Post #2: Is inducing anger in internet strangers for clicks morally acceptable?

Why does feeling angry feel so good? Let’s imagine Gronk, who lived in a small, nomadic community of 60 people 50,000 years ago. As he was going on his nightly walk around their settlement, he caught one of the community members stealing from the group harvest. Outraged, he rushed to tell the others. The group shared his anger and banished the thief. This collective outrage both rids the group of this bad actor and sends a strong signal to members: stealing is bad. 

Anger and punishment bring satisfaction: our punitive emotions evolved to fulfill an important prosocial function of community policing among our ancestors. Yes–we’ve actually evolved to feel pleasure when we punish people who violate social norms. Those who felt outrage thrived because their communities functioned well.

Gronk’s community benefits from this dopamine-driven desire to call people out. But now, every day, algorithms make it easy to find the most outrage-inducing things in the entire world and dole out digital punishment with little risk to ourselves. It is fun. It is addictive. And it makes us click another ragebait video, even when it makes us miserable.

As a social media manager for nonprofit organizations, I find myself creating TikToks that ask users, “Are you angry/unhappy/dissatisfied with the status quo? Well, you should be!” I recognize the irony of using anger to facilitate constructive social change. But isn’t social change often driven by anger? A mere reserved disapproval likely would not have desegregated schools in the U.S. or ended the apartheid in South Africa.

Protests for school desegregation in the U.S.

That leaves us with the question: Is inducing anger in internet strangers for clicks morally acceptable?

The philosopher Sukaina Hirji addresses some of these issues in her recent paper, “Outrage and the Bounds of Empathy.” She uses the case of Brock Turner and Chanel Miller to distinguish two forms of anger: reform anger and outrage anger. 

At the beginning of the trial, Miller recalls feeling reform anger toward Brock Turner, the man who raped her at a party while she was unconscious. 

“I wanted accountability and punishment, but I also hoped he was getting better. I didn’t fight to end him, I fought to convert him to my side. I wanted him to understand, to acknowledge the harm his actions had caused and reform himself.” (Miller, 2019, p. 91) 

Miller sought to engage with Turner in a moral relationship. Her reform anger meant that she saw Turner as capable of realizing he made a mistake. She thought he could reintegrate into the moral community with enough remorse. 

Miller soon realized not only that Brock would not apologize or be held accountable for his actions but also that the defense built their case on the argument that she was responsible for her own assault. In response, Miller describes being flooded with rage—her anger transformed into what Hirji calls “outrage anger.” 

Chanel Miller

Outrage anger isolates oneself from the dominant world of sense, serving two crucial functions: (i) creating a world where the victim’s outrage is taken seriously, which then (ii) serves as a space where other victims can join in solidarity. 

(i) is especially relevant in Miller’s case. Despite what the judge, key witnesses, and the defendent claimed, she is a victim of sexual assult and is not to blame for her rape. She gets closer to the truth the further she distances herself from their claims. 

Despite its usefulness, outrage anger is costly.

Firstly, it clouds our judgment, “making us less likely to be sensitive to exonerating evidence, more likely to blame third parties who are unrelated to the initial cause of anger, and more likely to act in punitive ways.” Moreover, isolating ourselves (ii), a consequence of outrage anger, also runs the risk of entrenching the beliefs and behavior of the abuser. 

Link to image

Unfortunately, social media creates an environment where everyone is encouraged to adopt uncommunicative forms of outrage. Perhaps your white friend feels guilty for making a racist comment last week and has shared several “ACAB” posts in the last 24 hours to make up for it. Or maybe your 16-year-old nephew wants to fit in with his church group, so he shares a post demanding that every woman who gets an abortion be sentenced to life in prison. Or maybe your grandmother airs her grievances on Facebook because she sees no way of making politicians listen. This desire to fit in, along with an algorithm that rewards virality to the angriest messages, leads to the echo chambers and gridlock we see today. We are baited to be in a constant state of rage without any communicative function undergirding it. 

Collectively, our rage has become unproductive. 

So how can we adapt this evolutionary quirk successfully, like Gronk did at the beginning of this discussion? And what can content creators and marketers do? 

Rage has to look different than it did 50,000 years ago. Punitive punishment can work in a tribe of 100 people, but it falters in societies of millions. Perceived abusers have and will ignore the rage directed at them before finding a home in tribes where their behavior is celebrated. Just look at the rise of misogynistic tendencies in young men.

What would productive rage in the 21st century look like? Here are some guidelines: 

1. Avoid inducing anger in situations where it would make things worse. This seems obvious, but it requires more research than you’d expect. For example, a nuclear disarmament expert told me that public outrage could actually lead to an increase in the net number of warheads if one country thinks another is backed into a corner, unable to keep up without answering to their constituents.

2. Give your audience a specific call to action.Call your elected official. Attend this protest. Vote for this referendum. Not, “get angry about this thing and post about it for the next few weeks.”

3. Humanize the opposite side.Send messages like, “These people are misguided and wrong. But there’s hope for consensus.”

4. Try to signal outside of the ingroup.Make your rage-inducing content accessible to the outgroup through messaging (i.e., avoid using language only known by the ingroup) or content (don’t make your examples only left- or right-coded).

5. Keep your own threshold high for claiming a right to outrage angerThough the costs of outrage anger are high, if you’re like Chanel Miller and you’re faced with a choice between humanizing your abuser or humanizing yourself, outrage anger might be the responsible choice. If you make content fueled by this outrage, encourage members of your audience to adopt reform anger if they can. 

   
   

Unlike Gronk, we cannot simply exile politicians or other individuals who transgress. But outrage nonetheless can serve a similar function, using the same mechanism, in modern times. Well-targeted content can produce productive outrage if it avoids dehumanizing others and provides specific, actionable ways of engagement that harness the power of reform anger for social change. As creators and consumers of content, we must rage responsibly.