In a recent legal battles over the possibility of mandating COVID-19 vaccines, those on one side see such requirements as a tyrannical overreach into personal liberty to make medical decisions. On the other side, individuals are incensed that mandates aren’t in effect because this effectively hobbles collective efforts to mitigate the spread and continued mutation of the COVID-19 virus. It’s no secret that highly politicised issues like this seem to elicit strong emotional reactions, particularly feelings of intense anger. But not only are these feelings common, individuals seem actively motivated to seek out stories of tragedy, scandal, and injustice on a seemingly unending quest to feel moral outrage.
Moral outrage is typically defined as anger toward a perceived moral violation. What distinguishes moral outrage from other forms of anger (e.g., annoyance, feeling insulted) is that it involves a specifically moral dimension; there must be both 1) a personal moral standard and 2) a perceived violator of that standard. Additionally, moral outrage seems to reflect anger in combination with intense feelings of disgust. While some forms of anger are relatively ‘pure’ (e.g, being angry at a rude comment), moral outrage is best described as an emotional cocktail blending two intensely negative emotional experiences.
As a psychologist, I’ve long been personally interested in outrage because it seems to fly in the face of so many of our everyday intuitions about human nature. After all, wouldn’t people rather avoid unpleasant experiences that could reduce their happiness? Given the choice, people seem to prefer pleasant to unpleasant experiences but moral outrage seems a peculiar exception. Moreover, decades of data clearly demonstrate that societies like America are coming apart at the civic seams, with polarisation rapidly increasing year after year. Why would individuals actively want to feel such strong negative emotions about their leaders, fellow citizens, and others with whom their own lives are inextricably linked?
Counterintuitively, psychologists have long argued that humans seem particularly calibrated to remember things that make us feel bad and to base our decisions on negative emotions. Outrage, particularly on social media, seems like an extension of this fact. Studies show that not only do individuals encounter more information about immoral behavior online, but this exposure also elicits substantially stronger feelings of moral outrage.
To return to the question: what is the allure of all this moral outrage? Recent research in psychology highlights the valuable role that these experiences of outrage play in