Emilian Mihailov, Cristina Voinea, and Constantin Vică (University of Bucharest), "Is Online Moral Outrage Outrageous? Rethinking the Indignation Machine"
Science and Engineering Ethics, 2023
Emilian Mihailov, Cristina Voinea, Constantin Vică, Science and Engineering Ethics, volume 29, Article number: 12 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-023-00435-3
By Emilian Mihailov, Cristina Voinea, and Constantin Vică
Anger, disgust or frustration generated by the belief that a person threatens the core values and well-being of a community, has roots in the evolved capacity to be outraged by injustices, which is unique to humans. What social media did was to liberalize the market for moral outrage: we can choose multiple “causes” a day and then we can publicly manifest our outrage alongside like-minded others, in order to vilify transgressors. Moral outrage gained a bad reputation, but is it really justified?
Sometimes, moral outrage can facilitate collective action and social change: for example, Russia's war against Ukraine was immediately met with backlash and condemnation from around the world, which helped mobilize people to offer support for refugees. At other times, people react with disproportionate violence against individuals who make foolish jokes or hold morally reprehensible positions.
The purpose of our paper was to deepen the understanding of when online moral outrage divides people, and when it becomes a moral force for positive collective action. We used moral psychology and an evolutionary perspective to argue that moral outrage evolved as part of a third party punishment mechanism, which is essentially an instrument to facilitate cooperation that responds to different types of moral norms. We then looked at the features of social media platforms that shape how we perceive and engage in moral outrage.
Our interdisciplinary approach reveals a plurality of moral experiences involved in moral outrage expressions. We showed that the specifics of violating different types of moral norms influences the effects of moral outrage on polarization. It seems that if the norms violated are identity-based norms (purity, sacred values, loyalty), it is likely that people will tend to divide, given that the function of identity-based norms is to prepare ingroup members for competition with other groups. Whereas if the norms violated are harm-based, people will tend to reach common ground because harm/care norms are shared more universally compared to loyalty and purity norms which are conditioned by a local context. On social media conflicting moral communities become more visible to each other. Because these mediums lower the costs of expressing moral outrage and foster group-based identification, they can tip the balance towards the negative effects of moral outrage expression. Moreover, on social media we are steered towards ‘Expressionist’ experiences, as platforms reward social status seeking, with no care for the aftermath. In the expressionist mode of online existence, anger is demanded and consumed, generating collective moral chaos in circumstances of ambiguity, conflictual normative communities, and persuasive technologies.
Ultimately, we need to change the design of social media platforms so that moral outrage becomes less socially corrosive. Social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement and, so, they will implicitly facilitate ‘outrage cascades’ that oftentimes degenerate in bullying, public shaming and even cruel behaviors. Firstly, reforming the ways social media engages users could benefit from the extensive research on nudges and choice architecture. Nudging interventions have been successfully implemented in many areas of public policies that address obesity, smoking, distracted driving, food safety, organ donation. Secondly, we should design social media to become less status oriented. In the early days of online socialization, users shared information and experiences to close ones and professional peers. Now, algorithms incentivize users to build personal brands, quantified through likes and shares. Last but not least, we point towards the need for future research about how online moral protest can generate a potential novel risk for democratic civic engagement. When ample moral protest in the online environment does not have the expected effects on the offline realm, there is a serious danger of inducing moral disillusion among people. It would be a dissonant world if we see that moral protest is boiling online, without spilling over into the offline world. The translation problem could make people lose faith in solving public moral issues, reinforcing existing social inequalities and providing opportunities for authoritarian movements.