You’re probably feeling it: an onslaught of depressing news about political action, wars, climate disasters and more. The first times you are faced with a perceived injustice, you feel fired up and ready to fight against it. But after dealing with this moral assault over and over again, you start to feel tired, even retarded. Resistance feels insignificant.
This phenomenon is informally referred to as “anger fatigue”. Although it has not been well studied, researchers have studied anger itself: what it does and how it spreads. William Brady, assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and his colleagues recently published a study. How anger helps spread misinformation online They found that messages from disinformation sources were more likely than those from trusted news sources to arouse moral outrage (anger and disgust), and that people were more likely to reshare them without reading them. But broad exposure to content that provokes anger can create a sense of fatigue that stops people from engaging in political action, Brady said.
Fortunately, there are ways to combat this fatigue, such as getting involved in local politics or causes. American scientific He spoke with Brady about why we experience anger fatigue and what to do about it.
About supporting science journalism
If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
(Following is an edited transcript of the interview.)
What is anger fatigue?
When people are experiencing anger, what this means, theoretically, is that they feel that a transgression has occurred against a perceived sense of right and wrong, what we might also call a moral norm. Anger is, in a way, very functional and good for groups, because it helps draw attention to those things that our social group or our culture would consider transgressive. And that’s usually a good thing, because it helps teams figure out, “Okay, there’s a bad thing going on here, and we need to coordinate. We need to catalyze collective action to solve this problem.” The reason anger works as a tool for this is because it’s so motivating: it gets our attention, makes us work, and can sometimes motivate us to action.
But of course there is another side to anger, which is when it happens along the lines of group identities, for example when you get angry at a political group for doing something that is against the rules or against your moral views of politics. team—
this can also lead to hostility and conflict. Of course, we’ve seen this with increasing polarization in the US, but also in other countries in Europe and around the world. In theory, there is this kind of hand-off with anger. It can be helpful; it can be functional. But if you are constantly in this situation, it can lead to increased conflicts and political conflicts. Psychologically, if you are constantly in that state it can be very tiring.
How does anger play out at the group level and at the individual level?
If you’re constantly getting angry at the team level and you’re doing all these transgressions, you can get this type of team-level fatigue. Moral anger loses some of its power because it is difficult to know, “What should I focus my anger on?” It is a limited resource. It requires a lot of attention and resources, so you start to get a little tired, because you say, “Well, I have to be angry with this and this and this. So what? I don’t know what to do.”
This has not been studied empirically very well, as far as I know. But we’ve looked a little at people who leave conversations in the context of online conversation. Basically, what happens is that some people are super-irritant producers, and then other people—which I think is the majority of responses, based on some of my data—don’t talk as much because they can feel isolated. Maybe things are getting too intense. Others may not know what to focus on. And there are other people – we have seen this, especially on social networks – who feel afraid to express their opinion, because if there is a lot of anger in the environment, you feel that you will be targeted. if you say it a little wrong.
If you want to talk about that individually, I’m not aware of any empirical research that has specifically looked at it in response to recent political events. This is getting into the realm of speculation now, but there’s some research that shows that when people generally feel a lot of negative emotions—obviously, I’d count anger in that bucket—they tend to feel like they need to regulate it. emotions, because they can be taxes.
Would it be fair to say that individuals act as part of a larger group—be it a political party, a race, or something else—and that whenever something happens that seems negative to that larger group, we feel threatened by our group?
Yes, 100 percent, and this is very well researched in social psychology. I think the key to understanding is that we flexibly identify ourselves depending on the context. In political elections, when we see our group lose, social identity theory would predict that this would be the case when you have a strong tendency to identify with the category you belong to. For example: “Oh, I’m a democrat. I feel very strongly about my Democratic identity, so now I feel threatened. We just lost the election. Trump is saying he’s going to do all these things that my team wouldn’t do.’ Then it’s very likely that you’ll feel anger and other emotions on behalf of your team, and that’s where the threat comes in.
But my point in saying it’s flexible is that it’s interesting to think about how we’re going to enter a different context, and now our categorization is a little different, or maybe we’re feeling a certain identity that isn’t necessarily there. done with politics And now we’re realizing, “Man, I’ve been in this chronically group-identified situation with my political identity, and I’m really pissed off, and it’s hurting me individually.”
How does the media environment, and especially social media, affect the way we experience anger?
We can often get tired of seeing all the outrage we see in a context like social media. And the problem with that is that’s not necessarily representative of how people feel in our political group. What my research shows is that when you combine the use of commitment-based algorithms in X, Meta, etc., disproportionately increasing the content of anger. And what that means in practice is that even though this tiny little group of highly motivated political users are posting a lot, most people aren’t. Algorithms increase, and it appears that many people are doing it. For me, that is worrying because then we could be disabled from political participation. We feel that we are already tired of the general media and the anger and the politics. But honestly, that’s not representative of our team.
Is there anything we can do to combat anger fatigue? How can people disconnect in a healthy way?
I think people really have to figure out, “How can I have anger and experience anger based on local communities?” I think you can build a kind of sense of security and understanding among a local community policy group, like, “Oh, actually, there are concrete things I can do, or we can do, to organize and think about and challenge the status quo that we don’t agree with.” I think the problem is that we’re in a kind of era where the main way for young people to engage in politics is through these online spaces, and I think it’s been problematic when there was more organization in offline spaces for the type of coalition building that was taking place.
So I think it’s just getting more involved on a local level where you have that interpersonal connection. It doesn’t cost much to express your anger online. It’s much more expensive to try to engage in the community and have more direct and focused anger. Directed anger is less likely to lead to fatigue because it is satisfying to know what it is leading to and that there are specific results you are looking for.
Can limiting your media consumption help?
There are some opt-out studies specifically for social media (studies where participants deactivate their account for a period of time). To be honest, the results are mixed. A study showed that a decrease polarizationbut people lost some political knowledge. Another study showed no effect. And there’s a big multi-country study going on with that, but to be honest, these studies tend to look at two weeks of deactivation. It’s hard to say, “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” It’s something nuanced. But I would say, from what I know from my research, that people have the ability to change their social media ecosystem. If you feel like you’re getting too angry and bombarded in a way that’s unproductive or causing fatigue, you have the ability to change that environment by engaging with different content.
Are political parties or groups weaponizing anger fatigue as a way to make people less engaged or resistant?
In general, here’s one thing we know at least from the US context: anger has been used as a political tool to divide groups. For example, the political right has specifically used anger to get certain groups — such as the working class — to vote on unrelated issues that would harm their economic policies. For example, immigration issues, race, identity, things that cause anger. Abortion is another: it can distract people from other issues that would harm them. Our investigations examined the Russian disinformation organization Internet Research Agency he was using exactly that as a strategy in the 2016 and 2020 elections. So we know that anger is something that is used as a strategy as a divisive tool.
