Is Online Moral Outrage Outrageous? Rethinking the Indignation Machine.

Moral outrage is often characterized as a corrosive emotion, but it can also inspire collective action. In this article we aim to deepen our understanding of the dual nature of online moral outrage which divides people and contributes to inclusivist moral reform. We argue that the specifics of violating different types of moral norms will influence the effects of moral outrage: moral outrage against violating harm-based norms is less antagonistic than moral outrage against violating loyalty and purity/identity norms. We identify which features of social media platforms shape our moral lives. Connectivity, omniculturalism, online exposure, increased group identification and fostering what we call "expressionist experiences", all change how moral outrage is expressed in the digital realm. Finally, we propose changing the design of social media platforms and raise the issue of moral disillusion when ample moral protest in the online environment does not have the expected effects on the offline world.

Ethics and frontline nursing during COVID-19: A qualitative analysis.

BACKGROUND: Nurses experienced intense ethical and moral challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our 2020 qualitative parent study of frontline nurses' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic identified ethics as a cross-cutting theme with six subthemes: moral dilemmas, moral uncertainty, moral distress, moral injury, moral outrage, and moral courage. We re-analyzed ethics-related findings in light of refined definitions of ethics concepts. RESEARCH AIM: To analyze frontline U.S. nurses' experiences of ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic. RESEARCH DESIGN: Qualitative analysis using a directed content methodology. PARTICIPANTS AND RESEARCH CONTEXT: The study included 43 nurses from three major metropolitan academic medical centers and one community hospital in the northeastern, mid-Atlantic, midwestern, and western United States. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: Participant privacy and data confidentiality were addressed. FINDINGS: Moral dilemmas arose from many situations, most frequently related to balancing safety and patient care. Moral uncertainty commonly arose from lacking health information or evidence about options. Moral distress occurred when nurses knew the right thing to do, but were prevented from doing so, including with end-of-life issues. Moral injury (accompanied by suffering, shame, or guilt) occurred after doing, seeing, or experiencing wrongdoing, often involving authority figures. Nurses expressed moral outrage at events and people within and outside healthcare. Despite difficult ethical situations, some nurses exemplified moral courage, sometimes by resisting policies they perceived as preventing compassionate care, guided by thinking about what was best for patients. DISCUSSION: This content analysis of ethics-related subthemes revealed conceptual characteristics and clarified distinctions with corresponding exemplars. Conceptual clarity may inform responses and interventions to address ethical quandaries in nursing practice. CONCLUSIONS: Ethics education in nursing must address the moral dilemmas of pandemics, disasters, and other crises. Nurses need time and resources to heal from trying to provide the best care when no ideal option was available.

Detecting Grooming Behaviors in Same-Sex versus Opposite-Sex Child Sexual Abuse.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a prevalent concern that often leads to severe, life-long consequences. Grooming is an early indicator of CSA, and it is imperative to be able to recognize these behaviors in adult-child relationships to prevent abuse from occurring. Research on CSA and grooming has primarily focused on opposite-sex (male adult and female child) abuse while little research has focused on same-sex (male adult and male child) abuse. The current study examined how the sex of the adult-child pair might impact the identification of grooming behaviors. Participants in this study were presented with a series of vignettes depicting grooming and non-grooming behaviors in either same-sex or opposite-sex adult-child pairs. Participants were more likely to label the behaviors presented as grooming when shown situations involving an opposite-sex adult-child pair as opposed to a same-sex adult-child pair.

Prostitution Policies and Attitudes Toward Prostitutes.

The present study examined whether regulatory attitudes toward prostitution are related to agency attributed to prostitutes and moral outrage. A Spanish sample (N = 391, aged 18-53 years old) completed a questionnaire that included two separate parts. In the first part, participants answered a scale on regulatory attitudes toward prostitution; in the second part, after reading one of two scenarios, participants answered questions about agency and moral outrage. Results showed a different pattern in the link between regulatory attitudes and social perception when participants perceived prostitutes as victims of sexual slavery (Scenario 1) or as women who freely choose to sell sexual services (Scenario 2). This study provides empirical evidence of how some regulatory attitudes toward prostitution are linked to mind attributions and negative feelings toward sex workers, and how it depends on the type of prostitute who practices it. These findings contribute to our knowledge of attitudes toward prostitution, which could inform future policy-making.

When jurors' moral judgments result in jury nullification: moral outrage at the law as a mediator of euthanasia attitudes on verdicts.

In a mock-trial study, jurors read evidence about a doctor who had killed a terminally ill patient at the patient's request. We tested whether instructing jurors about jury nullification (ie jurors' power to return a not-guilty verdict even when legal guilt is beyond doubt, often because the law would result in unjust convictions) would exacerbate the effect of pre-trial euthanasia attitudes on their verdicts - compared to standard, pattern jury instructions. We also hypothesized that anti-euthanasia pre-trial attitudes would result in moral outrage at the defendant and higher conviction rates, but pro-euthanasia attitudes would prompt feelings of moral outrage at the law and lower conviction rates. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that nullification instructions bolstered the effect of attitudes on verdicts by encouraging jurors to rely on their feelings of moral outrage toward the defendant. Jurors' moral outrage toward the law mediated the effect of attitudes on verdicts regardless of nullification instructions.

What elicits third-party anger? The effects of moral violation and others' outcome on anger and compassion.

People often get angry when they perceive an injustice that affects others but not themselves. In two studies, we investigated the elicitation of third-party anger by varying moral violation and others' outcome presented in newspaper articles. We found that anger was highly contingent on the moral violation. Others' outcome, although relevant for compassion, were not significantly relevant for anger (Study 1 and Study 2a) or less relevant for anger than for compassion (Study 2b). This indicates that people can be morally outraged: anger can be elicited by a perceived violation of moral values alone, independent of the harm done. A severe negative consequence for others is not necessary to elicit anger.

Effects of social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism on corrupt intention: The role of moral outrage.

Previous research suggested that dominance orientation and authoritarianism may be associated with corruption, but little research has verified this assumption or uncovered its psychological processes. In this article, we examined empirically the relationships between social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and corrupt intention and explored the mediating role of moral outrage on these relationships. A total of 677 college students participated in the study and completed measures of SDO, RWA, moral outrage and corrupt intention. Our findings demonstrated that both SDO and RWA were positively associated with corrupt intention. Additionally, moral outrage partially mediated the relation between SDO and corrupt intention and fully mediated the relation between RWA and corrupt intention. Specifically, the results indicated that higher SDO or RWA was associated with reduced moral outrage and increased corrupt intention. This implies that the enhancement of morality and moral outrage may inhibit corrupt intention.

Unequal by malice, protesters by outrage: Agent perceptions drive moralization of, and collective action against, inequality.

Economic inequality does not encounter strong protests even though individuals are generally against it. One potential explanation of this paradox is that individuals do not perceive inequality as caused by intentional agents, which, in line with the Theory of Dyadic Morality (Schein & Gray, 2018), should prevent its assessment as immoral and consequently dampen moral outrage and collective action. Across three studies, we test and confirm this hypothesis. In Studies 1 (N = 395) and 2 (N = 337), the more participants believed that inequality is human driven and caused by intentional agents, the more they moralized inequality, felt outraged and wanted to engage in collective action. This was confirmed in Study 3 (N = 243) through an experimental design. Thus, our research shows that agent perception is crucial in the moralization of economic inequality and, more broadly, that morality can be a powerful motivator and effectively mobilize people to action.

Digital Moral Outrage, Collective Guilt, And Collective Action: An Examination of How Twitter Users Expressed Their Anguish During India's Covid-19 Related Migrant Crisis.

This paper examines the intersection of group-based expressions including digital moral outrage, collective guilt, and collective action on Twitter, following the tragic incident of 8 May 2020, in which 16 migrant workers were run over by a train after the Indian government imposed a sudden COVID-19-related lockdown. Twitter data were gathered immediately at three different times - May 8-15, May 16- 23, May 24-May 31, and 4598 tweets were manually coded. The analysis revealed that digital moral outrage was the most frequently expressed emotion. It, however, gradually decreased, signaling digital outrage fatigue. Collective guilt and sympathy constituted the second-largest portion of the total tweets, and tweets reflecting collective action by the community progressively increased. The network of relationships among different group-based emotions, the promotion of one-sided narratives and virtue signaling on social media platforms are discussed.

Deliberately prejudiced self-driving vehicles elicit the most outrage.

Should self-driving vehicles be prejudiced, e.g., deliberately harm the elderly over young children? When people make such forced-choices on the vehicle's behalf, they exhibit systematic preferences (e.g., favor young children), yet when their options are unconstrained they favor egalitarianism. So, which of these response patterns should guide AV programming and policy? We argue that this debate is missing the public reaction most likely to threaten the industry's life-saving potential: moral outrage. We find that people are more outraged by AVs that kill discriminately than indiscriminately. Crucially, they are even more outraged by an AV that deliberately kills a less preferred group (e.g., an elderly person over a child) than by one that indiscriminately kills a more preferred group (e.g., a child). Thus, at least insofar as the public is concerned, there may be more reason to depict and program AVs as egalitarian.

Moralization of Covid-19 health response: Asymmetry in tolerance for human costs.

We hypothesized that because Covid-19 (C19) remains an urgent and visible threat, efforts to combat its negative health consequences have become moralized. This moralization of health-based efforts may generate asymmetries in judgement, whereby harmful by-products of those efforts (i.e., instrumental harm) are perceived as more acceptable than harm resulting from non-C19 efforts, such as prioritizing the economy or non-C19 issues. We tested our predictions in two experimental studies. In Study 1, American participants evaluated the same costs (public shaming, deaths and illnesses, and police abuse of power) as more acceptable when they resulted from efforts to minimize C19's health impacts, than when they resulted from non-health C19 efforts (e.g., prioritizing economic costs) or efforts unrelated to C19 (e.g., reducing traffic deaths). In Study 2, New Zealand participants less favorably evaluated the quality of a research proposal empirically questioning continuing a C19 elimination strategy in NZ than one questioning abandoning an elimination strategy, although both proposals contained the same amount of methodology information. This finding suggests questioning elimination approaches is morally condemned, a similar response to that found when sacred values are questioned. In both studies, condition effects were mediated by lowered moral outrage in response to costs resulting from pursuing health-minded C19 efforts. Follow-up analyses revealed that both heightened personal concern over contracting C19 and liberal ideology were associated with greater asymmetries in human cost evaluation. Altogether, results suggest efforts to reduce or eliminate C19 have become moralized, generating asymmetries in evaluations of human suffering.

Distinct affective responses to second- and third-party norm violations.

Social norm violations provoke strong emotional reactions that often culminate in punishment of the wrongdoer. This is true not only when we are the victims of the norm violation (second-party), but also when witnessing a complete stranger being victimized (third-party). What remains unclear, however, is whether second- and third-party punishments are associated with different emotions. To address this question, here we examine how subjects respond affectively to both second- and third-party norm violations in an economic game. Our results indicate that while second- and third-parties respond to norm violations by punishing wrongdoers similarly, they report experiencing distinct emotional states as a result of the violation. Specifically, we observed a cross-over interaction between anger and moral outrage depending on the party's context: while anger was more frequently reported for second- than for third-party violations, moral outrage was more evoked by third-party than second-party violations. Disgust and sadness were the most prevalently reported emotions, but their prevalence were unaffected by party contexts. These results indicate that while responses to second- and third-party violations result in similar punishment, they are associated with the expression of distinct affective palettes. Further, our results provide additional evidence that moral outrage is a critical experience in the evaluation of third-party wrongdoings.

The place and role of (moral) anger in organizational behavior studies.

The aim of this article is to conceptually delineate moral anger from other related constructs. Drawing upon social functional accounts of anger, we contend that distilling the finer nuances of morally motivated anger and its expression can increase the precision with which we examine prosocial forms of anger (e.g., redressing injustice), in general, and moral anger, in particular. Without this differentiation, we assert that (i) moral anger remains theoretically elusive, (ii) that this thwarts our ability to methodologically capture the unique variance moral anger can explain in important work outcomes, and that (iii) this can promote ill-informed organizational policies and practice. We offer a four-factor definition of moral anger and demonstrate the utility of this characterization as a distinct construct with application for workplace phenomena such as, but not limited to, whistle-blowing. Next, we outline a future research agenda, including how to operationalize the construct and address issues of construct, discriminant, and convergent validity. Finally, we argue for greater appreciation of anger's prosocial functions and concomitant understanding that many anger displays can be justified and lack harmful intent. If allowed and addressed with interest and concern, these emotional displays can lead to improved organizational practice.