Kurt Gray Explores the Psychology of Outrage
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, what triggers outrage in us? When someone violates our moral sense, we might bristle with rage or thirst for retribution. But UNC psychology and neuroscience professor Kurt Gray says we should keep in mind the other side is also motivated by moral convictions, even if they don't make sense to us at first.

We talked to Gray about how understanding the psychology of moral conflicts can help us better manage them. His new book is Outraged, Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. Join us.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Moral outrage is something you may be feeling a lot of these days. And this intense anger, when someone seems to lack decency or courage or compassion and humanity, can feel overwhelming. Psychology and neuroscience professor Kurt Gray has been studying what drives outrage and why it so often divides us. He directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina.

Gray says our outrage stems from wanting to protect ourselves and others from harm and that our divisions stem from disagreement over who is most vulnerable to harm. Kurt Gray joins me now. Welcome to Forum. Thanks so much. So say more about outrage. How do you distinguish outrage from your garden variety anger and frustration?

Well, outrage is tinged with a really deep moral conviction that not only is your side right, but that side, the other side, is wrong. And, as you briefly mentioned, right, that the other side is somehow causing harm or harm.

And so that's what really drives our kind of moral condemnation, the sense that there's harm happening. And so what's an example of a disagreement over who is causing harm and who is most vulnerable to harm? Everything.

Everything. In our political world today. Yeah. I mean, you can think about abortion, right? Who's vulnerable to harm? Is it a pregnant woman? Is it the fetus? Immigration? Should we be worried about the suffering of migrants at the border, maybe fleeing violence from their home country or citizens who are losing jobs or being harmed by illegal folks doing illegal things?

And this role of harm, you say that it's really almost a deep drive within us, right? That it's essentially hardwired. So talk about this. Why is harm something that primes us so much for outrage? Yeah. So any species, including us, right, we need to protect ourselves. If there was a species that just thought, you know what, I don't mind about harm. I'm just happy to walk into dangerous situations, right?

Those species died out. And it turns out that over the course of millions of years, we were really fixated on harm because, and here's a kind of myth about human nature, right? We are not mostly predators, as we often think when you go to

and see ourselves with like big spears, you know, cave people. We were more often prey, preyed upon by big cats, by big eagles. And so we're hardwired to kind of be vigilant to threats. And of course, today, there's fewer wild animals, you know, eating us.

And so we see more other threats, moral threats, how people might be doing immoral things to us and our family and trying to harm us that way. So still the same vigilance, still the same worried about threat. But now instead of saber-toothed cats, it's politics or a rival person at the PTA meeting maybe. So even though we are safe from being eaten, you're saying basically this –

This concern about harm and the strive to detect it and so on still exists, but exists in our modern day context. So then is it dangerous? Like, is it something that is on overdrive? I think so.

it probably is more on overdrive than it used to be. And so, you know, I like the word predator because I think it resonates both kind of in our evolutionary past, but also in modern times. So if you're in your neighborhood and your children are outside playing and you see a white panel van drive slowly up and down your street, right? You don't think, I wonder if that's a lost locksmith. You think, that's a predator. That's a kidnapper looking for my kids.

Even though we know objectively our kids are safer today than they've ever been, we're still hardwired to worry about what might hurt them and us.

Let me invite our listeners to join the conversation. I'm wondering, listeners, what has caused you to feel outrage recently? And if what Kurt Gray is saying about the drivers of outrage are resonating with you, what questions do you have about what's happening to us when we feel outrage? Kurt Gray is professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, and his new book is called Outraged.

You can tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on our social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram threads, the KQED forum, and by calling us 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. So, Kurt, tell me what motivated you to start studying this because you had a pretty intense personal experience.

Yeah. Well, so in the kind of roots, talking of the evolutionary past, in my past, I was a high schooler. I was driving at the time to the movies with my friends in my car. Sixteen, just got my license. It was dark. It had just stopped raining. The roads were wet. I was not driving cautiously as a 16-year-old boy. And I was just about to miss the turnoff to the movie theater. A friend yells, turn, turn, turn. I'm in the right-hand lane. I have to turn left. I cut off.

car in my blind spot. We're squealing, spinning, right? No one's hurt, thank goodness. But clearly I almost smashed this car and I opened my window to apologize and this driver gets out of the car and I start apologizing and he points to me and he says, "You're f*cking dead."

flipping dead. And so he's, you know, driving. I'm panicking. I stomp on the gas. He's following behind me. I don't know where I'm going. Right. Prey and predator. I'm definitely the prey here. We're driving around these strip malls. Eventually I get cornered in the back of a loading dock behind like a Home Depot and I'm trapped. No one's around. He gets out of the car and

He says, you're dead again, right? I lock my door at the last minute. He tries to open my door. I unroll the window to apologize. He reaches in and starts slapping me, tries to unlock my door. I'm apologizing. And eventually my friend in the back seat, she holds up a cell phone, rare at the time in the late 90s, and said, I'll call the cops. And he slaps me a little bit more. And then he pauses and he says, yeah, you call the cops and I'll tell him what you did.

And that moment was so strange to me, even though I was terrified at the time. It still stuck with me and being so strange because I was the one being assaulted. I was the one being threatened with death.

And yet he's thinking the cops will be on his side. Right. And so it's such a powerful way that our perceptions of the same situation and nothing about politics here, but it was a moral disagreement. He thinks he's in the moral right because he's victimized. He's focused on his suffering. I'm feeling victimized and focused on my suffering. And then it turns out I've researched this, you know, through grad school and as a professor and all our moral disagreements are just like this. Right. We feel victimized.

And feel like it's obvious that everyone will see it our way. But of course, we don't. We disagree. And what tends to determine how we will read who is the victim in a situation and who is the villain?

Great question. So when it involves us, right, and we feel harmed, then we're obviously to ourselves the victim, right? If you're in an argument with your spouse or with, you know, another parent on the playground, right, you and your people, they're the obvious victims whenever there's kind of some act of harm or some disagreement. When it comes to politics, I

I think it breaks down by liberal and conservative and who you see is generally more vulnerable to harm. And so we could talk about how those kind of like maps on like conservatives are more likely to see people in power as vulnerable to harm compared to liberals. And so... And based on what justification? Well, I think...

You know, we get into this in the book a little bit, but I think conservatives are more likely to see the world in terms of like individual victims. So it doesn't matter if you're born rich or poor, black or white. We can all suffer, right? We can all be harmed if we're cut with a knife. We all bleed the same. And so it's this kind of individualistic sense of victimhood, whereas more progressive folks, it's a more group-based sense of victimhood. So some groups are more oppressed. Some groups are more oppressor. And those oppressor groups,

CEOs, think of them like Brian Thompson, who was assassinated not too long ago, right, seem invulnerable to harm. And when they're harmed, even don't seem like legitimate victims to progressives. So there's a kind of individuals versus group based for liberals versus conservatives.

We're talking with Kurt Gray and you, our listeners, are writing in as well. Noel on Discord writes, it seems moral outrage is the fuel that is energizing so many these days. Kurt, do you feel like we are experiencing more moral outrage today, say, than a generation ago?

It's a great question. And I think we are. There's a number of reasons. So social media is a bad reason, you know, a bad thing in our lives mostly. It amplifies outrage. Those algorithms are custom made to kind of get us angry. But there's also, going back to what I said earlier, as we get safer in society, we're

we are more kind of attuned to more minor harms and those cause us more outrage. Because they're more visible to us, they're more apparent when there's more equality and safety. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, while I was writing this book, I was talking to my mom. She grew up in northern Canada. She was casually recounting all the way that she knew that kids died when she was a kid.

like in a house fire because there's candles on Christmas trees or died in the lake by drowning or, you know, the car was driving on the highway, a kid has a tantrum, opens the door, rolls out, dies. No child safety locks, no seat belts. We have all those things now. And so we in general are much safer, workplace protections, all sorts of things like this. And so when something kind of seems harmful, it really stands out. It really makes us upset because we feel like everything should be safe now.

And happy, basically. And when it's not, we get really outraged. You've also cited that social media has played a powerful role in generating outrage. Why? Yeah.

Well, again, for one, those algorithms are really designed to kind of find the things that make us outraged and elevate them because that's what captures attention. But two, I think social media is a kind of unique thing for our minds in a bad way. So I like to think of it as, you know, those old Godzilla movies?

You're sitting at a cafe, and you hear this distant roar of a monster, and then you hear hundreds of screaming people running towards you. That's a lot like social media, right? There's some threat you read about, some tweet, some Facebook post, some bad thing that's happening in America or overseas.

And then there's a virality metric, how many times it's been retweeted, how many times it's been shared. And so your mind fixates on those numbers as if they're all screaming people. And you can't help but basically get up and want to run with them and get upset, right? Because there's threats and there's social proof that you should worry about those threats. Right.

We're talking with Kurt Gray about what triggers outrage in us.

and how to find common ground is new. And he is also appearing at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco tonight at 5:30 p.m. if you're in the area. Join our conversation with your questions and comments about outrage, what triggers it in us, and tell us if what Curt Gray is saying is resonating with you and what questions you have about managing outrage, if you wanna manage it. More after the break. I'm Nina Kim.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about outrage this hour, the psychology behind our moral outrage. We're

We're talking about it with Kurt Gray, who's written a new book called Outraged, Why We Fight About Morality in Politics and How to Find Common Ground. And you, our listeners, are sharing your questions and reflections at 866-733-6786, at the email address forum at kqed.org, and at our social channels at KQED Forum. What has caused you to feel outrage recently? And is what Gray is saying about the drivers of outrage resonating with you? What questions do you have about what's happening to us when we feel moral outrage recently?

Are you trying to manage your outrage? And how is that going? Anita writes,

And this is on discord rights. I used it used to be that we could disagree with another political party's policies. But now many party members proclaim the other side as communists, socialists, fascists, evil, so that the opposition is seen as too far out of the norm that we cannot work with or find common ground or to compromise with. What do you think about that, Kurt?

I think it's true. As society has progressed over the last kind of 30 years, we've seen a spike in what scientists call affective polarization. So not just moving further apart on issues, but really disliking the other side and everyday people from the other side. And so I

I wrote this book in large part so we can help individuals connect, right? So it's not an apology for any kind of leader or media pundit, but it's about how we can connect with other people and maybe find compromise and common ground. But it's hard to do. It's certainly right. Can you talk about... You've mentioned before the evolutionary drive essentially to detect harm. What is the evolutionary drive toward morality? Yeah, it's a similar kind of drive, right? So...

Let's go back in the mists of time. We're hunted by saber-toothed cats and other species. And what do prey animals do to protect themselves? Well, they form into groups. They form into groups to protect themselves. You can watch out for other threats. Monkeys do this. Meerkats do this.

But the problem with living in groups is now you've got other members of your species that can harm you, right? If you're living in close proximity with other people, they can assault you, they can steal from you. And so we needed a psychological tool to kind of help us live together in harmony, more or less, to dampen our selfish impulses and our violent impulses and to get angry at those who might victimize the vulnerable within our society. And that's what morality is. So is...

Is that contributing to the kind of gridlock and accusations that Noel on Discord was talking about with regard to calling somebody else evil as well? Certainly. Certainly. And I think because we inhabit liberals and conservatives, kind of different media ecosystems, we see...

opposing victims everywhere. And I think this is why it's so hard to come together, because there's a narrative, and I call it the destruction narrative, that the other side doesn't care at all about the victims that you care about, and they're just trying to burn the world down, right? So questions of foreign aid, it seems like conservatives, right, don't care at all about the suffering of folks overseas, right, disadvantaged people.

But I think conservatives might think, well, maybe liberals don't care at all about having a fiscally responsible nation or don't care about suffering Americans. And I think that's a misperception on both sides. Everyday Americans do both care about helping people who are vulnerable overseas and also helping people who are vulnerable in America. You emphasize that perceptions of harm on both sides are sincere, right?

Really?

Yeah, really. I think really, right? So we can disagree about whether people are thinking of the right threats. But if you think about something like abortion, I mean, conservatives and especially evangelical folks are really focused on protecting fetuses and the lives of what they see as babies, right? They're not just saying, like, don't kill babies because they're trying to annoy progressives. And they're not passing stricter abortion laws because...

They hate women, which I think is the kind of caricature of progressive folks. But they're actually genuinely concerned with protecting the lives of babies. And I think the opposite way is true, right? So pro-life folks see pro-choice people as, you know, like just trying to hurt babies. But it's not at all true, right? More progressive folks are saying we need to protect the rights of women to get, you know, reproductive health and all sorts of things like that. And so both sides are trying to kind of protect women.

Yeah. And we should note, of course, we have to speak in certain generalities to be able to just advance this conversation. But I guess I say really because isn't there such a thing as false indignation or moral grandstanding? Yeah.

There is. I think it's much less prevalent than you think. And so, you know, I know the research on moral grandstanding, right? This idea that people go on to social media to win internet points and like be accepted as their community to like express outrage consistent with their own party line. You know...

Lots of people use social media. It's not a kind of fulfilling experience where you feel an upwell of support from your side. And in fact, we've run studies where we show that there's really powerful perceptions of harm that motivate people to express outrage online. You're like, oh, my goodness, this terrible thing's happening. What do I do? I can't do anything. I know. I'll say something online. So I think, again, it's much more sincere than we often think when people get angry and when people point out threats that they see.

Let me go to caller Sam in Fremont. Hi, Sam, you're on. Hi. Hi, go right ahead. Hello. So this is a topic close to my heart. I've been listening. I drive to work and I tune in at 10. I start only at 10 just to listen to this forum. And it's such a good topic today. I personally see people get outraged because...

I personally feel outraged when I see the sense of entitlement in people. When I was growing up, we would fear God, we would fear law, and it was just a sense of respect and fear. I mean, now there's a social media, you don't like the service of a restaurant, just put something nasty, 10 people will like you, and again, it will become a big thing. So it's so easy to just malign somebody, I mean, prey on somebody,

On the same way, it's so easy to be a victim too. It would have been just a small thing like the traffic incident. And that guy, if I...

Yeah, sorry to interrupt you. I just really like what you're bringing up. And we did talk a little bit, Kurt, about the ease with which social media enables us to, I guess, express our outrage, right, as Sam is pointing out. But there was something else Sam said that I just wanted to touch on too, which is that Sam feels like it's connected to a sense of entitlement. Could you talk about that? Like, what is happening? Do you agree? And what is happening when we feel entitlement?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And I do think it's connected to something else Sam said about this sense of victimization, right? And so what comes apart in our minds is, you know, how much we've actually suffered and how much we feel that we've suffered. And so you could, let's say, get cut off in traffic on the way to work. And that to you could seem like a massive loss.

Right.

to harm others, to say nasty things to others, right? And so I think that's what's really driving it, right? The sense of like, if you're a victim, the word Karen sometimes come up or you mail Karen, right? Like if you feel like you've been offended, you've been victimized, you feel licensed to kind of malign and be aggressive to others. You say that there are those with a victim mindset who tend to exaggerate the injustices that they face. Right.

So talk about the challenges that raises in trying to find common ground, for example. It certainly makes it difficult. And again, I think it's important to note that you can survive incredible tragedies and atrocities and not carry with you a victim mindset, right? Or you can experience relatively minor things and have a victim mindset. We talked about a little bit before, if you feel safe,

Right. And you're surrounded by safety than minor injustices kind of stand out. And so it's hard to interact with these folks because everything that you do to them, they see as a slight. But again, I think it's a legitimate feeling that they have, but it's exhausting to manage. And so what you have to do to kind of interact with these folks is to validate their feelings, but also try to bring them more back to reality. Like, you know, is it?

it really victimizing you that your coffee is a little bit cold today? Right? Should you really go on a tirade on social media? Maybe not. But I understand that it's upsetting. You know, it's a hard balance. You say that a strong victim mindset is common among narcissists. How so? I mean, narcissists, one, it's all about themselves, right? They're super self-focused. And so that means that their own feelings and their own feelings of suffering are very strong.

Narcissists also, I mean, you know, I know they're maligned, but they also, you know, have deep down a kind of lack of self-esteem and feel kind of worried about people mistreating them, walking all over them, you know, not respecting them. And so it's a really toxic combo as you focus on your own slights and then you think that those slights reveal again that people are not respecting you as much as they should, right?

Another thing that can hinder our ability to accurately assess who is the victim and who is the villain is something that you call moral typecasting. What is that? So we all know what typecasting is when it comes to Hollywood, right? Like Daniel Radcliffe, you think Harry Potter, right? Like that guy's Harry Potter. He could do a million different roles throughout his whole life. He's still Harry Potter.

It turns out that we typecast people, when it comes to morality, as either victims or as perpetrators. So if you see an orphan, you think victim, and then maybe the orphan steals something or says something naughty. You think, well, still an orphan, still a victim. I'm going to excuse that bad behavior. On the other hand, if someone is evil in our minds, then we never think about them as a victim. We never think how they might suffer.

So the example that everyone brings up almost every day in social media is Hitler, right? No one ever thinks of Hitler's inner pain and how he might have suffered as a child. He was abused as a child, right? We're just like, that is not relevant because Hitler is the most evil person we can ever think of, right? And so we have these like two poles when it comes to thinking of people's moral character. And of course, orphans and Hitlers are on the extreme, but we do this in our everyday life.

So that coworker who did that bad thing once, they're like, he's just pure evil. And even if he like suffers, I'm just going to ignore that suffering. We're talking about outrage and how it's connected to harm.

our desire to protect ourselves from harm and others from harm, and that our divisions often come from disagreements over who is most vulnerable to harm or who is being harmed, particularly in the political arena, which we are using as an example today with Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, whose new book is called Outrage, Why We Fight About Morality in Politics and How to Find Common Ground. And this listener, on the point that you were making earlier about harm and

And Rage and Traffic writes, what really makes my blood boil is bad mergers and traffic. To me, it really gives a hint to someone's moral character. I find I have zero tolerance for people who don't wait their turn in traffic. Let me go to Andy in Sunnyvale. Hi, Andy, you're on.

Yeah, hi. Great show. And I honestly think this daily outrage that many of us are feeling is definitely a potential mental health issue. So I'm really glad we're digging deeper into this. My point around...

outrage is how hypocrisy can really drive outrage or perceived hypocrisy. I always say that we're all hypocritical to some degree, but I do see at the national level, particularly with some of these confirmations that are coming through, people that have openly, blatantly stated a position. So I'll take the example of RFK Jr., who has stated pro-choice views and

And those that confirmed him, you know, obviously are very much opposed to that. And then another example is national security. You know, we've got someone now in place who is, you know, literally has been in conversations with some of our adversaries. But it's seen as, you know, everyone is for a strong national defense policy.

So those are just a couple of things about hypocrisy that I really find difficult to swallow. Interesting. Thank you, Andy. Why might hypocrisy be creating a feeling of outrage in Andy's time? Well, right. I mean, I like the traffic example, too, about merging. And I think it relates to hypocrisy as well. Right. So if you see someone not waiting their turn.

when it comes to merging, you think this person, they're flouting the rules, they're selfish, right? But if I don't wait my turn merging, it's because I'm late for an interview at the radio station, right? Or I have something really important to do, or I got distracted. And so we tend to see our own transgressions as being motivated by

legitimate concerns or feelings and other people's as being motivated by evil. And so when it comes to, let's say, senators confirming people that we think are immoral or lying about their beliefs, right, I think those senators can say, well,

It actually helps to advance America's agenda because of the following reasons, right? Sure, in the past, it's this. But I think, you know, it's like, you know, when I cut someone off in traffic, they're like, yeah, they've done that before. But here's the context. And I think moving forward, it's going to be best for the country. So our minds are flexible and can kind of make sense of this based on our group identities. What about Andy's other point about the...

frequency with which we feel outrage having an effect on us. What kind of effect does it have on us? Not a good one, unfortunately. I mean, again, because outrage is connected to feelings of threat and perceptions of harm, I think what's really making us and hurting our mental health, making us so upset, is this worry that things are going bad.

bad, that things are out to get us, that society is decaying. We've got some data that shows that people who use social media

to look at politics and who pay attention to the virality metrics, right, to see like other people's outrage, they have symptoms for PTSD above clinical threshold, right? So these people are like literally getting PTSD in a sense from exposing themselves to outrage and the kind of worries about harm on social media. And so it's bad.

Casey on Discord writes, Kurt Gray gives great talks and does good social psychology research. But boy, do those talks result in a certain kind of outrage between the people studying moral foundations and Gray's more simplified model. I read a New Yorker piece, I think, that referenced this, too. Do you want to just talk about what is the disagreement there?

Yeah. Yeah, you bet. You know, we could go really deep and kind of egghead. We have about two minutes before the break. Keep that in mind. Well, the argument by Jonathan Haidt, another moral psychologist famous now for some other things. Right. He argued that the moral mind is divided up into lots of different values that are some of which are very distinct from harm.

So if a conservative evangelical person condemns gay marriage, let's say, Haidt and moral foundations would say, well, it's because of this foundation of purity, and they're against it because God says that gay marriage is wrong. My account is simpler, and it argues that no matter what value we're talking about, it always comes down to harm. And so I have lots of studies that

that show this, but also it's true if you actually talk to folks who are passing judgment, who are outraged about something, it'll show that they also care about harm. So if you talk to evangelical conservatives or folks like my family in Nebraska,

Right. They will say that they're against gay marriage, not just because God says it's wrong or that it seems impure to them, but ultimately because it's harmful to America and Americans families. Right. And the reason that God forbids certain sins is because he's trying to protect us. So at the end of the day, no matter what value we're talking about, liberal, conservative, no matter what rhetoric people are using, it all boils down to perceptions of harm.

George writes,

There are facts. While maybe it's useful in some discussions, it is not a matter of psychology. I'm going to let you stew on that a little bit, think about that a little bit, Kurt, as we enter the break, and then I'd love to get your thoughts on George's point right afterward. We're talking with Kurt Gray about outrage, what triggers it in us, and the psychology behind moral conflicts. As well, Kurt Gray's new book is Outrage, why we fight about morality and politics and how to find common ground. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Listeners, what has caused you to feel outrage recently? What questions do you have about what's happening to us when we feel moral outrage? And are you trying to manage your outrage? How is that going? You can email forum at kqed.org, find us on our social channels at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Professor Kurt Gray's new book, Outrage, Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, is the topic of today's show. And just before the break, Kurt, we were talking about George's concern about the arguments that you're making about recognizing that, you know, perspectives are sincere, that they're held based on a real desire to protect ourselves and others from harm slipping into both sides of them.

It's a very valid concern. And I should say, you know, I'm a scientist and facts really do matter. However, in today's political environment where we occupy different universes with different facts, it's just not productive, scientifically speaking, right? I've studied this, to throw facts at each other, right? I've never had a moral conversation where I'm

about abortion or immigration where someone says, hey, I listened to this fact on NPR or Fox News. And what do you think about this? And then someone's like, oh, my goodness, you're right. I give up my opinion, you know, because you have this fact. And so there is a fact of the world, let's say like that vaccines are good. I agree. But if someone has a powerful personal story of someone they knew getting a reaction from a vaccine, you need to meet people where they're at.

And so this is where kind of more storytelling comes in. This is where more validation of their perspective, not as being true necessarily, but as being really important to someone, is a good first step to establishing some respect, some common ground, before you start talking about facts. But then what is the role of truth or an accurate reflection of reality?

Yeah, that's a great question. Right. What is truth? I mean, there is a truth out there, but our minds are not fundamentally designed to know the truth. This is why we've had centuries of science required for us to figure out how the universe works. Right. The fact that the sun is at the center of our solar system was something that we didn't believe for millennia. And so it can be hard to convince people, right, what the real truth is.

It's important. But I think before you kind of, you know, try to argue that someone's wrong about something, you first have to meet them where they're at again. I teach students statistics. It takes a whole semester to teach them simple things about statistics, right? Because our minds are not made that way. Our minds are made to tell stories and listen to stories. So even if you're a public health expert, you want to talk about vaccines, you want to talk about masks, I don't know, you still need to listen to people kind of understandably

understand where they're coming from, and then slowly, obliquely move the conversation there. Your hope is that by understanding what's happening in our minds, we can better understand each other and by extension, build bridges across divides. What I'm hearing, though, most often from people these days, and have even wondered myself, is actually how to keep the outrage that they're feeling from affecting the relationships they actually have with loved ones and close friends. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing, right? I think...

The reason that we get outraged at our loved ones. Not at our loved ones. It's like keeping your outrage from the things that you're hearing about the world, right? Or the experiences that you're having from affecting the very stable and close relationships that you have. Right. Well, you know, one bad thing about the modern world is that we're so segregated into our own political groups, right? So maybe you don't run into anyone who votes opposite from you.

But I think the antidote for this is to actually have some conversations with people on the other side, and that will reduce your outrage. And so, you know, maybe I'm like prescribing poison here, but I think it goes a long way. So I had an Uber ride to the airport.

Just this week, right, this guy, clearly different political orientation. I took another Uber ride with a Christian nationalist some time ago, right? Definitely not the kind of person I interact with on a daily basis, but I asked questions and kind of understood where he was coming from. And it made me realize that he was more rational and more of a reasonable human being than you would have, than I would have expected in advance if you're just like, tell me about Christian nationalists.

And crucially, at the end of this Uber ride, right, we came to a place of common ground, not only where I understood him, but where he was more sympathetic to pro-choice folks. And he was very pro-life. So I think, you know, it's not just like you trying to understand the other side, but in doing that, it helps others.

Others on the other side kind of see you as more rational, kind of brings us together. Right. But then how does that – so then are you saying you feel like the world is slightly more benevolent or less harmful and then you're less likely to get outraged by everything that you're seeing or reading or hearing? Exactly. That's exactly right.

And then your relationships that may be affected by the outrage that you're constantly feeling and everything at the news is not as vulnerable to you reacting? Yeah, I think, well, so it's one thing, you know, you can be threatened by things that are happening in the international or national forum, right? You can feel threatened by kind of what politicians are doing. Fair game, right? I'm not saying don't feel threatened or worried by what's happening. Right.

But if you realize that half of America is not out to destroy you and your values and your loved ones,

then it's easier to be a little calmer and a little kinder, right? You belong to a nation of people trying to protect themselves, a nation who just want things to work and for milk to be inexpensive and for their families to flourish. You're not confronted with half of America that wants to burn it all down. So I do think that is the solution to understand that other people are motivated by protecting themselves just like you.

Lizisner on Discord writes, I think we're seeing a lot of moral outrage in the form of white resentment, the idea that white people are falling behind while others are getting ahead. Can Kurt Gray give their two cents on that? How is this kind of resentment reflective of concerns for harm? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, the narrative, especially after the murder of George Floyd, was right, like that white folks are privileged, need to recognize that, and it's baked into systems in

And finance and government and education. And yet there are many white people who did not feel like they were privileged, who felt that they were losing, who felt that they were losing their job and losing their family, right? Who felt really kind of distressed. And I think that narrative of saying like you are the perpetrator, again, going back to typecasting, right? The narrative that like white folks are the perpetrator and need to take responsibility for their position in society by virtue of their race and maybe their sex.

Whereas they felt like the victim, right? Again, it's an argument over who's the victim here, right? And while progressive folks were saying, like, look at folks from these marginalized groups, right?

These other white people were saying, look, I'm the victim here and I need to take care of myself and my family first. And so, again, it's a debate about victimization. Josh writes, I love hearing the guest discussion regarding the evolutionary basis for moral outrage. I've wondered if the narratives we organize around, religious, political, etc., take advantage of the same evolutionary mechanism. That is why no matter how factually inaccurate or ridiculous the narrative is, it's

people will continue to believe it because its real purpose is to differentiate the in-group from the out-group. Yeah, that's a great point. It's a very good social psychology point.

And so I've brought up, you know, how everyday people are concerned about threats and how their moral judgments revolve around those threats. But of course, there's powerful processes of identity bringing us together, making us skeptical of the truths of outgroup members and making us not skeptical at all of the truths of our own groups.

And so it's a great point, right? We need groups to survive, right? Going back to the fact that we're hunted more than hunter. We rely on those groups. And so if there is some sacred truth in our group, we believe that because we don't want to be cast out of that group. Denise writes, I'm interested in the connection between a feeling of impotence and outrage. I often become most outraged when I feel there is nothing I can do to change a situation.

Yeah. You looked at helplessness, the sense of powerlessness as being a powerful factor in outrage. Yeah. Powerlessness is really, you know, a mark of a victim. So when we think of the most, you know, canonical victims that we condemn, who are harmed by acts we condemn, like child abuse or elder abuse, right, we get so upset at an act of child abuse because kids are powerless, right, and people are harming them.

And so when it comes to ourselves, when we feel powerless, when we feel like people are threatening us or harming us and we can't do anything about it, we can kind of step out of that situation and feel outraged on our behalf. It's a great point.

So Grace on Discord writes, I feel like outrage toes the line between talking to someone and talking down to them. It feels like these days more than ever, people try to hold themselves on a higher moral ground while seeming to plug their ears when other people try to share their own perspective on what might be a hot button topic. Absolutely. So we are deeply motivated to not only belong to our groups, but to see ourselves as someone who's a good moral person.

Almost no one gets up in the morning and thinks, you know what? I'm a monster. I'm evil. We all think that our moral convictions are the right ones, and we're really committed to seeing ourselves as good people. And so this gives us a sense of moral superiority. And then when others explain their moral views, because we're so convinced that we're right, their views seem obviously wrong, right?

And so I think some thing that we can do is have a little bit of moral humility. And I like to say, you know, move us off 100% right and you're 0% right to something like I'm 99% right. It's still really high, but you're just leaving a little sliver of openness there that you might be able to learn from someone else. You say that we should guard against the idea that

We shouldn't even bother to make sense of the other because doing so is akin to betrayal. And I thought that was an interesting word. What do you mean by that? Well, if you're in a war and someone on your side helps someone on the other side, that's a betrayal, right? We can agree on that. But I think even if someone on your side tries to argue that someone on the other side is

is not evil and maybe has some valid reasons for why they're doing what they're doing, that too can seem like betrayal. And so I encountered that a fair amount, right? Talking to progressives, here's how you might want to understand conservatives and why they vote the way they do and how they make their decisions when it comes to morality. And some folks are saying, well, I don't even want to understand them, right? I just want to beat them, right? I just want to win, right?

But unfortunately or fortunately, right. And that's one potential reason why I wouldn't want to. Right. Yes. Right. And I think they're evil. Right. So I think they're the other than I want to push them away. But then, you know, I think it makes sense to go back hundreds of years to the founding of this nation, which is an explicitly pluralistic nation. Right. With a party of progress and a party of tradition. Right. America.

Right.

what the other side is thinking, if only so you can find compromise or find common ground, find allies, make coalitions, whatever. Even pragmatically, we just need to understand where people are coming from. Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. But this point about betrayal is essentially then that by listening and taking in and potentially validating

The sincerity of the beliefs on the other side that you may then be betraying your own side, that you may be betraying real and felt pain that is driving your own perspective. You said it perfectly. I think that's what happens, right? If you try to reach out and make sense of those on the other side or have sincere conversations...

then are you discounting the harms that they've done to your side or the causes that you value? I think many people see that and believe that. But I do think that

Take civil rights, for instance, or women's suffrage. Those movements were only possible by understanding the other side, seeing the harms they were worried about, finding allies, building coalitions, and moving forward. So I do think that if you're thinking about how to organize and how to affect social change, you at least need to understand actually where people are coming from on the other side and not just act on a kind of caricature that there's some kind of demons. Yeah.

Let me go to caller Amir in Santa Clara. Hi, Amir, you're on. Yes, hi. Can you hear me? I can. Go right ahead. Okay, thank you for taking my call. My question was, you know, about this whole situation in Israel and Gaza, where both sides obviously have very strong feelings of being the victim, and the other side obviously thinks of them as the aggressor. And, you know, they're obviously...

a huge number of people on both sides. And I wanted to understand the author's take on, you know, how do we manage that situation as far as not getting sucked into just one narrative and then, you know, and then obviously move on with that. Amir, thanks.

Sure. I mean, we've got a little bit of time left, so I'm happy to solve the Middle East right now. It's a great question. And I think, you know, Amiri really hit on why it's so hard to move forward with that conflict, because there are such deep roots of legitimate victimhood on both those sides across millennia, really. Right. And so,

There, too, it does seem that some admission that the other side is a victim does seem like betrayal, especially to folks kind of embroiled in that victimhood. And so I'm not going to say how to solve that crisis. But what I will say is that when it comes to everyday disputes with people who really disagree, they often engage in competitive victimhood, which is saying like, well, my victimhood is more than your victimhood and it's more powerful and like I'm the victim and you're the perpetrator here.

And the way around that is, again, to kind of move from 100% I'm the victim and 100% you're the perpetrator just off of pure certainty to think, well, you know what? There could have been something I could say. Like, let's say you're talking about to your spouse. There could have been something that I said to you.

Right. That that I could see how that would hurt you. And I could see how you are hurt and those feelings are real. Right. So some validation of suffering can go a long way than just straight up denial. Adele wants to know, when is moral outrage appropriate?

Yeah, that's a great question. This is why it's such a murky topic, right? I mean, if you saw someone in the street just kicking a dog, right, for no apparent reason, 100% appropriate, right? Moral outrage evolved, if we go back to when we lived in groups, to really mobilize communities to stop threats, right?

So if someone was being abusive, someone was stealing all your food, the community would get outraged, show up with pitchforks and torches to kick them out of the community. Today, though, because we disagree so much on what is a reasonable threat and what's a real harm,

then there's more debate about when outrage is valid. But certainly there are many cases where outrage is valid. And in fact, if you open a random law book, we're going to agree on 99% of those laws. We're going to agree on so much that's happening today when it comes to outrage. And, you know, should someone who abuses their kids get prison time? Yes, right? We agree on that outrage, but we're really focused on the differences and that makes it hard. Susan says, every day I think about this quote from Alexei Navalny.

The important thing is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, and fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance. The idea is that you need to accept reality to act on it. Does that resonate with you, Kurt?

It's a great quote. It goes back, I think, to the point where I hear folks making about needing to meet people where they are. Right. So you could think, well, I just want to destroy the other side. I wish there wasn't any of the other side.

But there are folks on the other side and there are folks who disagree with you and we do need to move forward. So you just need to accept that there's conflict. It's not easy. And you need to figure out how to understand them so we can move forward. I've heard some folks say don't agonize, organize, right? When it comes to making social change, right? Don't just get angry, figure out what to do. It maybe addresses feelings of impotence and powerlessness that came up earlier. And part of that...

Learning how to organize is learning how other people think, what they're actually thinking and feeling, and that will give you a game plan of where to move ahead. We're talking with Kirk Gray about what's going on in our minds to better maybe understand each other. Kirk Gray's new book is Outrage. Thanks for talking with us. Thanks so much for having me. And my thanks to Mark Nieto for producing the segment. And also, as always, to our listeners, this is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

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