The Speed of Rage

Research on social media shows emotions spread at different speeds and ranges. Rage spreads quickly and broadly, while sadness spreads slowly and expands less. Anger can be a fast spreader, but awe can spread even faster than rage. Rage can worsen online environments because it motivates action, while sadness demotivates. Awe appears to travel widely because it encourages sharing, similar to people drawing attention to beautiful sunsets or impressive events. Sharing rage often aims to express anger and to infect others with it. Rage weakens the host’s “immune system,” described as reason and emotional control, which increases susceptibility to appeal-to-anger reasoning and related fear and appeal-to-force fallacies.

"One focus has been on determining how quickly and broadly emotions spread online. Over a decade ago, researchers at Beijing University found that rage spread the fastest and farthest online. Researchers in the United States found that anger was a speed leader, but not the fastest in the study: awe was even faster than rage. But rage was quite fast. As might be expected, sadness was a slow spreader and had a limited expansion."

"This research helped explain how social media made the world worse. Rage tends to be a strong motivator and sadness tends to be a de-motivator. The power of awe was an interesting finding, but some reflection shows this does make sense-it tends to move people to want to share. IRL, think of people eagerly drawing the attention of strangers to things like beautiful sunsets, impressive feats or majestic animals."

"When people share their rage via social media, they are sharing with an intent to express ("I am angry!") and to infect others with this rage ("you should be angry, too!"). Rage, like many infectious agents, also has the effect of weakening the host's "immune system." In the case of anger, the immune system is reason and emotional control. Anger tends to suppress reason and lower emotional control."

"This makes people even more vulnerable to rage and susceptible to the classic fallacy of appeal to anger. This is the fallacy in which a person accepts anger as proof that a claim is true. Roughly put, the person "reasons" like this: "this makes me angry, so it is true." This infection also renders people susceptible to related emotions (and fallacies), such as fear (and appeal to force)."

Read at A Philosopher's Blog