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Moral Outrage Is Self-Serving, Say Psychologists
 It seems like some people are working hard to understand what really motivates people. Way more at link, of course.I wonder if mirror cells work on imagined and written situations as well as viewed situations. And to prove that I am still able to learn, this time I will make sure I'm not standing between TW and this article! ;-) When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don't affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism--a "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others." But new research suggests that professing such third-party concern--what social scientists refer to as "moral outrage"--is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person. Outrage expressed "on behalf of the victim of [a perceived] moral violation" is often thought of as "a prosocial emotion" rooted in "a desire to restore justice by fighting on behalf of the victimized," explain Bowdoin psychology professor Zachary Rothschild and University of Southern Mississippi psychology professor Lucas A. Keefer in the latest edition of Motivation and Emotion. Yet this conventional construction--moral outrage as the purview of the especially righteous--is "called into question" by research on guilt, they say. Posted by: gorb 2017-03-01 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=482389 |