The role of social identity in spreading moral outrage online
Why moral and emotional messages spread like wildfire on social media + we are hiring a new Lab Manager!
If you have spent time on social media, you have likely noticed that posts expressing moral outrage or strong emotions often go viral. Our lab has found that the more moral-emotional words a message contains, the more likely it is to be shared. This pattern—known as moral contagion—captures how moral-emotional language increases the spread of moralized content online.
But why?
Research led by our lab alumnus Billy Brady has found that receiving positive feedback on “morally outraged” posts encourages people to express more moral outrage in the future. In short, people have social incentives to express outrage. These incentives—and norms—can lead people to exaggerate their expressions of outrage leading others to overestimate how morally outraged others actually are. This is all part of the outrage cycle that, in turn, leads others to generate exaggerated perceptions of hostility, ideological extremity, and polarization.
As political conversations move from the kitchen table to social media, we are seeing more intergroup conflict, public shaming, and hate speech. And much of it is facilitated by morally contagious messages. Indeed, we have found that even our feelings of hatred are loaded with a sense of morality—we often hate people or groups who we believe are harming others or violating our moral values.
Worse yet, moral-emotional rhetoric online is linked to the spread of misinformation, hostility, and the formation of echo chambers. Moralized communication online can also translate into real-world violence and is frequently exploited by bad actors to mobilize support for anti-democratic causes.
People who identified most strongly with their party shared moral-emotional messages approximately 80% of the time, likely because using emotional language allows these individuals to signal their belonging and alignment with their party.
Despite this, we still know relatively little about why and how moral-emotional content amplifies engagement and conflict online. In a brand new paper from our lab that was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we are finally able to address this gap. In a series of five pre-registered experiments with nearly 2,500 participants, we identified causal pathways through which moral-emotional language influences social media sharing and its implications for intergroup relations. Here are our key lessons:
Moral-emotional rhetoric increases sharing of political content online: Participants were more inclined to share messages critical of political opponents when those messages used moral-emotional language rather than neutral language. Even changing a single word caused people to share the message. This effect was particularly strong among participants who highly identified with their political party.
The influence of moral-emotional rhetoric on sharing depends on social identity: The more people identified with their political party, the more likely they were to share moral-emotional messages online. People who identified most strongly with their party shared moral-emotional messages approximately 80% of the time, likely because using emotional language allows these individuals to signal their belonging and alignment with their party.
Using moral-emotional language shapes how others see us: People who shared moral-emotional messages were perceived as strongly identified with their ingroup but they were also seen as less open-minded and less worthy of a political conversation by outgroup members. In short, people see you as a close-minded partisan when you use this type of language.
Expressing moral-emotional language online is a double-edged sword: On one hand, it boosts the reach of our messages and strengthens ingroup bonds, satisfying essential social needs like belonging. This makes moral emotions a powerful tool that unites group members online. On the other hand, it undermines intergroup dialogue, making productive communication and cooperation across ideological lines difficult. The widespread use of moral outrage language creates the impression of deeply divided social networks filled with intense hostility—even if many people don’t genuinely feel as extreme as their posts suggest.
Summary: In the context of contentious political conversations online, moral-emotional language causes political partisans to share content more frequently, especially among highly identified partisans. This is an important finding since all the prior work on moral contagion relied on correlational datasets. Now we know that this type of language has a direct causal impact.
Expressing negative moral-emotional language in social media messages makes the message author appear more strongly identified with their group but also leads outgroup members to see the author as less open-minded and less worthy of conversation. As such, this type of rhetoric might help make a message go viral but at the cost of deepening intergroup division.
Citation: *Brady, W. J. & Van Bavel, J. J. (2025). Social identity shapes antecedents and functional outcomes of moral emotion expression in online networks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Read the preprint here.
News and Announcements
Our lab manager Sarah Mughal has been accepted as an incoming PhD student in the Psychology Department at Rutgers University! Congrats to Sarah on reaching the next step of her academic career—we wish her the very best!
As a result, we are hiring a new lab manager! You can view the job posting at the link below: https://apply.interfolio.com/166620 Applications will be accepted starting April 18th, and will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position is filled. Please spread the word and we hope you’ll come join us at New York University!
Jay was named a 2024 Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS, an independent scholarly analytics platform and research database of over 30 million scholar profiles. High Ranked Scholars are the most productive (number of publications) authors whose works are of profound impact (citations) and of utmost quality (h-index). Jay’s scholarship placed him in the top 0.05% of all scholars globally. Congrats to Jay and all his students and collaborators!
Our postdoc Laura Globig was recently awarded the Dana Foundation Neuroscience & Society Trainee Research Award. This highly-competitive award supports innovative neuroscience research with the potential for large-scale societal impact. Congratulations to Laura!
On May 5th, Jay will be speaking at NYU Langone’s 9th Annual “Health And…” conference, revolving around the impact of social media on health. You can find more information here.
Preprints and Publications
Jay co-authored a Correspondence article in Nature this week with Jonas De Keersmaecker, emphasizing the need for scientists to regain trust in increasingly polarized times. You can read the full correspondence article here.
The preprint of our methods paper on the measurement of intellectual humility is out. We consolidated existing popular scales into the Collected Intergroup Intellectual Humility scale (CIIH) which offers strong psychometric properties and greater utility than existing measures. You can read the preprent here. This work was led by former lab alum Philip Pärnamets, along with Jay and Mark Alfano.
This newsletter was written by Sarah Mughal and edited by Anni Sternisko and Jay Van Bavel.
If you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to our Lab Manager Sarah (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who puts together our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.
And in case you missed it, here’s our last newsletter:
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That’s it for this month, folks - thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next month!