Jennifer Parlamis

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.

And many years of research showed that.

And I thought, well, this is really important because we have anger all around us all the time.

If you think about road rage, or trolls on the internet, or divisive politics, or wars, anger is everywhere.

And maybe we're not really knowing how we should manage that.

So my research early in my career asked some really critical questions, I thought.

One is, if venting doesn't work, why not?

And if venting doesn't work, why do we keep doing it?