How Anger Becomes the Only Choice: An Effective Cognitive Repertoire Bottleneck Model of Emotional Selection

This study proposes a novel theoretical framework to explain the phenomenon in which anger becomes dominant within organizations and is ultimately fixed as the only effective choice. While previous studies have examined anger, organizational silence, and toxic leadership as separate phenomena, this study integrates these perspectives and reinterprets them from a socio-evolutionary viewpoint. This study introduces the concept of the Effective Cognitive Repertoire (ECR). ECR refers to the set of cognitive and behavioral strategies that an individual perceives as effectively available for selection. This concept is based on the premise that human behavior is not determined by fixed traits, but is constrained by the structure of the choice space. Furthermore, in order to extend this individual-level concept to the collective level, this study defines the effective cultural population size (Ne_culture) and conceptualizes it as the total amount of behavioral diversity that actually functions within a group. Based on these concepts, this study proposes the ECR bottleneck model. In this model, factors such as biased reward structures, imitation, institutional justification, and the decline of psychological safety interact with one another, leading to a rapid contraction of ECR and a corresponding reduction in Ne_culture. As a result, behavioral diversity is lost, stochastic processes similar to cultural drift are amplified, and specific behaviors, particularly anger, become dominant. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that this process exhibits a structural correspondence with the stochastic processes observed in the Wright–Fisher model, and suggests the possibility of mathematically formalizing cultural behavioral selection. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in redefining problematic behaviors not as personality traits, but as consequences of structural constraints within the choice space. From a practical perspective, this study suggests that organizational dysfunction arises not from the presence of specific behaviors, but from the disappearance of alternative behaviors, and that improvement requires the expansion of available choices. This framework provides a theoretical foundation for empirical research on cultural bottlenecks and behavioral convergence, as well as for future mathematical formalization of cultural behavioral selection.