Recent research published in journals cognition and emotion It has been suggested that feeling morally outraged makes people more likely to rapidly share misinformation online. This study provides evidence that anger causes individuals to act impulsively and pay less attention to the credibility of news sources. These findings provide insight into how emotional reactions on social media facilitate the spread of misinformation.
Social media platforms are full of false and misleading news aimed at provoking strong emotional reactions. Previous research suggests that moral outrage plays a large role in spreading these false claims, but the specific emotions involved are not fully understood. Although moral anger is often treated as a single emotion, it actually includes different emotions such as anger and disgust.
Xiaozhe Peng, an associate professor at the Department of Psychology at Shenzhen University in China, wanted to examine these specific emotions. “As a principal investigator at the Emotion and Communication Neuroscience Institute, I have long been interested in how emotions shape communication,” Penn said. “This project was motivated in part by our repeated findings that emotionally provocative content on social media can accelerate the spread of misinformation and, in some cases, escalate into online attacks.”
“We wanted to understand which specific moral emotions are most involved in this process,” Penn added. Psychological theory proposes that persuasion occurs through various mental channels. People may evaluate the actual content of a message, but they may also rely on mental shortcuts such as emotion or the credibility of a news source.
Researchers designed an experiment to see how these mental shortcuts compete when people browse social media. For the first experiment, the scientists recruited 223 participants from China through an online platform. Participants read 24 different news headlines that were changed to represent misinformation.
These headings varied in the severity of the moral wrongdoing described, ranging from completely neutral acts to serious moral violations. The researchers also randomly assigned the level of confidence in the headline sources, ranging from 0 percent confidence to 100 percent confidence. Before deciding how much to share each heading, participants were encouraged to focus on specific details.
They were asked to either rate the accuracy of the news, the morality of the event, or nothing at all. Scientists have found that people are generally more willing to share news from reliable sources. They also found that severe moral transgressions increased people’s willingness to share.
This was especially true when participants were encouraged to focus on the moral aspects of the story. When participants were prompted to focus on either accuracy or morality, they made sharing decisions with less emphasis on source credibility. By focusing on the content of the message, reliance on external credibility labels was reduced.
The second experiment involved 116 college students and focused specifically on comparing moral outrage and moral disgust. Participants read 18 false news headlines that described mild or severe moral violations. This time, the headlines were presented as coming from highly reliable or unreliable sources.
The scientists wanted to find out how different emotional states affect sharing of these headlines. They asked students to rate their current feelings of anger, disgust, or neutral attention. After this emotional prompt, students rated their willingness to share the news.
The researchers found that participants who were made to feel angry were significantly more willing to share headlines from less trustworthy sources compared to the disgusted and control groups. Disgust prompts did not increase willingness to share compared to a neutral control group. This suggests that moral outrage actively reduces reliance on a person’s credibility when deciding to share information.
“What surprised us most was that moral outrage, not moral disgust, consistently drove sharing across studies,” Professor Penn said. “Both emotions are often lumped together as ‘moral anger,’ but they did not have the same behavioral consequences.” This is consistent with theories that suggest that anger motivates people to confront problems, while disgust tends to cause people to distance themselves.
The third experiment investigated the deeper cognitive processes behind how anger influences sharing decisions. Scientists recruited 63 university students and had them rate 36 true/false headlines. These headings were combined with labels of low, ambiguous, or high source credibility.
To create a strong emotional state, participants completed a memory task before evaluating the news. They wrote about deeply angry personal memories. After recalling this angry memory, they rated their willingness to share various headlines.
The researchers used a mathematical model to measure how quickly participants made decisions and how much mental evidence they needed before choosing to share. In psychology, these models help explain whether people make slow, deliberate choices or quick, impulsive choices. Track the speed of decision-making and the standard of evidence needed to take action.
The model showed that anger induction lowered participants’ decision-making thresholds. This means that students need less evidence and time to choose whether to share a heading. Emotions of anger prevented participants from sharing decisions quickly and carefully.
“We also found that anger was associated with lower decision-making thresholds, suggesting that anger may lead people to make quicker, less cautious decisions to share,” Penn noted. The model also showed that anger does not change a person’s ability to distinguish between truth and false information. Instead, that emotion simply lowered the mental barrier needed to hit the share button.
Although this study provides evidence about how online sharing works, there are some limitations to keep in mind. “Our study was conducted in a controlled experimental environment and measured willingness to share rather than actual sharing behavior on live social media platforms,” Peng said. “This allows us to pinpoint the mechanisms more precisely, but real-world online environments are more complex.”
The research was also conducted entirely within the specific cultural context of China. “Furthermore, because our sample was drawn from a specific cultural context, future research should investigate how broadly these findings generalize across countries and platforms,” Peng explained. The expression and differentiation of emotions may differ across cultures, which may influence the results.
Scientists suggest that future research should test these mechanisms in more natural environments. “One of our long-term goals is to better understand how certain emotions are formed, not only in whether people share information but also in how they consider cues such as accuracy, source credibility, and social signals when making decisions,” Penn said.
The team will also look at ways to reduce the spread of false content. “We are also working to develop interventions that target emotional and decision-making processes as well as belief accuracy, such as lightweight prompts that alert users when a post contains highly emotive or anger-inducing content,” Peng added. “More broadly, we are interested in interventions that can reduce the sharing of misinformation without substantially compromising user engagement on social media platforms.”
“One of the broader messages of this study is that misinformation is not only a problem of false beliefs, but also a problem of emotional communication,” Penn said. “Moral outrage appears to be particularly powerful because it is action-oriented: it seeks to express people, condemn it, and spread it rapidly.” “This is critical to understanding why some misleading content spreads so quickly online,” he added.
“Taken together, our findings suggest that moral outrage is a particularly strong driver of misinformation sharing,” Peng said. “People share not only because they believe something is true, but also because anger changes the emotional and decision-making processes behind sharing and can even override more analytical evaluation.”
Researchers offer practical advice for people browsing social platforms. “For everyday users, the practical takeaway is simple: If you see a post and immediately get angry, that’s exactly when you should pause before liking, commenting, or sharing,” Penn advised.
The study, “Moral outrage accelerates the sharing of misinformation: Evidence from experimental manipulation and hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling,” was authored by Haoyang Jiang, Hongbo Yu, Shenyuan Guo, and Xiaozhe Peng.
