Molly Crockett || Moral Outrage in the Digital Age

Today it’s a pleasure to have Molly Crockett on the podcast. Dr. Crockett is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Prior to joining Yale, Dr Crockett was a faculty member at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology and a Fellow of Jesus College. She holds a BSc in Neuroscience from UCLA and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and completed a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship with economists and neuroscientists at the University of Zürich and University College London.

In this episode we discuss:

• The discrepancy between outrage in real life vs. online outrage
• Cultural evolution and the selection and amplification of online content
• How basic reinforcement learning principles drive the design of online systems to maximize the amount of time we spend on the platforms
• Is the “habitual online shamer” addicted to outrage?
• Habitual behavior vs. addiction
• Is “outrage fatigue” happening en masse?
• Should we be thinking about rationing our outrage (reserving it for issues we find most important)?
• The costs and benefits of outrage
• Why people punish and the discrepancy between the actual reasons why we punish (inferred from behavior) vs. self-reported motives
• The difficulty doing science on topics that are incredibly heated in public social discourse
• The intractably intertwined nature of science and social justice
• What technologies might be doing to the way that young people construe the social world
• The human capacity for forgiveness
• Twitter Q & A

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