Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Open accessAbstract
As individuals and political leaders increasingly interact in online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of emotion perception online. Here, we propose that social media users overperceive levels of moral outrage felt by individuals and groups, inflating beliefs about intergroup hostility. Using a Twitter field survey, we measured authors' moral outrage in real time and compared authors' reports to observers' judgements of the authors' moral outrage. We find that observers systematically overperceive moral outrage in authors, inferring more intense moral outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages actually reported. This effect was stronger in participants who spent more time on social media to learn about politics. Preregistered confirmatory behavioural experiments found that overperception of individuals' moral outrage causes overperception of collective moral outrage and inflates beliefs about hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. Together, these results highlight how individual-level overperceptions of online moral outrage produce collective overperceptions that have the potential to warp our social knowledge of moral and political attitudes.
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People tend to misinterpret social media posts as expressing greater outrage than the author actually feels.
“people tend to misinterpret social media posts as expressing greater outrage than the author actually feels (Brady et al. 2023)”
From Social Media and Morality. (2024) · cites this paper as Brady et al. 2023
Algorithmic amplification of emotionally and morally charged content may feed back into human social learning-for instance, inflating beliefs about the normative value of expressing moral outrage, increasing outgroup animosity or creating echo chambers and filter bubbles.
“The algorithmic amplification of such content may then feed back into human social learning-for instance, inflating beliefs about the normative value of expressing moral outrage 138,139 , increasing outgroup animosity 140 or creating echo chambers and filter bubbles [141][142][143] .”
From Machine culture (2023) · cites this paper as [139]
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- Authors
- Brady, W. J., McLoughlin, K. L., Torres, M. P., Luo, K. F., Gendron, M., & Crockett, M. J.
- Affiliations
- Northwestern University (US)
- Princeton University (US)
- Yale University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Brady, William J.
- Crockett, M. J.
- Venue
- Nature Human Behaviour
- Published
- 2023-04-10
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 917-927
- ISSN
- 2397-3374 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4363672807
- Semantic Scholar
- ce08075b1d0b7d31f5f2ee0daf7412bb06af046b
- Cited by
- 121
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 47 · 2025: 30 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 17.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature Human Behaviour (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1808868)
- Yale University
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- moral outrage, emotion perception, social networking sites, intergroup hostility, affective polarization, ideological extremity, political attitudes, social media use, Twitter
- MeSH terms
- Communication, Emotions, Hostility, Humans, Morals, Social Networking
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