Moral outrage and neuroscience
The filter fiasco
I decided to write this article in the wake of what I like to call the recent ‘catastrophe of offense’ that gripped the Nepali internet community. A simple, innocent and creative gesture was marred by a hailstorm of outrage. Aayush Shrestha, a Nepali comedian and entrepreneur, created a ‘Kumari filter’ on Instagram for people to use on their selfies and share with friends. Many enjoyed it, but many others were offended to the point of threatening him with harm – so much that he had to take the filter off the platform.
Kumari is an old continuing Newa tradition of appointing a pre-menstrual virgin girl from a specific part of the Newa community as a ‘living goddess’. Some historians say that the tradition was established by the Malla kings of the late Newa civilization to protect their monarchy, which the invading Shah dynasty later continued to protect their own (even when they had actively suppressed other aspects of Newa culture and language) – perhaps because of the superstitious and spiritual significance of Kumari worship (1). And just because this was supposedly an old tradition, some people got offended even a decade after Nepal ousted its monarchy to become a republic, when the Kumari tradition had no purpose other than tourism revenue. Some called the filter an insult to the Kumari tradition, others called it cultural appropriation. But whatever the criticism, one thing was clear – people were morally outraged.
There has never been unanimous consensus on the topic of offense, and the divided opinions on this issue highlight something important: what offends people is subjective, varying from person to person and culture to culture. The effects of acting on that offense, however, are not. Whether outrage repairs a wrong or simply spreads harm is something we can actually observe and weigh. That distinction matters, because it is what lets us call some outrage misdirected without pretending anyone’s feelings were illegitimate. But whatever people’s justification for being offended, I was more interested in the phenomenon of social-media outrage itself – because even I get outraged on Facebook sometimes. This fiasco, petty as it might seem, inspired me to look into the matter. So what really is moral outrage on social media, and how is it shaping public discourse in the digital age?
What is moral outrage?
Most outrage on social media involves a moral issue. Morality is itself subjective, but moral outrage has been a significant part of human history, shaping our civilization to the point that we have devised organized concepts such as ethics, rights, and justice (2). Morality is internal and individualistic, but moral outrage motivates action that may or may not bring about social or individual change. It is as old as humanity itself. In the past, expressing outrage to someone’s face was energy-intensive and costly, so people thought hard before doing so (3) – they tend to weigh its cost-benefit ratio first. A behavioral scientist from Yale University writes, in her article published in Nature Human Behavior, that a stimulus (information) normally leads to a response (behavior), which then produces outcomes (consequences). Treating that as the baseline for natural human behavior, social media alters and exacerbates it from many angles. It amplifies stimuli by increasing exposure to emotional content; it heightens emotional experience and reduces the effort and constraints on responding, forming a habit; and it changes the consequences – lowering the cost of empathy, reducing social benefits, but raising personal ones such as financial gain, group approval, or attention (3). In short, social media adds fuel to our natural bonfire of outrage, and tends to benefit individuals more than society. She argues that technology has made expressing opinions as easy as a click, while disconnecting us from the people we are angry at. Outrage is far easier to express online than in real life, and the attention-capturing algorithms of social media magnify the effect. Clickbait is pushed to users through ads and their own usage patterns. If someone’s interests are conservative, religious, and nationalistic, they are constantly fed similar information – reducing exposure to contrasting views and making them less likely to change their mind. The same happens on the other side of the spectrum.
When people assume someone is doing something morally wrong, they tend to gossip to damage that person’s reputation. Damaging a reputation is a form of punishment, so people punish moral wrongdoers. Offline, punishing someone takes real energy, so it is usually difficult. But research shows that when we are disconnected from our targets, we hesitate less before punishing them (4). Social media amplifies that disconnect: it is far easier to attack a profile picture or an avatar, which dehumanizes them. Research also shows people are less willing to spend money punishing unfairness when they can express outrage through written or recorded messages rather than in person (2).
When social media makes outrage this easy, our tolerance for displeasing information dwindles, and so does our threshold for outrage (3). We become easily triggered by merely disagreeable content and mistake it for something morally atrocious. Repeating this cycle, she argues, forms a habit of shaming people. The strange part is that we may not even feel outraged while doing so; her proposed mechanism is that repeated exposure dulls the empathetic distress (3) we would normally feel when shaming or punishing someone in real life. If that holds, then unaware of it, we can slip into a vicious cycle.
News considered ‘morally outrageous’ also spreads faster than news that is not – perhaps explained by our evolutionary penchant for gossip and punishment. Moralized information framed in emotional language spreads faster within a group of like-minded people than beyond it, creating echo chambers (5). Echo chambers offer security in numbers, making it easier to reinforce accepted views and attack unaccepted ones. Backlash is also less likely when you express outrage among like-minded people – like shouting an offensive statement from within a crowd. This is why people are so eager to express outrage when a group backs them: it is a chance to display their moral credentials to that group (5). Moral norms are set by group agreement, and those who violate them are punished or shamed. This holds for any group on any side of the spectrum. Progressive groups are outraged when someone speaks against abortion rights, conservative groups when someone speaks for them; the emotion is the same regardless of the trigger (6).
What are the consequences of social media outrage?
Outrage is not always detrimental – it is often an important driver of positive social and economic change, and outrage on social media can be fruitful too. Consider the #MeToo movement, though I think it is better understood as solidarity than as outrage. Reporting sexual abuse and harassment once cost victims dearly, but #MeToo has lowered those costs so offenders can be prosecuted. Less powerful groups can challenge more powerful ones and get wrongdoers punished (3). Even so, the movement carries plenty of misdirected outrage, sometimes shaming innocent people before they are proven guilty. In this respect, social media limits the benefits of moral outrage in several ways:
1. It sorts people into ideological groups and keeps information from reaching the actual victims or perpetrators, since it just reverberates within an echo chamber (5,7).
2. By lowering the threshold for outrage – on Crockett’s account – it can erode our ability to tell heinous crimes apart from mere disagreements (3).
3. It builds a habit of outrage that distracts us from meaningful social causes.
4. It deepens social and political division as people subconsciously sort themselves into echo chambers (4).
By misdirected, I do not mean outrage I happen to disagree with; I mean outrage whose costs outweigh any corrective benefit – outrage that punishes without protecting anyone and damages people without preventing harm. The reaction to Aayush’s Kumari filter fits that description. Fueled by still more misdirected outrage, it benefited no one and simply robbed people of a small chance to amuse themselves during the COVID-19 lockdown or show off their creativity. No victim was spared anything, because there was no victim to spare.
Where do we go from here?
So most outrage on social media, especially the misdirected kind, is counter-productive to any cause, or to progress itself. Often we do not even know why we became outraged in the first place. Social media can connect us, reunite us with distant friends and family, build communities, and let us share ideas. But we shouldn’t assume it is always a safe space, because much of the time it is not. By design, it can be severely polarizing. Studying human behavior and the technology behind these platforms matters for public discourse and wellbeing, because we clearly cannot stop everyone online from behaving as they do – no matter how morally appalling we find them. We have to expect such upsets and guard against being consumed by them, so we do not misdirect our outrage and needlessly harm or shame others. Outrage, in my view, is best kept as a last resort – after a good deal of thought.
Reference
1. Nepali GS. The Newars (An Ethno-Sociological study of the Himalayan Community). United Asia Publication; 1965.
2. Xiao E, Houser D. Emotion expression in human punishment behavior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 May 17;102(20):7398–401.
3. Crockett MJ. Moral outrage in the digital age. Nat Hum Behav [Internet]. 2017 Nov 18 [cited 2020 May 9];1(11):769–71. Available from: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0213-3
4. Fincher KM, Tetlock PE. Perceptual dehumanization of faces is activated by norm violations and facilitates norm enforcement. J Exp Psychol Gen. 2016 Feb 1;145(2):131–46.
5. Brady WJ, Wills JA, Jost JT, Tucker JA, Van Bavel JJ. Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci [Internet]. 2017 Jul 11 [cited 2020 May 9];114(28):7313–8. Available from: http://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618923114
6. Atari M, Mostafazadeh Davani A, Dehghani M. Body Maps of Moral Concerns. Psychol Sci [Internet]. 2020 Feb 1 [cited 2020 May 9];31(2):160–9. Available from: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797619895284
7. Salerno JM, Peter-Hagene LC. The Interactive Effect of Anger and Disgust on Moral Outrage and Judgments. Psychol Sci. 2013;24(10):2069–78.
