Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2023 Jun;7(6):917-927. doi: 10.1038/s41562-023-01582-0. Epub 2023 Apr 10.
As individuals and political leaders increasingly interact in online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of emotion perception online. Here, we propose that social media users overperceive levels of moral outrage felt by individuals and groups, inflating beliefs about intergroup hostility. Using a Twitter field survey, we measured authors' moral outrage in real time and compared authors' reports to observers' judgements of the authors' moral outrage. We find that observers systematically overperceive moral outrage in authors, inferring more intense moral outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages actually reported. This effect was stronger in participants who spent more time on social media to learn about politics. Preregistered confirmatory behavioural experiments found that overperception of individuals' moral outrage causes overperception of collective moral outrage and inflates beliefs about hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. Together, these results highlight how individual-level overperceptions of online moral outrage produce collective overperceptions that have the potential to warp our social knowledge of moral and political attitudes.
随着个人和政治领导人越来越多地在在线社交网络中互动，了解在线情感感知的动态变化非常重要。在这里，我们提出社交媒体用户过度感知个人和群体感受到的道德义愤程度，夸大了群体之间敌意的信念。我们使用 Twitter 实地调查实时衡量作者的道德义愤，并将作者的报告与观察者对作者道德义愤的判断进行比较。我们发现，观察者系统地过度感知作者的道德义愤，从信息中推断出比信息作者实际报告的更强烈的道德义愤体验。对于那些花更多时间在社交媒体上了解政治的参与者来说，这种影响更强烈。预先注册的确认性行为实验发现，对个人道德义愤的过度感知会导致对集体道德义愤的过度感知，并夸大关于敌对交流规范、群体情感极化和意识形态极端的信念。总之，这些结果强调了个人对在线道德义愤的过度感知如何产生集体的过度感知，这些感知有可能扭曲我们对道德和政治态度的社会认知。
