Your Anger May Be Conveying ‘Guilty’ to People

(Leslie K. John, Harvard Business School professor)

Perception is a sticky problem. It doesn’t matter to other people whether that perception is not entirely true or whether it is factual at all. Anger in response to being questioned, it seems, can lead people to believe we’re ‘guilty’ and wanting them to back off so we can hide something.

In the article Why Anger Makes the Wrongly Accused Looked Guilty, Michael Blanding, writing for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge publication, presents interesting findings.

“People may misinterpret that anger as a sign of guilt,” says Harvard Business School professor Leslie K. John, whose paper Anger Damns the Innocent was published in the journal Psychological Science.

In a series of experiments, John and fellow researchers Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto, Gabrielle Adams of the University of Virginia and Holly Howe of Duke University discovered, as much as it might upset people, that anger can lead to people assuming with confidence that we’re guilty even when that isn’t true.

A problem? “People who are falsely accused, of course, have every reason to be angry,” John said.

The study found that “participants consistently recalled expressing more anger when they were wrongfully accused than when they actually did something wrong,” Blanding wrote. “The more serious the accusation, the angrier they reacted—and many said what made them especially mad was being unfairly judged.”

Setting aside critics of this revelation, who might bring up those who lie and gaslight, Blanding wrote “The experiment provided more evidence that when people see anger as a sign of guilt, they are often jumping to the wrong conclusion.

“It’s actually more likely to be a sign of innocence than of guilt,” John said. “It seems to be inherently more aggravating to be accused of something you haven’t done because there’s the added element of it being unjust.”

So what is one to do when unjustly accused and we feel shock, hurt and offense?

“When being accused, we know from other research that it is good to indicate a willingness to be cooperative. Anger seems to signal the opposite to others—that you’re hiding something,” John said.

How can we learn what is true if people are highly reactive (angry) manner?

“If you suspect an employee of wrongdoing, rather than relying on a person’s facial expressions or other reactions, try and get the data and see if the claim has merit before you decide on guilt,” John said.

Of course, your gut instinct does have reason for existing too, DeCelles says. “…those who are guilty might express anger, perhaps as a strategic attempt to look morally incensed, being angry at procedural issues rather than the accusation itself, or even not accurately remembering their transgression.”

She’s quick to add though, “But the research shows that, on average, the falsely, versus (the) correctly (accurately) accused, seem to both feel and express anger more strongly.”