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Outrage BONUS – Could we have done better to avoid the politicization of COVID? – Kevin Bass
David Beckemeye
Kevin Bass, an M.D./Ph.D. student, recently wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek titled It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives. He says: the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public […]
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Outrage 009 – How social media gives us what captures our attention rather than what we actually want – Steven Rathje
David Beckemeye
This is part-two of a two-part series with Dr. Steven Rathje discussing research that found that social media creates incentives for out-group animosity, which can be a factor in increasing polarization. It is also harmful for mental health and society. In this episode, we also talk about the increasing problem of transparency of social media […]
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Outrage 008 – How social media creates incentives for out-group animosity – Steven Rathje
David Beckemeye
We introduced the podcast with a two-part series with Dr. Peter H. Ditto, Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, telling us about “Political Sectarianism” explaining how our divide goes beyond policy preferences and ideas, arguing that American political partisans are bonded by something that looks more like religious faith where “our” side is morally superior […]
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Outrage 007 – How the outrage industry has evolved in the past decade – Jeffrey M. Berry
David Beckemeye
AlgorithmicFeeds, Angertianment, AttentionEconomy, BreakingNews, CommonGround, Cortisol, Dopamine, Exaggeration, FearAndOutrage, HateTheOtherSide, IncendiaryRhetoric, Indignation, lowerthetemperature, MorallyEgregious, MorallyIndignant, nextdoor, OutrageIndustry, outrageporn, Perception, PoliticalCampaigns, Progress, socialmediaThe term “outrage industry” is fundamental to this podcast. It comes up on basically every episode. On the podcast website, I introduce the podcast as follows: “in each episode we explore a different aspect of the outrage industry and lowering the temperature.” It’s such a key concept that the website has a separate page defining […]
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Outrage 006 – How virality results in moral panics – Kurt Gray
David Beckemeye
Moral panics are not uncommon. Back in the 1980’s there was a moral panic over the game Dungeons and Dragons. Some parents believed D&D was the work of the devil, a gateway to joining a Satanic cult. It wasn’t “but this didn’t stop people from worrying about it,” says my guest on this episode, Dr. […]
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Outrage 001 – How liberals and conservatives behave more like Sunnis and Shias than they do political parties and why that’s a problem – Peter Ditto
David Beckemeye
In this episode we speak with Peter H. Ditto, Professor of psychological science at UC Irvine who is an expert on motivated reasoning, and especially motivated moral reasoning. He worked with a team of all-star scientists to look at a major social problem in our society: political polarization. In this episode, we explore this groundbreaking work.
About

Outrage Overload is a podcast about the outrage industry, my journey to discover what it is, how it affects us, and what we can do about it.