Hi, I'm Anna Briecox. Welcome to With Friends Like These. People yelled at each other online

before Trump, but it took Trump for us to realize just how damaging online outrage can be.

To individuals, to relationships, to journalism, and to politics in general. But how damaging?

And in what exact way? There was a science to be applied to these questions, and that's

what Molly Crockett does. Molly is an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University and a

distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Center for Nero Ethics. She started looking into

online outrage before Trump, and in a way, her work predicted Trump. Her studies found that online

outrage tends to stay inside the echo chamber of people who already agree. She found that positive

feedback loop we're now familiar with, where the echo chamber emboldens those who are in it.

And it turns out, outrage isn't a thing that can be expressed and let go of. It's more like a drug.

The more you get, the more you want it. And social media means you can get it 24-7.

We talk about those findings and more with Yale psychologist Molly Crockett coming right up.

Molly, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. So I want to get kind of a general

overview of what you study. Now to me, it looks like there's a theme of moral outrage going

throughout your work. Is that I mean, there is a theme of moral outrage running throughout the

world. I can say, when I say the theme of moral outrage running through your work, I don't mean

that you are outraged. You may be. Well, I am. I am all the time constantly. There is a,

you know, running joke and psychology that we do research. We study the things that we have

experienced in our own life. Yeah, just in my research program is broadly on moral psychology.

I'm really fascinated by how human beings judge right from wrong, how we make moral decisions,

how we conceive of ourselves as moral beings, how we apply these judgments maybe differentially

to ourselves versus other people, to our in-group versus our out-group, and how these processes

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