are always the angry/violent ones. Domestic violence laws presume a man is always the attacker and always the party to be removed from the home because of this preconception.

Both the Feminine Imperative and even well meaning Red Pill men default to this overestimation. I get that this is largely merited on whole as a characteristic of men. This error management is a useful and pragmatic adaptation, but it is also a useful foil for dismissing men on whole. It’s interesting that I’d be pilloried for expressing that the realities of women’s menstrual cycle predispose them to ovulatory shift, as well as anti-social, behaviors, yet were I to explain that testosterone predisposes men to aggression we largely accept this as a given.

My intent in this essay isn’t to say men aren’t as angry as their evolutionary nature makes them. The point is that a feminine-primary social order readily makes this nature a useful tool in dismissing what would otherwise be valid, but uncomfortable Red Pill truth. This anger bias mechanism is a tool for message control.