Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Social media really is making us more morally outraged

Popular Science: “To no one’s surprise, scientists from Yale University found that social media platforms like Twitter amplify our collective moral outrage. Additionally, they found that it was mostly politically moderate users who learned to be more outraged over time. Their findings are detailed in a new study in Science Advances.  “We were interested in broadly trying to understand this phenomenon that most people who use social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter, are aware of—which is that when you log in, there’s often a lot of political content that floats around in your newsfeed, and it usually comes with a lot of moral outrage, especially during key times in American politics,” says William Brady, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of psychology at Yale University.

Further, Brady and his team wanted to tease out why moral outrage seems to be amplified in online social networks, and whether social learning—how we learn new behaviors by socializing with other humans—can play a role in influencing our decisions to express moral outrage…”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.