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757 points headalgorithm | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.226s | source
1. adolph ◴[] No.42964932[source]
From TFA: There’s actually a recent study by William Brady, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He and his colleagues found that outrage actually helps misinformation spread more widely, especially online on social media.

No specific study was linked from the transcript. Brady's works indexed by Google Scholar there is "Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online" by KL McLoughlin, WJ Brady, A Goolsbee, B Kaiser, K Klonick, MJ Crockett, published in Science 386 (6725), 991-996. [1] Two of moral outrage's properties are interestingly counter to one another. Expressions of outrage are often orthogonal to truth/falsity and expressing outrage imbues trustworthiness.

[O]utrage expressions can serve communicative goals that do not depend on information accuracy, such as signaling loyalty to a political group or broadcasting a moral stance. Consequently, outrage-evoking misinformation may be difficult to mitigate with interventions such as fact-checking or accuracy prompts that assume users want to share accurate information.

[I]ndividuals who express outrage are seen as more trustworthy. This suggests that news sources might gain a credibility advantage by posting outrageous content.

0. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ysiWkJMAAAAJ...

1. https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.adl2829