Episode 13: The anger algorithm: What codes our wrath?

(Lightly edited for readability)

Speakers: Sanjeev Jain, Imke Rajamani, Tavpritesh Sethi, Subhra Priyadarshini

00:01 Partner announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.

00:26: Subhra Priyadarshini: This is your host Subhra Priyadarshini and you are listening to the Nature India podcast. This episode we are seeing red with a clinical neuroscientist, a Bollywood historian and a computational biologist. Now what do I mean?

00:55 (Amitabh Bachchan’s angry dialogues from two Hindi movies.)

01:16 Subhra Priyadarshini: The quintessential angry young man. It probably didn't take you too long to identify Amitabh Bachchan’s voice in these clips from some of his super hit Hindi movies. That is the testament to the power of Bollywood. But also it's because anger is a universal emotion. Rage, wrath, fury, outrage, whatever you want to call it. We are genetically programmed to recognise it. And of course, we have all felt it. But what's behind those flared nostrils the rapid heart rate, what's happening when you shout at the top of your voice, or slam the door behind you? In this episode of the Nature India podcast, we are exploring the science of anger and much more. In this highly connected digital age, how our films, social media and algorithms shaping our emotions. Let's find out.

02:22 Sanjeev Jain: So emotional states broadly, can simply be defined as positive and negative emotions. These kinds of negative emotions, whether it's untoward anger, hostility or sadness began being codified as symptoms of psychiatric illness sometime in the 19th century. Our major research is on the genetics and neurobiology of severe mental illness, mainly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. And these symptoms in these patients very often have to do with hostility and anger.

02:56 Subhra Priyadarshini: That is Sanjeev Jain, a professor at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru. Indeed, inappropriate levels of anger are associated with many psychiatric conditions, and health conditions too. But anger is a necessary emotion. Throughout evolution, anger has had an adaptive role in survival. After all, along with fear, it drives the fight or flight response.

03:26 Sanjeev Jain: So as psychiatrists we understand that anger is as legitimate an emotion as happiness is. Not being able to express anger can actually be quite damaging for the psyche.

03:40 Subhra Priyadarshini: Our question to Sanjeev Jain was, while humans are genetically the same as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, is the general population just getting angrier than ever. If you've watched primetime news, or one of the latest blockbusters are just scrolled down through your Twitter of Facebook feed, it certainly seems so, doesn't it?

04:04 Sanjeev Jain: Obviously, the propensity to have so called basic emotions, like anger, fright, fear, are innate to almost all animals that have a central nervous system. Now human beings develop this very complex relationship between our so called neocortex or our frontal lobes, which regulates or understands or tries to interpret every emotional experience, rationalise it, compartmentalise it and regulate it. But when there is a flood of emotional data or sensory data, those mechanisms can get disrupted. Overstimulation itself can break down psychological defenses.

04:47 Subhra Priyadarshini: So on one hand, we are overloaded with information in our hyper connected digital world. And on the other hand, anger is pretty infectious. It sounds like a perfect storm. arm.

05:01 Sanjeev Jain: Negative emotions like anger and hostility has the potential of whipping a large number of people into frenzy. So early in the 20th century, people like Le Bon actually talked about the cloud psychology and the psychology of the masses and this kind of understanding of how negative emotions get amplified and transmitted in society became a matter of concern. All the things that drive anger seem to have had a resurgence in the recent past.

05:33 Subhra Priyadarshini: Indian cinema, as it turns out, is both a reflection of the anger of the masses and a driver of it.

05:41 Imke Rajamani: I started really to study the history of anger in popular films. And I found that actually it was with the new wave cinema that the trope of the angry young man came up for filmmakers. Then the angry young man was on the screen and acting out the actor of the popular culture, the anger of the population, the anger of the good Indian citizen.

06:07 Subhra Priyadarshini: That is Imke Rahamani, a historian of emotions so to say. Imke researched anger in postcolonial India, while at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

06:25 Imke Rajamani: I analyzed films from Bollywood, Tollywood and Kollywood. So Hindi, Tamil and Telugu films, to see how the angry young man popularised anger as a political emotion in post colonial India, and changed the public emotionality – that from a good Indian is a common hopeful citizen, as it was in the Nehru era, to a narrative that a good Indian should be angry at a corrupt government, which then was a trope which was taken up by different political forces, but especially also by Hindu fundamentalists, who then use anger strongly as a political tool.

07:04 Sanjeev Jain: Perhaps this toxic masculinity and this hyper hyper violence that we see on screen reflects to some extent, this subliminal angle, which a large number of people feel, and this is a fantasized, glorified, escapist kind of portrayal, which, like any scheme of endless mirrors, then starts feeding on itself and amplifying itself. So one must be very careful of this. The antihero, the little man who's so angry, because nothing in the world actually seems right and then takes revenge on everybody around him.

07:41 Subhra Priyadarshini: Imke explains how movies can change our beliefs, our attitudes, our psyche, they determine what's cool, what's attractive, and what's normal behavior. And we aren't just mimicking what we see we are actually being changed by it.

08:01 Sanjeev Jain: They really have an effect on the body, and experiencing an emotion while you're watching a movie with empathy, you're going through the main characters or the hero's experience – this changes something in the brain because there is a plasticity in the body, in the brain. And you experience those emotions through characters when you're reading, when you're watching a movie. It actually is a process of emotional learning, and this process of emotional learning materialises in the brain and in the body. I think it would make it less easy to use it, because in order to act as emotion and easily activated. For example, in a violent political action, people need to have learned that emotion, they need to have the feeling that it's an appropriate emotion to act out at that time.

08:50 Subhra Priyadarshini: Of course, I should point out that this is not just a phenomenon unique to Indian cinema, be it Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or Canada.

08:59 Imke Rajamani: There's a lot of cross referencing and copying and inspiration from each other. And talking of inspiration and cross referencing it’s also very interesting how a Hindu nationalist anger builds so much on American cinema.

09:18 Sanjeev Jain: The toxic masculinity issue is widespread from westerns, to gangster movies, To Kill Bill to Indian cinema, whether it's a worldwide trend or whether it's your just copycatting things, or whether it's a manifestation of genuine anger, social anger, or all of the above, it's difficult to tease out.

09:43 Subhra Priyadarshini: And it's not just mainstream media like cinema either. Let's turn to social media now, which as we know has been used to incite everything from mob violence to protests to hate campaigns, in what ways are Facebook, Twitter tick tock all lighting the match on our collective anger?

10:06 Sanjeev Jain: With this endless sensory stimulation on the screens, because the signage or the attention span is shorter and shorter, things are put up in millisecond or few seconds of information, the brain literally cannot keep up. or those kinds of emotions are then secondarily manipulated to heighten a particular kind of emotional state so that it becomes addictive.

10:34 Subhra Priyadarshini: Now, the very reason for primary emotions is so that we can have predictable responses to predictable emotional arousals. But Sanjeev points out that this is probably being used in marketing and in spreading propaganda.

10:51 Sanjeev Jain: So people can remember, tend to remember, negative emotions much better. So that taps into the whole enterprise of why negative emotions or negative opinions, therefore become neurologically or neuro psychologically more attractive, when you do need to manipulate action. Therefore, the click baiting of it, because whatever is remembered more often is what you want.

11:20 Subhra Priyadarshini: It's a fascinating field of study to explore how attention perception and cognition are being influenced by technology companies. To learn more about this, we turn now to Tavpritesh Sethi, a computational biologist and physician scientist at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi. We asked him, how exactly are our emotions influenced by artificial intelligence, and algorithms?

11:50 Tavpritesh Sethi: How are algorithms built in a way where emotions are triggered? Every company, every platform knows that human beings are emotional, and the way to engage with human beings as via emotions. So there is a lot of research around triggers, and hooks that basically engage with people's emotions and make use of that. It's always easier for humans to express emotions when they know that they are less accountable. And for example, interacting on the platform, or a medium where there is no human eye to eye contact. And that's when I think a lot of expressions can be written with emotions. And they can actually be quite provocative as well. We were working with what spreads faster on social media when we look at COVID tweets, right? And we observed that tweets, which had a lot of exclamation marks, or tweets which have a lot of capitalized letters, and tweets that have more emotional content, they actually were more likely to be misinformation. And yet, those were the tweets, which were more likely to get more reactions.

13:16 Subhra Priyadarshini: So can you recall what the last social media post was that made you angry? Tavpritesh actually tells us how algorithms can be regulated.

13:29 Tavpritesh Sethi: AI (artificial intelligence) is neutral, it's the way we use AI. it's more to do with how these algorithms can be regulated, can be detected, policed and regulated. There is an international debate around ethics and also around the way algorithms can change the behavior of people. With every possible AI application, there should be an associated metric that helps us quantify the dimension of emotional engagement with the user. If you want to engage with users and move them towards positive outcomes, let's say health outcomes, you need the positive emotional feedback as well. But at the same time, you want to regulate the negative impact of the algorithms. We should be aware of how these algorithms are built, what are the algorithms using what features so that it just becomes a little bit more transparent. For example, bringing in people from the social science research together with, let's say, computational health research, or other fields, let's say, social media research and discuss out openly and see how these algorithms actually have influence on the psyche of people.

14:43 Subhra Priyadarshini: So the next time you feel your temper rising, remember, it could well be a product of everything you see and hear around you. In fact, it could be the reaction you've actually been primed for We hope this episode sparked your curiosity and interest, and not your anger. We'll be back soon with another insightful episode on science in India in Hindi and English. In the meantime, make sure to check out our archives and share it with your friends and colleagues. I'm Subhra Priyadarshini and this is the Nature India podcast.

15:23 Partner announcement: Thanks to the DBT Wellcome Trust India alliance for their support in producing this episode.

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