Indulging in moral outrage: Do we love to hate? – Jennifer Stellar – Online Speaker

Some scholars have claimed we live in an outrage culture. Although people typically try to down-regulate their negative emotions, when it comes to moral outrage it can seem as if people indulge in this emotion. Here we explore two questions: 1) To what extent do people choose to engage with media (i.e., articles) that they know will elicit moral outrage? and 2) Why do they do this? In Study 1, participants identified whether they typically choose to engage with media they know will elicit moral outrage and why. We then coded their reasons into broader themes. In Study 2, we presented participants with choices to read morally outraging versus control media article titles. We used the themes from Study 1 to generate items and measured the extent to which endorsing these items predicted participant’s choice to engage with morally outraging media. In Study 3, we plan to present the participants 50 media article titles from one day of news that vary in how much they elicit moral outrage and examine whether people indicate wanting to read articles that elicit more moral outrage and which themes best predict intentions to read these articles.