A new study into the psychology of expressing moral outrage has revealed what some already suspected – it is significantly motivated by personal guilt.
Academics at the University of Southern Mississippi investigated people’s thought processes when they were told about different types of injustice.
They found that participants’ tendencies to express outrage changed significantly depending on whether or not they felt culpable for a particular wrong.
The more directly they felt implicated in a given wrong, the more likely they were to displace the blame onto an external agency.
The study also showed that sounding off about an issue – aka virtue signalling – helped people’s self-esteem by letting them feel like good people.
Its results suggest murkier motivations for social activism than those often claimed by its proponents.
The study was published in the scientific journal Motivation and Emotion – and explained in more concise form on the website Reason.
In essence, the experiment works by testing the reactions of randomly-selected subjects to reading about various social wrongs.
Fabricated articles, designed to elicit a moral response, were varied by whether they suggested bad things like companies using child labor, or climate change, were the fault of the readers, or of somebody else.
Participants who were led to believe they had nothing to do with the moral outrage were less concerned by it overall.
By contrast, people who were told they were part of the problem – because they buy cheap stuff, use fossil fuels, etc. – had more complicated reactions.
First off, they acknowledged higher levels of guilt to begin with if the moral outrage was linked to their lives.
Secondly, those people were much more likely to heap blame on third parties (e.g. “big oil”, “corporations”) if they had an inkling of guilt themselves.
Thirdly – and perhaps most interestingly – the study found that giving people a chance to express their outrage (in the form of questionnaires which let them rage at third parties) promptly felt better again.
In fact, they felt even better overall than the group who believed the moral outrages were nothing to do with them.
The study – which adjusted its results to compensate for existing political leanings etc. – essentially traced the architecture of virtue-signalling, and found it is, as much as anything else, a coping mechanism to protect your sense of self.
