Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Overcoming Outrage in a Polarized World With Kurt Gray
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 502 of Live Happy Now. We’re living in a time of extreme polarization, and that’s having a direct effect on our well-being. So, this week, we’re going to look at what’s driving our outrage and what we can do about it.
I’m your host, Paula Felps, and today I’m joined by Kurt Gray, a professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the new book, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. Kurt, who also directs the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at UNC is here to explain the role that our perceptions of harm play in our outrage, and look at how our concerns and differences can foster hope for the future, and even strengthen our relationships. Let’s have a listen.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:51] PF: Kurt, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.
[0:00:53] KG: Thanks so much for having me.
[0:00:55] PF: Oh, well, you have written the book we need for 2025. This is such an incredible read, so much packed into it, and I highly recommend everybody block out some time to dig into it. But before we start talking about the book, can you tell us a little about yourself and the work that you do that led you to write this?
[0:01:16] KG: Sure. So, I am a social psychologist, and that means I study how our minds work, not necessarily how our minds should work, but how they do.
[0:01:24] PF: Two very different things, right?
[0:01:26] KG: Absolutely. I study our moral judgments. So, how each of us makes sense of what’s right and what’s wrong based on our own convictions, based on our perceptions and based on our kind of communities. I study why we’re divided by morality and politics and what led me there is both kind of an academic journey, which was making sense of how people can feel so strongly, but so oppositely on so many issues. In my personal sense of, knowing folks on the left and on the right who are both good people, but who have very different opinions on these issues. So, there’s a personal interest here as well.
[0:02:11] PF: So, at what point did you decide I’m going to dig in and write this book? Because as I said, this is the book for 2025. There’s so much division and it is over politics. It is over morality. This didn’t just appear overnight. When did you say, “Hey, this is the work that I’m going to do and this is the book that’s going to come out of it.”
[0:02:30] KG: For the last maybe 15 years, I’ve been studying how people make kind of their moral judgments. It’s been a little further away from politics, so I’ve studied how people make sense of animal rights and questions of whether in a vegetative state someone deserves to kind of stay there or pull the plug, these kind of like ethical questions. But living in today’s society, you just can’t get around that the real argument here about morality is about politics too.
So, I, like anyone else who lives in the world who consumes social media who watches the news, I just felt the pull and it was my hope that it could be useful for people too, to try to make sense of this and to try to understand themselves and others who maybe disagree with them.
[0:03:20] PF: Your subtitle is so enticing. The first, we’re just going to share the first half of that subtitle right now, which is why we fight about morality and politics, which of course that’s a question most of us are asking right now. So, what’s the short answer?
[0:03:34] KG: The short answer is that we are all concerned about protecting ourselves, from harm, from suffering, protecting our families and society. But we see different harms. We each focus on different threats, and we disagree about who the real victim is in these moral issues. So, we have, to put a fine point on it, different perceptions of harm.
[0:04:01] PF: Yes, and that drives our polarization.
[0:04:05] KG: That’s right, that’s right. So, political polarization is ultimately grounded in our moral judgments and our moral differences between, let’s say, left and right.
[0:04:16] PF: It’s so interesting because I had just read that part of your book and I shared that with somebody else and they had a discussion the very next day where it was starting to get heated and she did that exact thing where she took a step back and says, “Thought. What kind of harm? How are they perceiving this?” It completely changed the way that that conversation went. So, I think that’s such an important thing for us to be able to recognize, it’s not something that I had ever thought about.
One thing that I see from your book is you teach us that progressives and conservatives have different perceptions of harm. And I loved the way that you presented it. Can you share how that explains a lot of the moral divides that we are facing right now?
[0:04:59] KG: Sure. So, I want to say not to jump ahead to common ground, right? But there’s so many things that progressives and conservatives agree on, right? We’re only focusing on the kind of 1% of cases where we’re disagreeing. We all agree, animal abuse is wrong, child abuse is wrong, elder abuse is wrong. Because those are examples where it’s very clear who’s vulnerable. The puppy, the kid, the elderly person.
Where we disagree is where we can have kind of legitimately different perceptions of who’s most especially vulnerable to suffering or victimization. My research, and it’s in the book, is about kind of a few clusters where progressives and conservatives kind of really disagree about who’s suffering and who’s most vulnerable to suffering. So, the environment, progressives think that the environment is very vulnerable to suffering like suffering like FernGully for maybe older folks or Avatar. These functioning ecosystems that we really need to project where maybe conservatives think of natural resources more as resources, and not kind of suffering.
Another example is the divine. So, conservatives are more likely to be religious and more likely to think that Jesus and the Bible can suffer in a kind of more real way than progressives might think. But I think the biggest source of disagreement is about how much folks who, and the term I use is, othered in society. Muslim folks, maybe undocumented immigrants, trans folks. These are people who have been othered by society, who are kind of more at the fringes of American society. Progressives think that these folks are really vulnerable to harm, right? They really need protection.
On the other hand, conservatives think that they can suffer, but not that much more than the average American. On the other hand, there’s another group called the powerful, corporate leaders, maybe cops, folks who are kind of in a structurally more powerful place. Now, progressives think that these folks cannot suffer at all, that they are invulnerable to harm. Whereas conservatives think that these folks can suffer basically just like everybody else. So, now we get this, if we zoom out, we see progressives divide the world. There’s like groups who are really vulnerable, they’re oppressed, and groups who are really invulnerable, they’re the oppressors, the kind of like corporate leaders. And then conservatives are more like, look, everyone’s kind of the same. Everyone can suffer about equally.
So, progressives give us a kind of group-based kind of differences between vulnerable groups and invulnerable groups, and conservatives kind of are less like to emphasize group-based differences and just say, “Look, everyone’s an individual.” There are truths in each of these things, but I think this is how we get divides about immigration or Black Lives, Blue Lives Matter and so forth.
[0:08:02] PF: Oftentimes, when you have groups that are othered, as you said, the progressives see the harm that comes to them, but some of the conservatives might feel like, but those are people who can cause us harm. We see that a lot where that incidents are cherry-picked in the news or in a, say in a political debate, and they’ll reinforce that idea that this is a group that is causing us harm. How does that help reinforce on both sides the divide?
[0:08:33] KG: Exactly right. You’re right on. So, one group says, “These are the victims,” and the other group says, “Well, these are the perpetrators.” This is what these arguments are really about. Because our moral judgments come from the sense of who the real victim is, when your victim is the other person’s perpetrator, that gets you really outraged. So, we see it with, let’s say, abortion. Is a fetus, is that the vulnerable victim and kind of the woman seeking an abortion, is she the perpetrator? Or is the woman seeking the abortion, is she the victim? And then maybe the kind of like medical system or politics is that the perpetrator.
There’s really these competing narratives of kind of like victim and perpetrator. When we’re actively like divided. One person’s purpose, the other person’s victim, well, then it’s really hard to find common ground.
[0:09:30] PF: One thing that you brought up, and I love this, you talk about that, even though our concerns about harm and protection can alienate us, they can also give us some hope for the future. But how does that work?
[0:09:42] KG: So, it’s easy to think that liberals and conservatives have kind of fundamentally different moral concerns. But at the end of the day, my research really finds that we’re all concerned about perceptions of harm. On one hand, it makes it complicated, right? Because now we’re all arguing about who’s the real victim. But I think it actually simplifies it more than complicates it because now we have a kind of common currency. It turns out now you can understand all sorts of moral disagreements with just one question, which is what are the harms that they see and what are the harms that I see and how do those disagree? So, the fact that we can map all of these debates onto this common currency, I think, is really useful, especially when we’re trying to understand people who disagree with us, because now you can say, “Well, they ultimately are worried about the same things I am, but just see the world differently.”
[0:10:39] PF: One thing I found so interesting about your research, which by the way, kudos for the amount of research that has gone into this, that bibliography is a book in itself. But your research showed that our perception of how the other side views issues, like child abuse, where it’s like we tend to overestimate the person’s willingness to accept harm that we disagree with. It was really surprising. Can you talk about how we perceive the views of others?
[0:11:11] KG: Yes. So much political kind of polarization today is driven by misconceptions, is driven by wrong ideas about the morality of the other side. So, it’s certainly the case that the left and right disagree about kind of these perceptions of harm when there’s tough trade-offs to be made. The rights of unborn children, the rights of women. These are things where people legitimately disagree. But people don’t disagree on the wrongness of child abuse or child pornography. Yet, when we ask people, estimate the number of people on the other side, Democrat or Republican, who think that child pornography is not wrong, then we get crazy estimates. People think that 15% of people on the other side, don’t condemn child pornography.
That’s crazy. Almost everyone to a person condemns it, right? But because we think the other side’s evil, it gives us license to dehumanize them, demonize them, and not have a conversation with them, but that’s wrong.
[0:12:15] PF: Yes. Again, that’s a great chapter. That is some great information to read and get these realizations that it really makes us like, “Hey, we are more alike than we are different and we have more to agree on than we actually disagree on.
[BREAK]
[0:12:31] PF: We’ll be back with more of Kurt and Live Happy Now in just a moment.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:12:41] PF: Welcome back to Live Happy Now. Right now, for most of us, many of us at least, it seems that the fuse is pretty short and it doesn’t take a whole lot to go from sedate to outrage, and even over things that are pretty minor, it seems like. So, one of the things you talked about in your book that I loved was outrage creep. Can you talk about what that is and why we’ve become so much more sensitive?
[0:13:08] KG: It’s such an interesting phenomenon. So, there’s a lot of pieces that are connected to this idea. The base idea is that, over time, we have seen more things get us outraged, because we see more things as harmful, even more minor things like, I don’t know, wearing a hat with a red color. Some people think that’s a great thing to do. Some people think it’s a terrible thing to do. It’s just a hat, but people say, “But is it?” Or, all sorts of things. The example I cover in the book is a mom who had her kid walk home through their neighborhood when they were being, you know, real pain in the back seat. She says, get out of the car, you know, walk 10 minutes home on the sidewalks through a safe neighborhood. Someone called the cops on her. They were outraged because her kids walked home. She was arrested, it’s crazy. She had to do drug tests and she couldn’t work with kids any – It was crazy.
The reason why this seems wrong when, 20 years ago, I roamed neighborhoods or more than that. I’m actually much old more than that. Maybe 35 years ago, 40 years ago, I roamed the neighborhood, and no one batted an eye. That’s because our world has gotten safer, but we are still hardwired to find threats everywhere. So, as the kind of really severe threats become less there, we’re not getting trapped in fridges anymore. We have seatbelts to protect. Kids are not working in mines anymore. We’re generally safer, but we still feel that there’s threats out there because of how we evolved. We evolved being concerned about threats, and we’re still concerned about threats. But now, there’s no wild animals coming to get us. Now, we think like that white-panel van driving through our neighborhood is not a locksmith, but instead, a child-abducting predator. So, that’s what’s happening. We get safer, but we’re still worried and so we kind of project our fears on the world and find more things to create outrage.
[0:15:19] PF: But why are we so sensitive when someone talks about their political belief or their religious belief? It doesn’t take long in many cases for it to go from a simple discussion to being very, very heated.
[0:15:34] KG: So right. I think we’ve all experienced – I’ve experienced this as well.
[0:15:39] PF: We just got finished with Christmas. So, yes, we did.
[0:15:42] KG: Yes, we did. Amen. I mean, there’s lots of reasons. So, one is, we’re more segregated than ever. So, people live in communities where everyone votes the same. People’s spouses vote the same, our family. It’s really hard for us to deal with differences because we’re really seeking kind of like these homogeneous communities where we don’t have to deal with divides, with disagreement.
I think the other reason is that because politics has become so synonymous with morality. I think in the past, you could understand someone’s a good person if they voted differently on some specific policies. But now, I think because of our segregation of the media, of social media, especially. Now, we kind of equate red, blue, good, evil in our minds. It simplifies the world, which I think people like when the world is simple, but it really creates division and creates – a conversation at Christmas could be like, “Oh, how are you doing?” to five minutes later being like, “You’re terrible. How did you vote for the person you voted for?” It’s crazy how fast it goes.
[0:16:56] PF: Right. Yes, we had a lot of episodes where we talked about how to create guidelines for the holiday gatherings and keep people from going off the rails as we got into those discussions. But now that we’ve, we’ve gotten through the holidays, and we don’t have to worry so much about those discussions, what we do have going on is our workplace. We know there’s a lot of things happening this month. There’s the inauguration, there’s going to be a lot of changes. There’s already a lot of chatter because of that. So, can we talk for a minute about this divide and what happens when we take it into the workplace?
[0:17:32] KG: It’s challenging. I was just on a Newsweek panel about civility in the workplace, and it is hard. It’s hard when we’re so entrenched on these ideas. I think it could be easier in the workplace than in other arenas though, like taking the bus because we have a common goal. We have a common goal of our workplace values, are common enterprise, whatever we’re working on. So, these teams are not just teams where you go and talk about politics. They’re teams where you’re trying to achieve something, accomplish something.
I think that’s useful to think about. But I think, because politics are so tied to identity, I mean, some stats from the Society for Human Resource Management came out and shows that people are talking more about politics, they seem more unavoidable. Especially for younger folks, they want companies to take a stand. You can’t avoid politics. So, we can talk about guidelines for these conversations, but I think the kind of general guideline is maybe the middle path, which I think is a useful path in many things, which is, don’t suppress it, don’t try to never talk about it. But also, don’t revel or like wallow in politics.
Talk about politics. A little bit is like who you are, but really try to leave that identity maybe outside of work, at least a little bit. What happens when you have people that aren’t abiding by those rules? Say, let’s not even take it from a managerial standpoint as a coworker. When someone feels like they can’t communicate with a coworker, when someone feels like they are being threatened, what are some of the ways that they and work around that?
[0:19:12] KG: It’s tough, and I think this gets to the common ground spot. It also, I mean, I’ll tell a story, and I think I’ve told the story to other folks and some people say, “Well, it’s easy for you as a kind of middle-aged dude who’s a professor to have these conversations,” and if I feel unsafe, there’s some imbalance, whether it’s gender or race. It’s maybe harder for me to kind of have that mindset. I want to say, absolutely, I totally agree, but here’s how I approached it. So, I took an Uber ride to the airport with someone and he says, “What do you do?” I say, “I study morality and politics. I’m a social psychologist.”
[0:19:51] PF: That’s going to open a door.
[0:19:52] KG: I know right, exactly. Hold my beer kind of thing. So, he’s like, “Here’s my moral stance. I’m a Christian nationalist, but not the typical kind.” So. I could have – I’m not a Christian nationalist, no one I know is a Christian nationalist. So, I could have immediately said, “Whoa, that’s weird. I don’t believe in that. I think church and state should be separate,” whatever. But I was like, “Oh, I’ve never met a Christian nationalist, and certainly not an atypical one,” by his own admission. “What do you believe in?” So, we talked for 20 minutes about his beliefs. I ask questions about, “Oh, you believe this? Not this? What about this? Okay.” I kind of got a sense of where he was coming from.
I talked about the harms he saw, who he saw as vulnerable, kind of what I study. Then, as we’re driving to the airport, kind of just pulling up the exit ramp, we start, obviously, talking about abortion to make it a little more contentious. Then, he started to, as everyone does, started to liken the other side to the Nazis. Another symptom of our time, where you can’t get away from analogies to the Nazis. So, I said, “Hold up. If we’re having a good-faith conversation about morality, you can’t liken half of America to the Nazis. It’s not fair, and it’s not really coming
from.” He pauses and says, “You know what? I’m sorry. It was hard for me to express my views. I’ll take a step back.”
So, that is something that never happens in conversation about politics, typically. No one apologizes. The reason that it worked is because, I started the conversation trying to understand where it was coming from, a good faith kind of listening and learning. Again, when there’s power and balances, it could be a different story. But I think, in the workplace, let’s say, you could say, “Oh, interesting. Where’d you come from on here? What made you think that? Why this?” Listen for a bit. They’ll feel heard, and then they’ll feel less threatened when you make a kind of argument that you disagree with them. “Here’s where I’m coming from.”
It’s not easy to do, and there’s practitioners who do it their entire lives to make these conversations easier. I think that’s where I started, you try to understand, and then, you can have a little more civil conversation.
[0:22:15] PF: Is that something you should practice? I know we’re going to come back, and we’re actually going to come back and have you on the next episode, and talk about that common ground, but I don’t want to let you go from this episode before we talk about. Is that, do you practice those techniques? I mean, your book is such a great starting point because it explains the psychology of it and because it tells kind of how to go about that. But do we need to practice it before we try using that in action?
[0:22:41] KG: Practice is good. Practice makes perfect, especially when these things are really hard. So, I work with the practitioner, His name is John Sarrouf. I talked about him in the book. He works for an organization called Essential Partners. Very essential partners in bridging divides. He likes to point out that our bodies can feel adrenalized, fight or flight within, I think a fifth of a second.
[0:23:05] PF: That’s amazing.
[0:23:06] KG: Right, but it takes 20 to 30 minutes to calm down. So, the first time you have these conversations and someone says, “Well, that’s un-American for
believing that” or like, “How could you think that?” You’re like, “I’m in a fight. I’m getting attacked, no longer by wild animals now, by political opponents.” You’re like, “I feel attacked,” and your body feels these like huge surge of adrenaline. So, you need to find a way to kind of habituate to that, to not feel those huge feelings. So, I talk about these things every time I’m in an Uber ride.
I think people can start small, you can start with friends. I mean, even if people vote for the same person, they still might disagree about some issues. So, I think you could start practicing these kinds of harder conversations, or start talking about moral positions that are maybe not so hot-button, like capital punishment, it’s not as hot-button as it used to be, assisted suicide. These are things that people disagree about. It’s not clearly like cloning, I don’t know, not clearly left and right, get some practice disagreeing. When I teach a class on this, this is what I get students to do, and I think it really helps them learn how to have these conversations in the real world.
[0:24:16] PF: How much is also a matter of taking a step back and seeing where that person is coming from?
[0:24:23] KG: It’s essential, and I think you need to do that kind of before you have these conversations. So, one thing I often say is that, if you go into a conversation about politics and morality, trying to win, then you’ve already lost because no one ever admits defeat in a conversation. No one listening today is like, “Yes, I had this conversation about immigration, and then someone said this one thing they read online.” And I said, “You know what? Oh my goodness, I’m wrong. You’re totally right.”
[0:24:57] PF: Never in the history of mankind has that happened.
[0:25:01] KG: Never. You can kind of maybe nudge someone because they understand your perspective now. But the way you do that is by trying to understand where they’re coming from, and then sharing your perspective, and then maybe kind of navigating this difficult terrain. So, when you start these conversations, you need to say, “I’m trying to understand” and I’m aware
that they are motivated by protection, like concerned about harm, and I’m going to try to understand how exactly they’re trying to protect themselves in this conversation. So, have that general awareness of where the other person’s coming from, and then start that conversation with a motivation, an intention to understand.
[0:25:40] PF: That’s fantastic. We’re going to have you back on our next episode to pick up this part of the conversation and discover how we can find that common ground, why it’s important, and get some really great tips on doing that. Kurt, thank you for joining me and talk to you again very soon.
[0:25:57] KG: Great. Thank you.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:26:03] PF: That was Kurt Gray, talking about overcoming our outrage. Kurt will be back next week to talk about how to find common ground. But in the meantime, if you’d like to
learn more about Kurt, discover his book, or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for our all-new Live Happy newsletter. Every Tuesday, we’ll bring you some of the latest findings on happiness, uplifting stories, and our new Look for the Good word search puzzle. And of course, we’ll always have that happy song of the week of the week for you too. That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
