Why is everyone so outraged? Kurt Gray has some ideas — and some solutions

Yahoo

28-01-2025

Before Kurt Gray wanted to understand the human mind, he was drawn to the physical world. Gray, a social psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studied geophysics in college until he realized he didn't want to dedicate his career to studying rocks. Instead, he was captivated by what he describes as things 'more real in (people's) hearts,' such as moral convictions and religious beliefs. 'I wanted to make scientific sense of people's deepest beliefs when it comes to morality, politics and religion,' Gray told me recently.
Gray now leads the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, which seeks solutions for bridging the moral and social divides that often fuel political conflicts.
In his latest book, 'Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground,' released earlier this month, Gray argues that the perception of harm is at the core of all moral judgments. 'We condemn things based on how harmful they feel to us,' he says.
In that respect, according to Gray, we are all more alike than we think, regardless of our politics and worldviews. By understanding the emotions that drive our moral judgments — particularly powerful ones like outrage — Gray believes we can foster greater empathy and respect in conversations around contentious issues.
'Studies show that feelings of harm are the master key of morality: all people judge acts as wrong based on how harmful they feel, explaining how even so-called harmless wrongs can be condemned based on harm,' Gray writes in the book. 'This finding provides a new understanding of morality and provides a powerful lingua franca to connect with others across divides.'
Gray, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and co-authored, with social psychologist Daniel Wegner, 'The Mind Club — Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters,' recently spoke with the Deseret News about how understanding what shapes our moral convictions can help us bridge divides and foster respect toward the other side's worldview.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Deseret News: Let's start by talking about what morality is. What role does it play in our society?
Kurt Gray: I think it's important to say from the get-go that I'm a moral psychologist. I study how our mind works, I study what morality does in our society from a descriptive level. I'm not telling folks this is the right thing or this is the wrong thing — that's for philosophers, theologians, pastors, parents.
From a scientific perspective, I think morality is this kind of gut feeling we have that something is right or wrong, the kind of visceral sense that someone did a bad thing, that someone deserves a punishment. We're all familiar with the feeling of outrage in our society today, and that's what I'm really focused on and the behaviors that are associated with that feeling.
And so morality, as the evolutionary argument goes, evolved to help people live in society better, to cooperate, to suppress our selfish instincts, to work together. Groups where people are less selfish thrive more than the groups that are selfish and are hurting each other. Ultimately, our morals are based on the harms that we see — the threats that we try to protect ourselves, our family and our groups against.
And while different people disagree, they don't disagree about the importance of protecting people from harm. What they disagree about is what is harmful and who is particularly vulnerable to victimization.
DN: In the book, you talk about how the 'destruction narrative' became prevalent in our political disagreements. What is that? And how does it contribute to polarization today?
KG: Every time we make a policy decision on a contentious issue, there are trade-offs. There is harm on both sides. For instance, the issue of abortion: If you move the abortion restrictions earlier, it's going to cause more potential harm to women, who are trying to get reproductive rights. If you move them later, then it harms fetuses and growing babies. So everyone's trying their best to protect themselves and what they care about, but people don't see it that way. What they see is this destruction narrative — the idea that the other side is out to harm and destroy.
This plays out in politics, where both Republicans and Democrats think the other group is going to create a hellscape filled with violence for the country and especially for themselves.
They view each other as evil and stupid — they're either trying to burn the world down or they don't recognize the truth and are just parroting back talking points from their media environment.
But if you dig into how and why people hold fast to their moral convictions — no one is a supervillain who just wants to burn the world down. Instead, we're trying to protect our group and our values. We have evolved more as prey than predators, feeling incredibly vigilant to threats. So rather than a destruction narrative, I think the more accurate narrative to account for how people act in politics is the 'protection narrative.'
DN: Many people divide our society into the oppressed and the oppressor. You talk about this dichotomy in terms of 'competing perceptions of victimhood.' How do these perceptions of victimhood fuel conflict?
KG: It's natural when people emphasize victimhood when they talk about morality. If someone harms you, your own victimhood is so powerful in your own mind — it's very obvious to you, as opposed to when someone else claims their experience as a victim. So if harm and victimhood is the thing that really underlies morality and that everyone understands, it's one thing that might ring through the noise.
The phenomenon of competitive victimhood occurs because if someone thinks you're the victim, you (escape) blame, but if you're the villain then you're punished by everyone and everyone gets outraged at you. So it's a really high-stakes competition for who gets to claim the central role of a victim.
We tend to typecast people into: This person is 100% a villain and this person is 100% a victim. Sometimes we typecast ourselves. It's totally fair given people's strong moral convictions to see naturally one person more a victim than another.
But when you say that someone's 100% the victim, that kind of annihilates any chance for conversation, for finding common ground. What you need is a little bit of moral humility to move off 100 to zero, even to 99. You can say: 'There is a seed of responsibility within me and a seed of victimhood within the other party.' It's a start. And I think that's a really important start.
DN: How can understanding the root of our moral outrage and convictions help us bridge divides? You make a case for sharing personal experiences of harm rather than facts.
KG: There are a couple of answers to why facts so often fail us in moral conversation. Our minds are not attuned to statistics. I've tried to teach college kids statistics — it's really hard. Our minds are not made to think about distributions and probability. I think, too, increasingly we live in different ecosystems with different facts. The other side's facts seem fake or not relevant to the situation at hand. Facts are the wrong kind of thing when we talk about morality.
'A story seems true in a way that a fact never can, even if it's just about one person.'
Kurt Gray
Morals are these deep truths about how the world should work and who's being harmed, and a statistic is not relevant in the same way. But a story seems true in a way that a fact never can, even if it's just about one person. For example, I'm talking to one individual and they're pro-gun rights, because their mom defended herself with a handgun from an attacker. It's much harder to deny the truth of that one experience. And now we're not having a conversation about some far-flung societal truth — we're talking about one person's convictions, and now I understand where that comes from.
And even if I disagree with you, I can understand how it's rational. You're not stupid for having this moral conviction because your experiences make that make sense. And so it increases respect because now I can see the harms that you care about and I'm confronted firsthand with your victimhood. It's much easier to put yourself in someone's shoes in a story. That's why we watch movies, that's why we read articles — the story shifts us out of our own mind into those of others.
There is also a 'civ' framework that is useful for some people to have challenging conversations — it stands for connect, invite, validate. Underlying all those things is an understanding that you're talking to a full human being. So first, you connect with them as another human being — give someone the choice to share and then validate their views, because it's hard to share and people are worried about being attacked.
I think the ultimate goal should always be to understand and not to win. And if you try to win, I think you've already lost. But you can understand where someone's coming from, have some mutual understanding, and then maybe try to influence someone that way just by sharing where you're coming from. Trying to understand, I think, is much more important than trying to win.