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Essay / Anger in Society
People in society express their anger in various ways, for seemingly unrelated reasons. There are three main sources of unnecessary anger in society: when people don't get what they want, have divergent opinions, and when they feel like their time is wasted. An article by Edward O'Brien, Brad Bushman and Phyllis Anastasio explores the role of your sense of entitlement on the perception of the passage of time. The idea is quite simple. At any given moment, everyone feels some sort of entitlement. By checking out at a retailer, you may feel especially entitled to better service. So a 10 minute wait for a slow cashier can feel like an hour. On the other hand, if you were sitting in a White House waiting room before you had the chance to meet the president, you might consider yourself lucky to be there. In this case, a 10 minute wait may not seem that long. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In one of the studies, the authors simply looked at the correlation between people's sense of entitlement and their perception of time. The authors gave people a number of questionnaires, including one measuring feelings of entitlement. Then they asked students to complete either a boring task or copy a letter matrix. Or a less boring task, use the same letter array to find people's names. Students performed this task for exactly 10 minutes and then were asked how long it took. To make judging time more difficult, there was no clock in the room and students were asked to remove their watches before beginning the study. When people performed a relatively fun task, there was no relationship between the amount of time they thought they spent completing the task and their overall sense of entitlement. In contrast, when students completed a boring task, the more entitled people generally felt, the more time they felt they spent on that task. What does all this mean? Time is one of the most precious resources we have. The greater your sense of entitlement, the more you want to avoid wasting this resource. As a result, the more entitled you feel, the more anger you feel when your time is wasted. Even if no one appreciates this frustration, this mechanism can be useful. If we don't feel frustrated when our time is wasted, we might persist in doing things that aren't worth our effort...