If you feel like you're met with a lot of anger and vitriol every time you open up your social media apps, you're not imagining it: A new study shows how these online networks are encouraging us to express more moral outrage over time.
What seems to be happening is that the likes, shares and interactions we get for our outpourings of indignation are reinforcing those expressions. That in turn encourages us to carry on being morally outraged more often and more visibly in the future.
What this study shows is that reinforcement learning is evident in the extremes of online political discussion, according to computational social psychologist William Brady from Yale University, who is one of the researchers behind the work.
"Social media's incentives are changing the tone of our political conversations online," says Brady. "This is the first evidence that some people learn to express more outrage over time because they are rewarded by the basic design of social media."
The team used computer software to analyze 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users, collected during several controversial events, including debates over hate crimes, the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, and an altercation on an aircraft.
For a tweet to qualify as showing moral outrage, it had to meet three criteria: it had to be a response to a perceived violation of personal morals; it had to show feelings such as anger, disgust, or contempt; and it had to include some kind of blame or call for accountability.
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Read Full Story: https://www.sciencealert.com/social-media-networks-are-training-us-to-express-more-outrage-online
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