You Can’t Treat Me This Way

The evolutionary logic of anger

Apologies are remarkably effective at defusing anger.

Intuitively, this makes sense. But when you think about it, it is a little odd. Apologies don't physically change your situation. Someone telling you sorry doesn’t provide any material benefit to your life.

Yet apologies work because they acknowledge your status and worth, affirming respect previously denied.

The fact that apologies work to defuse anger gives us a clue as to why anger evolved in the first place.

Anger is a built-in bargaining chip. It evolved as a specific adaptation—a tool used by our ancestors to get others to treat them better.

Anger serves as a way to communicate a clear message: “I’m not as weak as you think. You can’t treat me this way.”

From an evolutionary perspective, the primary goal of anger is to influence another person’s behavior or decisions, aiming to change how they perceive and treat us.

It's important here to distinguish between two levels of understanding: the ultimate (or evolutionary) and the proximate explanations for anger. The proximate explanation addresses the immediate reasons we feel anger—perhaps we feel disrespected, belittled, or mistreated in some way.

But the ultimate/evolutionary explanation digs deeper, asking why emotions like anger evolved in humans at all. Why does disrespect or mistreatment activate feelings of anger? Why does being slighted feel painful?

Anger evolved because it offered benefits to our ancestors. This idea is known among evolutionary psychologists as the “recalibration theory of anger.”

Essentially, anger works to reset how others treat you. If you feel like you’re being ignored or treated unfairly, anger becomes a tool to demand better treatment from others.

Anger arises when we perceive threats to our well-being or opportunities, motivating others to provide better treatment. From a paper led by the psychologist Daniel Sznycer:

“Anger interfaces with the brain of the target of your anger (e.g., the person who imposed excessive costs on you) and feeds the target information. The subtext of this information is: Pay the cost of valuing me more highly (e.g., ‘Stop borrowing my clothes’), or I will exact an even higher cost from you.”

By expressing anger, our ancestors communicated their discontent, signaling to others that mistreatment could carry significant social costs. These displays aimed to secure vital resources, strengthen social status, forge alliances, and maintain romantic partnerships—factors directly linked to survival and reproductive success.

Interestingly, this process unfolds without conscious awareness.

You don’t consciously think to yourself, “This person is mistreating me. I’m going to get angry now in order to orchestrate a series of cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses aimed at incentivizing this other person to place more weight on my well-being.”

Emotions, including anger, are involuntary and automatic, which is why they are so effective. Conscious thought burns more calories than automated processes, so evolution streamlined most human desires and responses to operate unconsciously. The unconscious mind quietly solves problems for us, activating emotions to change how others view and treat us. Even when we have no direct awareness of this process.

Understanding anger in this way can help us handle conflicts better in our own lives.

When we get angry, we're implicitly trying to influence others to change their behavior. For example, people naturally respond to anger by puffing up their chests, lifting their heads, and appearing physically stronger. These poses aren't accidental; they're designed to make others believe we are strong and capable of defending ourselves.

Anger can be expressed either by inflicting costs or withdrawing benefits, such as the "silent treatment." Research indicates that angry men often express their displeasure through direct threats of aggression, while angry women are more likely to withdraw emotionally or socially. This difference makes sense given that women are more physically vulnerable than men and directly expressing anger would have historically been riskier for them.

Interestingly, anger most often occurs among people who genuinely care about each other. These conflicts typically arise over limited resources, such as attention, time, or money. Imagine leaving a friend waiting in the rain for hours for you to pick them up. If, when you finally show up, you dismiss their discomfort by saying, "Yeah, I know you had to wait and you’re soaking wet. So what?" They will respond with anger because you've openly shown you don't value or respect them.

Anger arises when you feel others don’t respect or value you as much as you believe they should. For instance, calling someone "stupid" triggers anger because intelligence is socially valued. Insults like this imply the person is less worthy of respect, prompting them to respond defensively.

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People sometimes react with more anger than they “should.”

This can be adaptive. Exhibiting dramatic rage for a single instance can discourage others from mistreating you again.

Imagine you’re a new inmate at a prison cafeteria. Your food is taken by another inmate. Exploding with rage over a small amount of food might seem irrational. But if you don’t behave this way, you send a signal to observers that you can be easily exploited in the future. In fact, sometimes people will use these seemingly small provocations to measure how vulnerable you are.

Narcissists commonly elicit anger in others because they expect better treatment than most people think they deserve. At the same time, they often treat others poorly, offering worse treatment than what those people believe they should receive.

Small children respond with anger, screaming and crying because they don’t yet have the tools to bargain for what they want. Even a smart two-year-old can’t yet provide compelling reasons for why they should get what they want. And they are not physically intimidating. And they can’t threaten to relinquish benefits. So what options do they have? They bargain to get what they want by withdrawing cooperation and inflicting costs, expressed by being loud and obnoxious and physically unwieldy. I see parents try to calmly reason with a screaming toddler and it blows my mind. Small children lack the cognitive capacity to understand arguments.

Research led by the psychologist Aaron Sell reveals interesting patterns regarding what predicts propensity for anger. In one study, he measured how much weight male participants could lift and compared it to their likelihood of expressing anger and aggression. He found stronger men were consistently more prone to anger—not just in American samples, but also among hunter-gatherer groups in Peru and central Africa. Anger appears to be a particularly effective bargaining strategy for physically strong men.

Interestingly, this pattern didn’t hold for women. Instead, women's anger correlated with popularity and attractiveness rather than physical strength. Attractive and popular women are more likely to express anger, relative to less attractive women, presumably by withdrawing benefits (as opposed to inflicting costs, as men tend to do).

Anger isn't always sparked by severe offenses or insults. More frequently, it arises from smaller, ambiguous situations—like not receiving a party invitation or having one's dinner suggestion ignored by friends. Even something seemingly minor, like forgetting someone's birthday, can imply a lack of value or importance, activating feelings of anger.

Social comparisons amplify these emotions. For example, if your girlfriend forgets your birthday but remembers her ex’s, it may feel like a clear sign she values him more, increasing your frustration. Similarly, if your friend won’t lend you his car but freely lends it to someone else, you may interpret this as evidence that you have lower social status in his eyes.

People also respond with anger to inanimate objects, but interestingly the response is sometimes similar to what happens when people are angry at other social beings. Your dishwasher doesn’t work and you want to bang your fist on it, out of some unconscious hope that violence or the threat of it will get the object to do what you want.

Interestingly, I think there can sometimes be an evolutionary misfiring here, especially among young guys. I remember seeing my roommate get angry at losing at a video game and punching a hole in the wall. This doesn’t make rational sense, but if the mental program is something like feeling mistreated/disrespected → violence then this might just be a glitch in an otherwise adaptive system.

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Sell’s research distinguishes clearly between two powerful emotions: anger and hatred. Anger, as previously noted, seeks improved treatment from another person.

Hatred, on the other hand, is fundamentally different. It arises from the belief that your life will be better if the target of your hatred no longer exists.

To understand hatred clearly, Sell contrasts it with love.

Love occurs when you feel your life improves due to another person's existence.

Hatred is the exact opposite—it occurs when you perceive someone else's mere existence as a detriment to your life. Someone who feels hatred desires the complete elimination of the hated individual. But attempting direct violence or murder carries significant risks. The targeted individual may fight back. Or the attacker might face severe consequences. So people adopt more subtle and indirect strategies to hurt someone they hate.

So instead people find ways to inflict indirect harm at minimal personal cost. Spreading harmful rumors. Turning others against the hated individual. Subtly sabotaging their opportunities.

Such strategies reduce the risk of retaliation and are easier to manage than direct violence.

Anger, in contrast, typically manifests openly and obviously, with visible expressions such as the universally recognized "angry face." Hatred, however, can be more secretive and hidden. This makes it difficult to immediately detect.

Interestingly, both strong and weak people are equally likely to experience hatred, unlike anger, which is more commonly expressed by physically stronger individuals. Another notable difference is that anger usually arises in response to direct harm or disrespect. You typically won’t become angry unless someone has personally wronged you or someone you care about.

You can feel hate, though, for someone who hasn’t directly harmed you.

Imagine a stalker who is obsessed with you. They lavish you with attention, gifts, and praise. They intrude into your life and disturb your loved ones. You likely wouldn’t feel anger because the stalker isn’t mistreating you in a conventional sense. Instead, you would be more likely to feel hatred, perceiving their existence as harmful to your well-being.

These emotional responses evolved in ancestral environments, where every social interaction carried implications for future interactions. Anger was adaptive, as expressing it could recalibrate another person’s behavior for the long term. In modern contexts, however, anger often arises pointlessly.

Getting mad at a stranger who cuts you off in traffic. One of my old roommates kept a pistol under his passenger seat and if anyone cut him off in traffic he would roll his window down and wave his gun around in the air.

We can recognize the futility of anger in these cases. But we often cannot help but react with rage due to deep evolutionary impulses.

Anger and hatred differ in other ways. If two angry people both desire the same resource, the one who desires it less will usually yield to the other. However, if two people hate each other, the dynamic changes drastically. Even if the other person desires the resource more, someone motivated by hatred may refuse to concede, going so far as to harm themselves just to prevent the hated individual from benefiting.

Anger can lead to zero-sum outcomes—one wins, one loses.

Hatred is worse than anger, in that it can result in negative-sum outcomes, where both sides suffer losses just to hurt each other.