Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility

Abstract

As individuals and political leaders increasingly interact in online social networks, it is important to understand how the affordances of social media shape social knowledge of morality and politics. Here, we propose that social media users overperceive levels of moral outrage felt by individuals and groups, inflating beliefs about intergroup hostility. Utilizing a Twitter field survey, we measured authors’ moral outrage in real time and compared authors’ reports to observers’ judgments of the authors’ moral outrage. We find that observers systematically overperceive moral outrage in authors, inferring more intense moral outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages actually reported. This effect was stronger in participants who spent more time on social media to learn about politics. Pre-registered confirmatory behavioral experiments found that overperception of individuals’ moral outrage causes overperception of collective moral outrage and inflates beliefs about hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. Together, these results highlight how individual-level overperceptions of online moral outrage produce collective overperceptions that have the potential to warp our social knowledge of moral and political attitudes.

What makes groups emotional?

“…Amplification in the evaluation of collective emotion also leads to the formation of social ties that express stronger emotions. Research on the perception of average collective emotions suggest that people tend to overestimate the intensity of fellow group members' positive and negative emotions in response to political issues (Brady et al, 2022;Goldenberg, Abruzzo, et al, 2022;Lau et al, 2016). Furthermore, in a recent study we found that the tendency to overestimate the collective emotional response was associated with selecting tie who express more extreme emotions.…”

Vaccine Nationalism Counterintuitively Erodes Public Trust in Leaders

“…Thus, this disconnect reflects a form of pluralistic ignorance (Miller & McFarland, 1991), wherein individuals systematically misperceive public opinion by overestimating how much it differs from their own. Indeed, such misperceptions of public opinions have been shown in other domains such as climate change (Leviston et al, 2013; Sparkman et al, 2022), alcohol consumption (Prentice & Miller, 1993), and political hostility (Brady et al, 2023; Moore-Berg et al, 2020; Ruggeri et al, 2021). Collectively, these results demonstrate that endorsement of redistributive vaccine policies enhances public trust in leaders and suggest that an accurate understanding of public opinion by policymakers is crucial for the containment and prevention of current and future health crises and resource shortages.…”

Negative Expressions are Shared more on Twitter for Public Figures than for Ordinary Users

“…Overrepresentation of negative information, such as negative news or online hate, cultivates a more negative or dangerous evaluation of the world (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli, & Shanahan, 2002), potentially leading to a decrease in social trust (Näsi et al, 2015), and reduction in subjective well-being (Feinberg, Ford, Thai, Gatchpazian, & Lassetter, 2020;Keipi, Räsänen, Oksanen, Hawdon, & Näsi, 2018). In addition, exposure to negative political content has negative collective consequences such as contributing to group polarization and intergroup conflicts (Brady et al, 2022;de Mello et al, 2022). Based on the findings of this study, the overrepresentation of negative content produced by public figures could worsen over time, because increased sharing of negative content incentivizes public figures to produce more of this negative content (Brady, McLoughlin, Doan, & Crockett, 2021).…”

“…Overexposure to negativity is known to have adverse consequences at the individual level, leading to reduction in well-being (Diener et al, 2010;Jose, Lim, & Bryant, 2012;Seidlitz & Diener, 1993). At the collective level too, exposure to negativity contributes to group polarization and intergroup conflicts (Brady et al, 2022;de Mello, Cheung, & Inzlicht, 2022). Therefore, it is crucial to understand the roots of negativity sharing online and its driving mechanisms.…”