The perils of walking slow: scientists analyze sidewalk rage

Wait it is my fault the route planners made the routes such that the path from one train to the next, goes through a choke-point, but did not consider the travel between trains could be delayed? Seriously, lots of places where you buy tickets have time limits on the transfer where you must make a specific train (or bus or whatever) or you forfeit your fare. You are going to tell me that if someone blocks the route and causes the transfer to be missed it is my fault for time mis-management? What instead should I have done? My travel is screwed up whether I arrive at the destination late or on-time. I may have lost money because of the situation. But it is all my fault? I may have had a part in it, you know going that route or whatever, but you are seriously playing blame the victim here.

Inside my control or outside my control doesn't matter. I don't care when people do things that don't have negative consequence to me. I do care when I am responsible for doing something that has negative consequence to me. The common denominator here is not my control, just that i don't like the negative consequences.

I understand now... please let me hear how you would use this to troll the rape victim that it is really just her self absorption that makes it a problem, she shouldn't have been so narcissistic about her genitalia. Or the family of someone murdered, and how they really just should have spent more time with him, instead of missing him now. It is unreasonable in both cases to thing that life would have gone perfectly and they may have lived their life without rape and murder.

Your style of trolling is actually pretty good dark humor, now that I get it.

Whoa, you jumped to some extremes, and I would be hard-pressed to agree they are analogous. You reshaped your situation to suggest that you did indeed have no way to plan better, that somebody's action was directly responsible; logically, my opinions cannot possibly apply, and I think the conclusion you drew by misapplying my opinions was a stretch. In my response, I brought up traffic lights and other such things; in yours, you are now on some narrow path with a choke point.

Allow me to depart from the time management answer (it was a convenient way to reveal that both parties were at fault in one way or another), since it does not apply at all in the new scenario, and let's meet up with my core point in this whole thread.

As I understand your hypothetical situation, a single person stopped at a choke point, and because of them keeping you from moving forward, you missed an important rendezvous. Missing this means you take financial loss. You are going to experience a flash of anger for your loss. You have a target for your anger, the person who blocked you.

My core point is this: You are angry because the situation is out of your control, did not match your plan. The world did not operate according to your desires; someone else barged in and interrupted it, stopping you from moving forward. I propose that the amount of anger you experience is proportionate to how wrapped up with yourself that you are.

Here is the litmus test. What if you find out soon after that it was because that person had a stroke right there at the choke point? If you are like most normal people in this situation, you will suddenly experience a mix of emotions: lightened anger (it is still there, since things did not go your way), a sense of shame (oh, they had a really good reason, and you were really targeting them), a touch of concern, and a bit of relief that something in the world makes some sense.

In the absence of this information, having nothing but your own viewpoint to go on, you would have remained angry, even angrier as time passed. With somebody else's viewpoint, suddenly it seems unjustified to an extent. Amazing how seeing through another's eyes changes the emotion.

I didn't reshape, I just mis-assumed everywhere had the same stupid transfer rules as here. I was corrected by the internet. Second, the assumption that anyone would be late or more than inconvenineced and lose a fare was your jumping to conclusions, not mine. I never said I was late, only that I missed a train transfer.

Stop telling me why I would be angry in the situation. I am not angry because of the crowds that I hate but can't control. I'm not angry because of the people that play music on the train when I would prefer quiet. I am angry because the door-stander caused an actual negative consequence in my life, beyond "i don't like it and can't control it".

Now, unlike you, and most people according to you, I can separate my emotions and look at them. If the case was that the door stopper was not just gawking, but in fact had a stroke (speaking of jumping to extremes... this is a different case alread, seriously, gawking is a choice to stop the door whereas I presume stroke is not but I will set aside this completely irrational comparison for now), I would in fact still be angry that I missed the train and the fare. I would also feel sad for the sufferer and his family, that can seriously affect the life. I would also understand if they were angry, the whole situation has some pretty negative consequences for them (you on the other hand would apparently tell them its their own fault and they shouldn't be angry). If I was actively hindering or getting in the way of EMTs and other people who could help the sufferer and make the whole thing run smoothly, yes I would feel a bit of shame, as hindering that process, intentionally or not has negative consequences for that person. When I found out it was not that person's choice to block the door, I would no longer be angry towards them. Note however: the anger at missing the train and related consequences didn't go away.

Now back to the difference between as stroke and a choice to stand and gawk. They are fundamentally different as one is the choice made by a person and the other is something happening to a person (if they somehow were trying to commit suicide by stroke, it collapses back to the door blocker by choice scenario). If a person makes a choice to do something that has negative consequences to me, I will be angry because those consequences are not just falling out of the universe, they are the result of intent.

I still think you are just trying to set up your world so that you can act as you choose and tell other people that you are strictly in the right at all times. Basically you don't seem to think there is any difference between the results of your actions and the results of the weather. This is silly. Every person who participates and thus reaps benefit from society also has a certain amount of responsibility to act in the interest of that society, aka not gawking in doorways affecting many instances of missed train.

Finally: what harm comes to the world if I am angry towards a person doing harm to me? Seriously, you seem so against anger, but who cares if anger happens? It certainly does nothing to harm anyone, no matter how much anger I direct at them. Should I act on that anger, perhaps there could be harm but not just from being angry.