A minute-by-minute reconstruction of the emotions of Americans on September 11, 2001, was carried out by researchers at Mainz University, Germany.The authors of the study, Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner and Boris Egloff analyzed freely accessible, anonymous data published on the Internet platform WikiLeaks on 25 November 2009.
The data includes a total of 573,000 records with 6.4 million words sent from over 85,000 different US pagers, over a period of 24 hours from 3am to 3 pm on the following day, showing the emotional reaction of thousands of Americans.
Normally expected reactions would be sadness or fear but according to the researchers, Americans had high levels of rage and anger regarding the events on September 11, 2001.
Psychologists Mitja Back and Albrecht Küfner from the department of Personality Psychology and Diagnostics, at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz were “extremely surprised by these results.”
“We expected to find that this tragedy would have evoked a massive wave of sadness or fear, but our findings showed a continuous increase in anger and rage as time went on.”
They used automatic text analysis that looked for words like sadness, crying, fear, worry or hate, within the reports, and found that sadness was not the first reaction to the attacks.
After the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the twin towers collapsed, there were several panic outbreaks, that also had much to do with the initial information about the terrorist background of the attacks, but soon after, the panic faded away.
Back explains that “this was probably due to the ongoing flow of additional background information provided in the media, which reduced the uncertainty and fear.”
The anger feelings however, were present since the beginning, since the first plane hit the first tower, and kept growing as more information on the terrorist scenery was being released.
At the end of the day, the anger level was ten times higher than at the beginning.
The results of this study offer an explanation to what followed the 9/11 events, like the rise of the discrimination rate and the offensive position of the Bush period, getting to cases of civil rights violation in the name of national security.
“Because anger and rage evoke indignation and a desire for revenge, we are now getting an initial idea of what was going on inside the people of America in the moments after the attacks,”added Küfner.
The results of the study have been published online in the journal Psychological Science.
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