Soon after the snows of began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. When the wife found out, she was livid. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail. It asked the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether punches had been thrown.
Greenfield, population 18,, was an unusual place to plumb these depths. It was a middle-class town with a prosperous tool-and-die factory, where churches outnumbered bars two to one. Citizens were private and humble, andβexcept for a few recent letters to the editor lamenting that the high-school hockey team had been robbed in the playoffsβthe town showed little evidence of widespread resentment.
In fact, this very placidity was why Greenfield had been chosen for the study. The author of the questionnaire was James Averill, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Averill was a gentle soul, the kind of man who had once returned to a grocery store to apologize to a cashier after becoming annoyed over miscounted change.
But he was convinced that his academic colleagues misunderstood anger. He had attended many conferences where researchers had described it as a base instinct, a vestige from our savage past that served no useful purpose in contemporary life.
Despite his genial disposition, Averill had been known to mutter angrily when a driver cut him off. He felt bursts of indignation on a regular basis, as did everyone else he knew.
