Does venting actually help you cool off, or does it just add fuel to the fire? Social psychologist Jennifer Parlamis busts common myths about anger, showing how curiosity — not catharsis — can keep you calm. Discover the surprising science behind anger management and four practical tools for building stronger relationships from a researcher who’s rethinking Freud, one deep breath at a time.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Venting. We all do it. Something frustrates us and we vent to a partner or a friend, hoping it'll make us feel better. But does it actually work?
In this talk, social and organizational psychology expert Jennifer Parlamas unpacks the science of anger and the myths behind venting and reveals why it actually can reinforce anger rather than alleviate it. She shares what you might want to consider doing instead.
So I'd like to begin with a story. When my daughter was a baby, we lived in New York City, and I was there studying to get a PhD in social and organizational psychology, and I was researching conflict resolution and negotiation. And like most New Yorkers, we would walk everywhere, and I would push her in a stroller with two hands, like a responsible parent, all over the city.
But I noticed that my husband, he pushed the stroller quite differently. with one hand kind of off to the side, and kind of looking a little bit too cool, like he had better places to be. And this really bothered me. I started to get angry. And I started to make all these causal attributions, what psychologists call these explanations for his behavior.
One, I thought maybe, oh, he's a hotshot Wall Street lawyer now. He thinks he's too good to push a stroller. Or I thought maybe he thinks women are the only ones who should push strollers. Or maybe he didn't care about safety, and that was why he was doing it that way. So as I was thinking about all these explanations for his behavior, I started to get angry.
And that anger started to build up, and I vented. I expressed my anger forcefully to anybody who would listen, called my friends, called my sister. But that venting didn't help release my anger. I actually felt even angrier, until one day, I saw my dad pushing the stroller the exact same way. He came into the city, and he was taking my daughter to the park, and he's walking like that.
And I know my dad doesn't care about looking cool. Sorry, Dad. And I said, I know I must be missing something here. What don't I know about this situation? So I asked him a simple question. I said, dad, why are you pushing the stroller like this? And he said, oh, well, because when I use two hands, my stride is too long and I kick the bottom of the stroller and it hurts.
It actually cuts into my shins. He's like, so I much prefer it, but that's why I do it. And so what I realized at the time, I was learning all about this cognitive bias, but I made the fundamental attribution error. This is when you over-attribute the causes for someone's behavior to something internal to them, something internal and controllable, rather than to some external cause.
So you under-emphasize the external or situational causes that might be really the explanations for someone's behavior. So at that moment, I started to get really curious about venting because I thought that was helping me in some way. So as a researcher and getting my PhD, I started to look into venting a little bit more. And I found out that actually venting doesn't release anger.
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