How Viral Content Shapes Moral Thinking

[Dr. Lindsay Hahn]: When we’re thinking about how the online environment works for morality, typically the ways that we’re looking at this is that most viral content is moral in some way – might be immoral – but it’s somebody being wronged, it’s somebody crossing a line, and therefore it almost feels like paying attention to it is a righteous things for me to do. And then, of course, we know reactions reinforce this, and they are teaching kids kind of which of these moral framings win, right? And who is right and who is wrong. And then, of course, the algorithms are sort of helping to amplify those same things that we have already reacted to. And so I would just say here moral outrage and kind of that my-side-versus-their-side framing are really engaging. So, of course, they do get boosted. But the work in moral psychology generally suggests that over time, if we repeatedly have these steady diets of us-versus-them, that can nudge kids – and not just kids, actually, adults too, perhaps unsurprisingly – toward this kind of rigid, tribal thinking where my group is right and your group, therefore, must be wrong. And so the point here is really just that the moral wiring which makes stories really powerful is the same wiring that kind of makes this online outrage really sticky in our minds. So it’s something to be aware of.