“Screaming into the void” from Hidden Brain
“Screaming into the void: How Outrage is hijacking our culture, and our minds”
Source: Hidden Brain (Listen: 42 min)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
"Many people have come to believe that the only way to spark change is to incite anger. Outrage is hijacking our conversations, our communities, and our minds." - Shankar Vedantam
Between politics, covid-19, racial injustice, and climate change, the media is turned up to 11. Are you feeling it?
In this Hidden Brain episode, you’ll learn about the research that underlines why outrage (including calling out another person's bad behavior) feels good while asking the question— "what happens when we take an emotion, carefully calibrated for small knit groups and give it a global platform?"
This is a reminder that the things we see online are not always the full picture, and that outrage isn't bad. Pausing can help us be a part of the change we wish to see in the world, and understanding human behavior is to understand oneself.
Who's in this podcast?
Shankar Vedantam— American journalist, writer and science correspondent for NPR. His reporting focuses on Human Behavior and the social sciences.
Julie Irwin Zimmerman— Humble reporter
Dr. Molly Crockett— Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics.
Dr. William Brady— NSF postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychology at Yale University.
“Why do we still see so much outrage even when we know that it causes the people that disagree with us to tune us out?”- Shankar Vedantam
(21:36) Molly: “There’s a sort of visceral satisfaction in dulling out punishment, and this is corroborated by the brain imaging evidence that shows that when we decide to punish, we see activation in brain areas associated with reward.”
(26:48) Shankar: “Most of us under-estimate how powerful this brain circuitry can be. How vulnerable we are to the psychological rewards that come from feeling really, truly mad about something and then seeing our outrage amplified by others.”
(27:06) Molly: “Social rewards are just as powerful if not more powerful in driving learning and decision making than chocolate or money. The approval of our peers is like the most potent reward you can get for social beings like us.”
(30:52) Shankar: “To be sure, outrage sometimes produces real change. It can bring together marginalized communities. It can fuel social movements such as the Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter. It can help win elections. Outrage can be especially effective if your goal is to pull someone down. After all, this might be what the emotion was designed for in the first place.”
(34:27) Shankar: “What psychologists William Brady at Yale says ‘there is a great paradox in the way outrage works. Outrage leads to engagement, but not always to change.’”
(34:55) William: “The type of people you’re getting to that is giving you the shares and the likes, it tends to be people who share your political views—so, people of the same political ideology.”
(35:07) Shankar: “In other words, outrage is very effective at spreading a message within an eco-chamber.”
(36:00) Shankar: “When was the last time you changed your mind because someone screamed at you? And that leads to an interesting question—why do we still see so much outrage even when we know that it causes the people that disagree with us to tune us out? Aren’t those precisely the people whose minds we want to change?”
(41:04) Julie: “You can stand up and be super outraged about something national, but if you really want to have an impact, go pick up litter in the intersection near your house, or go work at an animal shelter. There are things we can do every day that improve our lives and the lives of people around us, but they don’t give us that drug of having a hot take spread around on social media.”
(42:00) Shankar: “So many tools of modern culture take ancient circuits in the brain and put them in hyperdrive. We evolved to need nutrition, but many of us are surrounded by so much food that we now get sick. We evolved to care about relationships, but social media has weaponized this, transforming personal connections into metrics of self-worth.”
(42:38) Shankar: “Our capacity for outrage honed over millennia gives our society guard rails. It tells us how we’re supposed to behave, and it can lead to positive change. But used recklessly or for self-promotion, outrage can poison the way we interact with each other. It can imprison us in our own eco-chambers.”
FOR THE FULL TRANSCRIPT AND TALK, HEAD TO NPR (Listen: 42 min)
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