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 Phelps, 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, Outrage, Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common

Ground. Kurt, who also directs a 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.

Kurt, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.

Thanks so much for having me.

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? 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. Two very

different things, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And I study our moral

judgments. So how each of us make 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. And I study, you know,

why we're divided by morality and politics. And what led me there is both kind of an academic journey, which was, you know, making sense of how people can feel so strongly, but so oppositely on so many issues. And at my personal sense of, you know, knowing folks on the left

and on the right who are both good people, but who have very different opinions on these issues.

...