People become less approving of social media outrage the more people join in with it. One person rebuking another is fine, but ten people doing it looks like a mob.
This is the key finding of an interesting new paper called The Paradox of Viral Outrage, from Takuya Sawaoka and Benoît Monin of Stanford.
According to the authors, the titular ‘paradox’ is that “individual outrage that would be praised in isolation is more likely to be viewed as bullying when echoed online by a multitude of similar responses.” In other words, how can it be that lots of individually good actions add up to one not-so-good whole?
Sawaoka and Monin carried out six experiments to investigate how people perceive online outrage. Participants saw an initial post and a series of outraged replies to it. The provocative posts were taken from real viral scandals, although the names and faces of the ...
