You’re probably feeling it: the onslaught of depressing news and commentary about political actions, wars, climate disasters and more. The first few times you’re exposed to a perceived injustice, you feel fired up and ready to fight against it. But after being repeatedly facing this moral assault, you start to feel fatigued, even withdrawn. Resistance feels futile.
This phenomenon is informally referred to as “outrage fatigue.” While it hasn’t been well studied, researchers have studied outrage itself—what purpose it serves and how it spreads. William Brady, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and his colleagues recently published a study on how outrage helps misinformation spread online. They found that posts from misinformation sources were more likely than those from trustworthy news outlets to elicit moral outrage (anger and disgust)—and that people were more likely to reshare them without reading them. But extensive exposure to outrage-inducing content can cause feelings of fatigue that turn people off participating in political action, Brady says.
Fortunately, there are ways to combat such fatigue, such as getting involved in local politics or causes. Scientific American talked to Brady about why we experience outrage fatigue, and what do so about it.
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[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What is outrage fatigue?
When people are experiencing outrage, what that means, theoretically, is they’re feeling that there’s a transgression that has occurred against their perceived sense of right and wrong—what we might also call a moral norm. Outrage, in a way, is very functional and good for groups, because it helps bring attention to these things that our social group or our culture would consider to be a transgression. And that usually is a good thing, because it helps groups to figure out, “Okay, here’s a bad thing happening, and we need to coordinate. We need to catalyze collective action so that we can solve this issue.” The reason why outrage tends to work as a tool for that is because it’s very arousing—it draws our attention, it gets us worked up, and that can sometimes motivate us to action.
But of course there’s a flip side to outrage, which is that when it occurs along the lines of group identities—for example, when you get outraged at a political out-group doing something that is counter normative or against the moral views of your political group—
that can also create hostility, and it can create conflict. Obviously, we’ve seen that with rising polarization in the U.S., but also in other countries in Europe and around the world. Theoretically, there’s this kind of give and take with outrage. It can be helpful; it can be functional. But if you’re constantly in that state, it can lead to conflict and escalation of political disputes. Psychologically, if you’re constantly in that state it can be very exhausting.
How does outrage play out differently at the group level and the individual level?
If at a group level you’re constantly outraged and playing out all these transgressions, you can get this kind of group-level fatigue. Moral outrage loses some of its potency because it’s hard to know, “What should I focus my outrage on?” It’s a limited resource. It requires a lot of attention and resources, so you start to get a little jaded, because you’re like, “Well, I’m supposed to be outraged at this and this and this. So what? I don’t know what to do.”
This has not been empirically studied very well, as far as I know. But we’ve looked a little bit at people leaving conversations in the context of online conversation. Basically, what happens is, some people are the super–outrage producers, and then other people—which turns out, according to some of my data, to be the majority of responses—don’t talk as much because they might feel isolated. Maybe things are getting too intense. Other people just might not know what they should be focusing on. And then there’s other people, even—we’ve seen this on social media, especially—who feel kind of afraid to express an opinion, because if there’s a lot of outrage in the environment, you feel like you’re going to be targeted if you say slightly the wrong thing.
If you want to talk about it individually, I’m not aware of empirical research that has studied that specifically in response to recent political events. This is now getting into the realm of speculation, but there is some research that shows that when people are feeling a lot of negative emotions in general—I’d obviously consider outrage in that bucket—they tend to feel like they need to regulate their emotions, because it can be taxing on them.
Would it be fair to say that individuals often behave as part of a bigger group—whether it’s political party or race or something else—and we feel a threat to our group whenever something happens that seems negative toward that broader group?
Yeah, 100 percent, and this is very well studied in social psychology. I think the key thing to understand is that we flexibly identify ourselves depending on the context. During a political election, when we see our group lose, social identity theory would predict that this would be a case when you very strongly are prone to identifying with categorizing yourself. For example: “Oh, I’m a Democrat. I feel very saliently my Democrat identity, so now I feel threatened. We just lost the election. Trump is saying he’s going to do all this stuff that my group wouldn’t do.” Then you’re very likely to feel outrage and other emotions on behalf of your group, and that’s where the threat comes in.
But my point in saying that it’s flexible is just to say it’s interesting to think about how we might then go into another context, and now our categorization is slightly different, or maybe we’re just feeling a certain identity that doesn’t have to do with politics. And now we’re realizing, like, “Man, I’ve been in this chronically group-identified state with my political identity, and I have been really outraged, and it is taking a toll on me individually.”
How does the media environment, and especially social media, affect the way we experience outrage?
A lot of times we can get kind of exhausted from viewing all the outrage we see in a context like social media. And the problem with that is that’s actually not necessarily representative of how people are feeling in our political group. What my research shows is that when you combine the use of engagement-based algorithms that are on X, Meta, etc., they are disproportionately amplifying outrage content. And what that means in practice is that even if there’s this small minority group of highly motivated political users who are posting a lot of this stuff, in fact, most people aren’t. The algorithms amplify, and it makes it look as if there are a ton of people doing it. To me, that’s concerning, because then we might get turned off of political participation. We feel like we’re already kind of exhausted by the general media and the anger and politics. But in fact that’s not actually representative of our group.
Is there anything we can do to combat outrage fatigue? How can people healthily disengage to some extent?
I think people really have to figure out, “How can I be aware and experience outrage while also grounding myself in local communities?” Because I think local community politics is how you can build a kind of feeling of safety and understanding among a group, like, “Oh, actually, there are concrete things I can do, or we can do, to organize and think about how we challenge the status quo we disagree with.” I think the problem is we’re in a kind of era where a primary way that, especially, young people engage in politics is through these online, honestly not that personal, spaces. And I think it’s been problematic for the kind of cross-coalition building that used to occur when there was just more organizing in offline spaces.
So I think it’s just getting more involved at a local level, where you have this interpersonal connection. It doesn’t cost much to express outrage online. It’s much more costly to try and get involved in the community and to have more direct and focused outrage. Directed outrage is less likely to lead to fatigue because there’s a satisfaction of knowing what it’s going for, and there are concrete outcomes you’re looking for.
Can limiting your media consumption help?
There are some deactivation studies for social media specifically [studies in which participants deactivate their account for some period of time].To be honest, there are kind of mixed results. One study showed a decrease in polarization, but people lost some political knowledge. Another study showed there was no effect. And there’s a big multicountry study going on with that, but to be honest, these studies tend to look at, like, two weeks of deactivation. It’s hard to say, “Is it a good or bad thing?” It’s something that is nuanced. But what I would say, drawing from what I know from my research, is that people do have the ability to alter their social media ecosystem. If you feel like you’re getting too much outrage and bombarded with stuff in a way that is not productive or is causing fatigue then you have the ability to change that environment by engaging with different content.
Is there evidence that that political parties or groups weaponize outrage fatigue as a way of making people less engaged or resistant?
In general, here’s one thing we know from at least the U.S. context: outrage has been used as a political tool to divide groups. For example, the political right has specifically used outrage stoking to get certain groups who would be harmed by their economic policies—say, the working class—to vote for them on other issues that have nothing to do with that. For example, issues of immigration, race, identity, things that make them outraged. Abortion is another one—it can distract people from other issues that would harm them. Two of our studies looked at the Russian disinformation organization the Internet Research Agency that was specifically using that as a strategy in the 2016 and 2020 elections. So we know that outrage as a divisive tool is something that is used as a strategy for sure.
