Thread by @JewhadiTM

Perpetually raging about the world's injustices? You're probably overcompensating. reason.com/blog/2017/03/0…

When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don't affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others."

But new research suggests that professing such 3rd-party concern—referred to as "moral outrage"—is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person.

Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one's sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt finds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one's actions.

Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group's moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing.

These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity.

1. Triggering feelings of personal culpability for a problem increases moral outrage at a third-party target.

2. The more guilt over one's own potential complicity, the more desire "to punish a third-party through increased moral outrage at that target."

3. Having the opportunity to express outrage at a third-party decreased guilt in people threatened through "ingroup immorality."

4. “The opportunity to express moral outrage at corporate harm-doers" inflated participants perception of personal morality.

5. Guilt-induced moral outrage was lessened when people could assert their goodness through alternative means, "even in an unrelated context."

The findings also suggest that "outrage driven by moral identity concerns serves to compensate for the threat of personal or collective immorality" and the cognitive dissonance that it might elicit...”

... and expose a "link between guilt and self-serving expressions of outrage that reflect a kind of 'moral hypocrisy,' or at least a non-moral form of anger with a moral facade."