Lecture | Molly Crockett | Digital Outrage: Mechanisms and Consequences

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Moral outrage shapes fundamental aspects of social life and is now widespread in online social networks. How does social media change the expression of moral outrage and its social consequences? Drawing on evidence from neuroeconomics, I will develop a theory that social media platforms amplify moral outrage by exploiting our capacity to learn from social rewards. Data from observational studies of millions of social media posts and behavioral experiments confirm that social rewards amplify moral outrage at the level of individual users. I’ll then present evidence for several troubling consequences of amplified digital outrage: it facilitates the spread of misinformation, exacerbates hate speech and networked harassment, and inflates collective beliefs about intergroup hostility. I’ll conclude with a discussion of the ethical and policy implications of these findings.

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