The story in the gap

A car pulls out in front of you and you brake hard. In the first second you feel fright. In the second, you're furious, and the fury comes with a sentence, something like "that idiot doesn't care about anyone else on the road."

Look at what that sentence contains. You know one fact, which is that a car pulled out. Everything else is a story. You don't know the driver is an idiot, or that they don't care. They might have been dazzled by the sun, or lost, or distracted by a child being sick in the back seat. They might be a careless fool. You have no information either way. Your mind supplied a motive instantly, and the motive it picked was the most insulting one on offer.

We say "he made me angry" as though the event produced the feeling directly. It's more accurate to say the event produced a reading, and the reading produced the feeling. The reading happens so fast that it doesn't feel like a thought at all. It feels like seeing. Still, the same event read differently brings a different feeling. If you found out the driver was rushing to a hospital, the anger would be gone in a moment, though nothing on the road had changed.

Psychologists have a name for the habit of reading unclear behaviour as deliberate. They call it hostile attribution bias. In 2019 Stéphanie Klein Tuente and colleagues reviewed twenty-five studies of it in adults. People who tend to see hostility in unclear situations were more aggressive, and this held across very different groups, from students to forensic psychiatric patients. The links were small to medium in size, and studies like these can't fully settle which comes first. They do fit what you can observe for yourself. The more readily you see intent, the more often you're angry.

The usual stories fall into a few families. One is "they did it on purpose." Another is "they don't respect me." A third is "they always do this." And there's the one about yourself, which is "I can't stand this." Underneath them you'll usually find a rule with the word "should" in it. People should be on time. Drivers should indicate. My children should do what they're told the first time. Nothing is wrong with having standards. The trouble starts when you treat a preference about how other people behave as a law, so that every breach registers as an outrage when it's really an annoyance.

I need to be careful here, because this idea is easily turned into something false. I'm not telling you the other person is always innocent, or that it's all in your head. Sometimes they did do it on purpose. Sometimes they don't respect you. The aim is to be accurate, which isn't the same as being charitable. If you're going to act on a story, it should be the true one, and the first story anger hands you is only a guess.

Here's an exercise that takes two minutes. Take the most recent thing that made you properly angry. Write down what happened in a way a camera could have recorded. "She looked at her phone while I was talking." Then write three different explanations for it, including at least one that has nothing to do with you. She was waiting for news about her mother. She does it to everyone. She was bored by what I was saying. You don't have to believe any of them. You only have to notice that you don't know which is true, and that your anger had already chosen.

Often the simplest move is one the hot state would never think of. You ask. "You seemed distracted when I was telling you about the meeting. Is something up?" Nobody flinches at that sentence. It gets you real information, and if the answer turns out to be "I was bored," you now have a real problem to deal with where before you had an imagined one.

You won't catch the story in the first second. It's too fast, and the heat arrives with it. You'll catch it on the second pass, a few minutes later. That's one more reason the first few minutes are a bad time to act. The story you'd be acting on hasn't been checked yet.