Outrage and curiosity

By koenfucius on August 2, 2024

Outrage seems to rule the information waves. Might we be giving in too easily to that emotion? How might we turn it down a few notches?

Last Friday, a speech by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Florida, and a particular section of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games both led to a (social) media storm that raged for several days. Yet, in both cases, once the dust settled, the commotion seems to have been somewhat misguided, based on a somewhat selective interpretation of the events in question. How come?

Perception is (not quite) reality

What we perceive is not just what our senses tell us and nothing else. It is based on prior beliefs and assumptions and on our perspective on the context. It is tempting to believe that we can observe a neutral and objective reality, but in fact we cannot distinguish it from our perception – as the political scientist Lee Atwater famously said, "perception is reality".

Optical illusions and stage magicians exploit this very effectively: dark grey is light grey, and people get sawn in half – or at least, that is what seems to be the case. But higher up in the cognitive chain, we can be subject to similar effects, not on sensory data, but on the meaning we give to them. Was what your colleague just said a genuine question, a barely concealed sarcastic remark, or something else? Is the person who fails to respond to your message deliberately ignoring you, busy, forgetful, working on crafting a wonderfully helpful reply, or something else? Does that teenager's T-shirt signal disrespect for a decent society, an idiosyncratic personality or something else?

An outrageous signal of disrespect for decency, or something else? (image: Hard Seat Sleeper/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Scrutinizing every possibility, and verifying its accuracy and appropriateness to ensure we reach a correct conclusion consumes a lot of energy and time – both scarce resources. Applying brute force to examine a situation rapidly becomes impossibly cumbersome.

So, rather than on onerous conscious pondering, we often rely on something that delivers quick conclusions: our emotions. These are mental and physical states that arise usually as a result of an external or internal stimulus and, as the etymology of the term suggests, aimed at prompting some behaviour ("motion") in response.

One such emotion is outrage, a strong sense of anger or resentment. It can stem from a wide range of (perceived) wrongs, including unfairness or injustice, violations of social or ethical norms, threats to personal or group identity, abuse of power or authority, and harm to vulnerable individuals or groups. Its moral grounds make it extra powerful – it transcends the realm of trade-offs and diversity of preferences, and inhabits the realm of the absolute right and wrong. Moral outrage can also find its origin in people's personal (as opposed to collective) sense of guilt, research by psychologists Zachary Rothschild and Lucas Keefer suggests, related to similar transgressions they themselves committed or where they were directly or indirectly complicit, or even for general moral failings. Expressing outrage may produce a feeling of moral superiority or signal it, and thus cultivate a (more) positive self-image.

The downsides (and upsides) of outrage

Strong emotions like outrage, in response to a situation, may shut down any inclination we might have to and purposefully examine the context. Reasoning doesn't get much of a look in, except perhaps in the shape of motivated reasoning: we reason backward and infer a plausible cause for it, one single interpretation among several others that we fail to consider. Our outrage justifies itself.

In the International Handbook of Anger, a chapter by psychologist Paul Litvak and colleagues identifies different ways in which anger (a main component of outrage) can impair our decision making. It can have both social effects (increasing prejudice against relevant outgroups, notably those perpetrating the alleged outrage), and cognitive effects (a strong tendency to attribute causality and blame, selective attention to stimuli that are congruent with the anger, and a preference for heuristic processing to more conscious, deliberate processing).

Furthermore, outrage is an emotion that transmits particularly easily through social media, research by psychologist Molly Crockett suggests: there is little or no cost to express it, and it is easy to reach a receptive audience. This increases the chance of a message going viral, and that then rewards the originator with an enhanced reputation in the audience's eyes. Research by psychologist William Brady and colleagues corroborates this: the authors found that messages which described a situation in moral-emotional language were 20% more likely to be shared, especially within ideological groups. Among the examples they cite two posts, from either side of the debate around same-sex marriage: "Gay marriage is a diabolical, evil lie aimed at destroying our nation", and "New Mormon Policy Bans Children Of Same-Sex Parents-this church wants to punish children? Are you kidding me?!? Shame".

[A supper, but not quite the last one? (image via Artnet)]

A supper, but not quite the last one? (image via Artnet)

It is not hard to see how outrage and the multifarious ways in which it can influence our decision making and behaviour, might explain much of the commotion around both the Paris Olympics opening ceremony and Donald Trump's speech. The narrative around the person of Trump as an aspiring authoritarian may well be congruent with statements like "In four years you won't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you won't have to vote", but is at least intellectual laziness and arguably culpable neglect not to verify the context from which these fragments were lifted. Rewinding just a couple of minutes shows that he was talking about the need for his Christian supporters to vote en masse to outweigh the (allegedly) large number of rigged votes, and his intention to take steps to eliminate electoral fraud, not about abolishing elections. Open to debate, for sure, but hardly deserving of outrage. Similarly, a deep aversion to drag queens and queerdom in general may have led some to see a certain section in the ceremony as a shocking parody of Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper mural, mocking Christianity. Outrage may well have made them miss incongruent elements such as the presence of more than twelve 'apostles' and indeed of Greek-Roman god of bon-vivantism Bacchus, or the similarity with other works of art, notably The Feast of the Gods by Jan van Bijlert (which, unlike Da Vinci's Last Supper, does feature Bacchus). The performance in question may not have been to everyone's taste, but the actual evidence of blasphemy is pretty thin. With outrage as a point of departure however, rather than as a well-considered conclusion, the social media bandwagon was up and running in no time, and those who shared the outrage happily jumped aboard, from the Harris electoral campaign to Bishop Robert Barron.

Outrage can certainly be a positive, constructive emotion, capable of driving beneficial social change through collective action, argue psychologist Victoria Spring and colleagues in The Upside of Outrage. Examples that come to mind are the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the embracing of same-sex marriage in many countries. But if outrage leads to an impulsive reaction, shutting off any considered thought, it leads too often to collective, misguided knee-jerk reactions based on misunderstanding, misinterpretation or misframing of a situation. In the least bad case, this means we make a fool of ourselves. But it can also needlessly fuel polarization, and indeed lead to violence, such as in the riots in the UK earlier this week following the deadly stabbing attack at a dance and yoga class, fuelled by speculative and inaccurate rumours on social media (that the perpetrator was a Muslim refugee).

Perhaps the impulsive dominance of outrage of the emotion of outrage can be tempered by another emotion: curiosity. It can stimulate us to seek knowledge and understanding, so we can make a sober, prudent judgement and reacting in the right way. These two emotions form a powerful couple. But while curiosity can be safely let out on its own, it is a good idea to make sure outrage is always in the company of its partner.