Being Angry In A World That Wants Us To Chill

Beware of empathy norms

‘Just relax.’

‘You need to chill out bud.’

‘Why don’t you get into meditation.’

All responses I’ve heard over the years after I’ve launched into a monologue about something bad happening somewhere in the world.

This is a particular affect that I’m sure many of us have come across: the impulse from others to emotionally regulate our outrage by making out it’s something uncool, embarrassing or bad for our health.

This emotional regulation worked on me when I was younger. I did feel a social pressure not to get outraged despite the outrageous things happening in the world.

I grew out of that quite quickly when I realised confronting injustice and fighting for a better world— despite the often impossible odds — requires a certain amount of moral outrage.

All the people I’ve campaigned alongside for various causes have this sense of outrage. It doesn’t mean we can’t be fun and relax and chill out. Some of us are even into meditation! We know it’s not healthy to be outraged all the time.

But I’ve never met anyone who wants to change the world who isn’t angry about the state of the world.

You try to change things you’re angry about. It seems logical.

Recently I wondered if there was any science to support the idea that outrage is a necessary condition for change.

It turns out there is.

But here’s the curious thing: many of the popular science articles about moral outrage I came across said how bad it is from both a personal and social point of view. A few select headlines include: “The allure of moral outrage;” “Moral outrage is self-serving;” “Social media teaches moral outrage;” and my favourite “How outrage is hijacking our culture and our minds.”

Reading these headlines I felt like my younger self again. It looked to me like a deliberate attempt to regulate emotions.

This in fact might be exactly what’s happening.

A paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences analysed literature examining discord between social groups. They found that while “outrage is frequently cast in a destructive light in the public discourse and in psychological research….the literature presents several cases in which outrage can serve as an important catalyst for collective action.”

They also said something fascinating about the kind of emotional regulation we might face when voicing feelings of outrage or anger at injustice.

They said that calls for empathy (the “relax, chill out” mode of discourse) are often pitted against outrage, not because of a deeply held, good faith belief that empathy is the key to resolving problems, but as a linguistic-emotional tool to quieten calls for change.

“People may leverage empathy norms to suppress outrage...promotion of empathy is a form of interpersonal emotion regulation, in which people attempt to induce emotions in others that further their own goals.” The researchers say that “such calls for empathy may have the effect of delegitimizing outrage, particularly outrage expressed by low-power groups, which could in turn reinforce the status quo.”

They are not saying empathy is bad. They are suggesting we shouldn’t accept the idea that empathy must always hold primacy over outrage, especially in a situation of injustice.

They describe the finding as controversial because of the cultural norms that have positioned outrage as a detriment to social progress.

Empathy and outrage are of course not mutually exclusive. It is often the empathy induced by the situation of injustice that leads to the feelings of outrage. The researchers are just saying we shouldn’t junk the outrage in the face of calls for empathy. And we should be aware that these calls may not be kind-hearted expressions of concern for all sides, but motivated to supress change.

The researchers ask “how did outrage come to be so negatively characterized in the first place?” We can look to the aforementioned media articles for an answer to this question. They say that just because outrage can have negative consequences in some instances “does not minimize its potential for positive moral impact. Rather than being antirational simply because it’s an emotion, in some cases outrage may be a rational means for achieving one’s goals.”

We don’t always need to be chill.

They even find that social media has an important role to play in galvanizing group action through the collectivisation of moral outrage, offering a counter to the ‘slacktivism’ trope that argues expressing outrage online is a lazy, zero outcome form activism.

“Some argue social media makes it too easy for outrage to swell into virtual mobbing while reducing engagement in actual activism. We offer a counterpoint: social media plays a crucial role in organizing outrage-inspired collective action. Sharing outrage on social media can create a sense of ‘common knowledge’ that an event or policy is considered unjust (which is sufficient to influence attitudes and beliefs), and promote the perception that participating in collective action is normative.”

They say while social media has clearly contributed to social and political discord, this doesn’t mean it is bad. This discord, they write “may be necessary for broadscale change…and it also offers a means of transforming emotion into effective action.”

Tension is a pre-requisite for change.

This has been obvious in the last month. The scale of the protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza would have been unthinkable prior to social media, which has enabled us to see and share the worst of the horror and helped amplify Palestinian voices. This is not 1993. Media elites can no longer act as gate-keepers for what they deem acceptable information.

(Other research has found social media engagement facilitates the sharing of information as well as motivational and emotional content in support of political protests).

The authors then differentiate between outrage on a personal and societal level. If you are personally wronged, responding with a sense of outrage may increase interpersonal antagonism and be counter-productive. But on a societal scale, they say outrage can be an effective “lever for activism.”

Researchers who have focused on whether outrage concretely influences solutions to problems in the real world came to similar conclusions. In a 2011 experiment researchers examined what effect outrage had on women’s intention to participate in collective action for equal pay. The researchers exposed women to written, visual and audio clips of men displaying hostile sexism and found that this exposure increased their desire to engage in collective action for equal pay. They then examined examples of women who had successfully achieved equal pay and found that “anger and fury, predicts intentions to participate—and actual participation—in collective action for equal salaries.”

But yet again, a quick search on the subject of anger, women and the workplace comes up with the same emotionally regulating ideas you can find on an initial search about outrage: “Workplace anger costs women irrespective of race;” Why women and anger collide too often;” Can an angry woman get ahead?”

If the world is burning, if an unjust war is raging, if a pandemic never ends, if you’re getting paid less than a man for doing exactly the same job, then yes: it’s ok to be outraged.

And not just ok.

It has significant societal utility.

Stay outraged. Share outrage. Organise.