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Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
A groundbreaking new perspective on the moral mind that rewrites our understanding of where moral judgments come from, and how we can overcome the feelings of outrage that so often divide us
It’s easy to assume that liberals and conservatives have radically different moral foundations. In Outraged, Kurt Gray showcases the latest science to demonstrate that we all have the same moral mind—that everyone’s moral judgments stem from feeling threatened or vulnerable to harm.
Although we all care about protecting ourselves and the vulnerable, conflict arises when we have different perceptions of harm. We get outraged when we disagree about who the “real” victim is, whether we’re talking about political issues, fights with our in-laws, or arguments on the playground.
In laying out a new vision of our moral minds, Gray tackles three common myths that prevent us from understanding ourselves and those around us. For a long time, it was commonly believed that our ancestors were apex predators. In reality, we were more hunted than hunter. This explains why our minds are hard-wired to perceive threats, and why we’re so preoccupied with danger. Gray also examines new research that finds that our moral judgments are based more on gut feelings of harm than rational thought. We condemn acts that feel harmful. Finally, Gray refutes the idea that facts are the best way to bridge divides. In moral and political arguments, facts often fail to convince others of our point of view, since our moral judgments are based on our subjective beliefs not objective observations. Instead, sharing stories of personal suffering can help to create more common ground.
In this insightful tour of our moral minds, Gray draws on groundbreaking research and fascinating stories to provide a new explanation for our moral outrage, and unpacks how to best bridge divides. If you want to understand the morals of the “other side,” ask yourself a simple question—what harms do they see?
It’s easy to assume that liberals and conservatives have radically different moral foundations. In Outraged, Kurt Gray showcases the latest science to demonstrate that we all have the same moral mind—that everyone’s moral judgments stem from feeling threatened or vulnerable to harm.
Although we all care about protecting ourselves and the vulnerable, conflict arises when we have different perceptions of harm. We get outraged when we disagree about who the “real” victim is, whether we’re talking about political issues, fights with our in-laws, or arguments on the playground.
In laying out a new vision of our moral minds, Gray tackles three common myths that prevent us from understanding ourselves and those around us. For a long time, it was commonly believed that our ancestors were apex predators. In reality, we were more hunted than hunter. This explains why our minds are hard-wired to perceive threats, and why we’re so preoccupied with danger. Gray also examines new research that finds that our moral judgments are based more on gut feelings of harm than rational thought. We condemn acts that feel harmful. Finally, Gray refutes the idea that facts are the best way to bridge divides. In moral and political arguments, facts often fail to convince others of our point of view, since our moral judgments are based on our subjective beliefs not objective observations. Instead, sharing stories of personal suffering can help to create more common ground.
In this insightful tour of our moral minds, Gray draws on groundbreaking research and fascinating stories to provide a new explanation for our moral outrage, and unpacks how to best bridge divides. If you want to understand the morals of the “other side,” ask yourself a simple question—what harms do they see?
497 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 14, 2025
150 people are currently reading
4221 people want to read
About the author
Kurt Gray
3 books37 followersKurt Gray is a professor of social psychology at UNC Chapel Hill who received his PhD from Harvard University. He is the author of "The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why it Matters" together with his late mentor Dan Wegner.
He studies mind perception and morality, pondering such questions as "what is the nature of good and evil," "can we ever truly know ourselves," "why are humanoid robots so creepy," and "what makes grandma's cooking taste so good?" (The answers, by the way, are "salvation and suffering," "probably not," "dead eyes," and "love.")
He was almost a geophysicist instead of a social psychologist, but a cold night stranded and stalked by lynx in Northern Alberta convinced him otherwise. He firmly believes that one shouldn't take themselves too seriously, even when exploring serious issues of the human condition.
He is the winner of multiple awards including the APS Janet Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Research and the SPSP Theoretical Innovation Award. He lives in Carrboro with his wife and two cats Chas and Cleo, to whom he attributes far too much mind.
His website is www.kurtjgray.com
He studies mind perception and morality, pondering such questions as "what is the nature of good and evil," "can we ever truly know ourselves," "why are humanoid robots so creepy," and "what makes grandma's cooking taste so good?" (The answers, by the way, are "salvation and suffering," "probably not," "dead eyes," and "love.")
He was almost a geophysicist instead of a social psychologist, but a cold night stranded and stalked by lynx in Northern Alberta convinced him otherwise. He firmly believes that one shouldn't take themselves too seriously, even when exploring serious issues of the human condition.
He is the winner of multiple awards including the APS Janet Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Research and the SPSP Theoretical Innovation Award. He lives in Carrboro with his wife and two cats Chas and Cleo, to whom he attributes far too much mind.
His website is www.kurtjgray.com
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
December 17, 2025
This is a far more thought-provoking book than what I expected. As polarization worsens, exacerbated by social media (which allows/promotes shallow interaction), this is a very mentally stimulating book.
We see people outraged by something or the other often these days, especially online. The underlying premise of the book is that our perceptions of harm divide us. For instance, pro -choice advocates keep the mother's needs in mind while pro-life advocates have the foetus in mind. As such, neither side is immoral though both sides claim the other side is. Intuitively, the degree of harm perceived to be caused influences our moral outrage. Social media ensures that we form groups and lob insults to the other side declaring the other side as bad (political discussions online are especially bad for mental health). We also largely simplify moral judgements. There is a long discussion for context on whether we are predators or prey. While we are currently perceived as the apex predator, for a lot of history, we were also prey and that mindset influences us even today. The author points out that we often miss the fact that we are becoming more moral. We have significantly expanded definitions for terms (concept creep) such as abuse for instance.
The last sections deal with potential ways to bridge the divide, or at the minimum deal with it in a mature manner acknowledging the views of the other side. Facts do not help bridge moral divides, as such matters mostly involve a trade-off. This is well-researched book which is rich in concepts. While the author pitches for perceptions of ‘harm’ being able to explain all divides, he does cover alternate viewpoints which others have proposed over the years. I found the question the author suggests we ask ourselves when someone has an opinion that we find immoral, "What harm do they see?" to be powerful.
There are quite a few areas the book could have been better. The initial example the author offers on a road rage episode is average as it is less deep than the issues which divide the best of people. In one section, the author discusses the experiences of Shweder who studied practices of some Indians in Bhubaneswar – while the broad contours are right, it misses the overall spiritual and cultural context and is poorly explained. The discussion on predator vs prey is long-winded & tiring, as these are not to be taken as non-intersecting in any case. Many of the alternate concepts the author discusses also felt very credible to me, and I felt narrowing down to ‘harm’, as the author does, also involves concept creep.
As we see the divides widen the world over, and people belittle the other side constantly, this is a book which makes you evaluate your own positions and understand the other side’s viewpoint. Much recommended.
My rating: 4.5 / 5.
We see people outraged by something or the other often these days, especially online. The underlying premise of the book is that our perceptions of harm divide us. For instance, pro -choice advocates keep the mother's needs in mind while pro-life advocates have the foetus in mind. As such, neither side is immoral though both sides claim the other side is. Intuitively, the degree of harm perceived to be caused influences our moral outrage. Social media ensures that we form groups and lob insults to the other side declaring the other side as bad (political discussions online are especially bad for mental health). We also largely simplify moral judgements. There is a long discussion for context on whether we are predators or prey. While we are currently perceived as the apex predator, for a lot of history, we were also prey and that mindset influences us even today. The author points out that we often miss the fact that we are becoming more moral. We have significantly expanded definitions for terms (concept creep) such as abuse for instance.
The last sections deal with potential ways to bridge the divide, or at the minimum deal with it in a mature manner acknowledging the views of the other side. Facts do not help bridge moral divides, as such matters mostly involve a trade-off. This is well-researched book which is rich in concepts. While the author pitches for perceptions of ‘harm’ being able to explain all divides, he does cover alternate viewpoints which others have proposed over the years. I found the question the author suggests we ask ourselves when someone has an opinion that we find immoral, "What harm do they see?" to be powerful.
There are quite a few areas the book could have been better. The initial example the author offers on a road rage episode is average as it is less deep than the issues which divide the best of people. In one section, the author discusses the experiences of Shweder who studied practices of some Indians in Bhubaneswar – while the broad contours are right, it misses the overall spiritual and cultural context and is poorly explained. The discussion on predator vs prey is long-winded & tiring, as these are not to be taken as non-intersecting in any case. Many of the alternate concepts the author discusses also felt very credible to me, and I felt narrowing down to ‘harm’, as the author does, also involves concept creep.
As we see the divides widen the world over, and people belittle the other side constantly, this is a book which makes you evaluate your own positions and understand the other side’s viewpoint. Much recommended.
My rating: 4.5 / 5.
January 14, 2025
There’s probably a voice in your head like mine screaming, “please don’t publish any more books on polarization, misinformation, or victimhood!” And then I read this wonderful psychological analysis of how easily we feel hurt and want to hurt others, and the interesting mechanisms on why.
I loved this book. Kurt is an exceptional storyteller - which is severely lacking in psychology non-fiction and especially self-improvement books. He is also gr re t at developing a new lens to understand morality and its failings.
I have dog eared numerous pages and scribbled furiously on others. This will sustain your attention and inspire you to be a better person.
I loved this book. Kurt is an exceptional storyteller - which is severely lacking in psychology non-fiction and especially self-improvement books. He is also gr re t at developing a new lens to understand morality and its failings.
I have dog eared numerous pages and scribbled furiously on others. This will sustain your attention and inspire you to be a better person.
January 14, 2025
This is such an eye-opening and important book that doesn't vilify "the other side" (whoever your "other side" is) but humanizes them, while at the same time explaining how we can still vehemently disagree in ways that feel incredibly distressing.
November 22, 2024
Everybody should read this book.
During such difficult times, when the country is so polarized and divided, it’s important to come together and try bridging this gap. There is everything you need to know about “other side” and why people behave the way they do.
This book is incredibly interesting and profoundly informative. Highly recommend!
During such difficult times, when the country is so polarized and divided, it’s important to come together and try bridging this gap. There is everything you need to know about “other side” and why people behave the way they do.
This book is incredibly interesting and profoundly informative. Highly recommend!
February 4, 2025
I honestly can’t remember the last time I binged a book like I did this one. I absolutely loved Kurt Gray’s first book The Mind Club, and when I heard he was coming out with a new book, I was so excited. Kurt researches and studies moral psychology, which is one of my favorite subjects. This book isn’t just about our political divide, either. Kurt dives deep into the roots of moral psychology to explain why we evolved this way and how the way we see morality is relevant in our everyday lives.
Kurt argues that we evolved as prey, not predators, meaning we’re always on the lookout for something that’s going to harm us or our loved ones. Through this lens, we can better understand why people take certain moral stances. They aren’t trying to actively harm us; they’re trying to protect themselves, their family, or their community.
Gray discusses Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory a bit in this book, and it’s super interesting. Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind was the first book to introduce me to moral psychology, so it’ll always have a special place with me, but Gray makes great arguments against Haidt’s moral foundations theory.
This is definitely one of my new all-time favorite books, and I’ll for sure be reading it again. I kind of want to read it again already.
Kurt argues that we evolved as prey, not predators, meaning we’re always on the lookout for something that’s going to harm us or our loved ones. Through this lens, we can better understand why people take certain moral stances. They aren’t trying to actively harm us; they’re trying to protect themselves, their family, or their community.
Gray discusses Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory a bit in this book, and it’s super interesting. Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind was the first book to introduce me to moral psychology, so it’ll always have a special place with me, but Gray makes great arguments against Haidt’s moral foundations theory.
This is definitely one of my new all-time favorite books, and I’ll for sure be reading it again. I kind of want to read it again already.
April 15, 2025
Toward the end of the book, Kurt Gray describes a woman who worked as a family therapist and now runs basically a family therapy group for people to learn how to talk to and empathize with people of different political stripes. While I like the idea and admire this woman and her organization and I definitely think truly listening to others can go a long way to breaking down some of these political barriers, I couldn’t help wondering how this family therapy model translates to actually toxic relationships. Because we know there are reasons people go low- or no-contact with parents, siblings, children, and that those reasons are 100% valid and necessary. And to be honest, watching the current administration in 2025 makes me feel like all the moral psychology in the world does not take into account what’s happening and how it’s very hard to listen to people who are causing so much harm.
The section on the Divine, the Environment, the Othered, and the Powerful was fascinating to me because it aligns so much with what I see in my life and in the lives of those I know with different and similar political leanings. If I take nothing else from the oft-rambling book, I’ll often think about that.
The section on the Divine, the Environment, the Othered, and the Powerful was fascinating to me because it aligns so much with what I see in my life and in the lives of those I know with different and similar political leanings. If I take nothing else from the oft-rambling book, I’ll often think about that.
February 19, 2025
لقد اعتقد العلماء منذ أمد بعيد أن البشر في أعماقهم حيوانات مفترسة. فقد قتل البشر وأكلوا أعضاء كل الأنواع الحية الأخرى تقريباً، بدءاً من السلاحف في جزر غالاباغوس أثناء رحلات تشارلز داروين إلى أدمغة القرود أثناء الولائم التي أقامتها أسرة تشينغ. واليوم يطارد البشر الخنازير البرية ويطلقون النار على الدببة بأسلحة متطورة. وقد صممنا أنظمة معقدة لولادة وتربية وقتل مليارات الأبقار والخنازير والدجاج. وليس من المستغرب أن نطلق على أنفسنا وصف "المفترسين الأوائل". فنحن نقف على قمة الهرم الغذائي. فنحن نصطاد أي حيوان نريده، ولا يصطادنا أي حيوان في المقابل.
يزعم العلماء أننا من الحيوانات المفترسة بسبب القدرات الفريدة التي يتمتع بها جسمنا ودماغنا. فنحن بارعون في رمي الرماح (لقتل الحيوانات) والجري لمسافات طويلة (لإرهاق الحيوانات)، ولدينا أدمغة مذهلة تسمح لنا بالتنسيق والتخطيط مع الآخرين (للصيد). وقد زعم عالم الأنثروبولوجيا التطوري ريتشارد رانغهام أن قدرتنا على تزويد أنفسنا بنظام غذائي ثابت من اللحوم ــ وخاصة اللحوم المطبوخة ــ زودتنا بالفائض من السعرات الحرارية اللازمة لنمو أدمغتنا الكبيرة المميزة.
.
Gray Kurt
Outraged
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
يزعم العلماء أننا من الحيوانات المفترسة بسبب القدرات الفريدة التي يتمتع بها جسمنا ودماغنا. فنحن بارعون في رمي الرماح (لقتل الحيوانات) والجري لمسافات طويلة (لإرهاق الحيوانات)، ولدينا أدمغة مذهلة تسمح لنا بالتنسيق والتخطيط مع الآخرين (للصيد). وقد زعم عالم الأنثروبولوجيا التطوري ريتشارد رانغهام أن قدرتنا على تزويد أنفسنا بنظام غذائي ثابت من اللحوم ــ وخاصة اللحوم المطبوخة ــ زودتنا بالفائض من السعرات الحرارية اللازمة لنمو أدمغتنا الكبيرة المميزة.
.
Gray Kurt
Outraged
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
February 24, 2025
The content of this book is excellent and contains research that everyone should be aware of- especially the core starting idea that humans evolved as prey and not predators, and that most of our extreme behaviors can be explained thru fear rather than innate aggression.
Unfortunately though the writing style- which is heavy on thesis paper style deep dives into different studies- makes this book less accessible. Shorter, punchier chapters would make this a 5/5 book.
Unfortunately though the writing style- which is heavy on thesis paper style deep dives into different studies- makes this book less accessible. Shorter, punchier chapters would make this a 5/5 book.
November 6, 2025
I had some bones to pick with some of the studies, the conclusions, the examples used. It definitely felt like it was written by a person of privilege and lacked some tact. But overall, I found the book valuable and insightful. I have a deeply held belief that the majority of lay people across the political aisle from me are not operating from a place of evil, with an intent to harm innocent people. This faith is hard to reconcile with my similarly-deeply-held belief that actions taken by those across the aisle ARE often deeply harmful. But both of those beliefs can be true at once. This book helped make sense of it all by taking a scientific moral psychology perspective, describing how we make moral judgments (from a place of fear, wanting to protect ourselves, our in-group, and those we see as victims), how our moral judgments can differ based on who we PERCEIVE to be most vulnerable to victimization (perceptions which appear to systematically differ based on political affiliation), and how bridging the divide needs to come from a place of moral humility, willingness to listen to other’s perceived harms without judgment, and rely on human connection over fact-firing. The country is so polarized, and the harms cut so deep, that I think it can feel like a betrayal to entertain the opposite perspective. But I think polarization is itself a deep-cutting harm, fueled by social media algorithms and misinformation and hateful rhetoric, and extending a little humanity is desperately needed
October 8, 2025
I liked the book, I guess, because I agreed with nearly everything in it. (Smile)
I was interested in his (very diplomatic) take-down of Jon Haidt’s “5 moral foundations” theory. I agreed with this book that morality in general seems simply linked to perceived harm, no need to split it up into specific modules. A single overall source of morality as described in this book makes much more sense to me. That said, I’m curious what Haidt’s rebuttal would be on this topic.
I guess I also need to say, that while I agreed with most of what was in the book, it just didn’t seem all that deep or original. Mostly kind of common sense.
One quibble: there was way too much description about standard social science experiments that he and others have done. My advice: just say what you think is true in the text, and stick the long descriptions of the not-likely-to-be-replicated, low-n experiments in the notes. Social science experiments have become the laughing-stock of the science world for years now. If these experiments were higher quality than average, or have been replicated in other labs the author didn’t take any time to mention it.
I was interested in his (very diplomatic) take-down of Jon Haidt’s “5 moral foundations” theory. I agreed with this book that morality in general seems simply linked to perceived harm, no need to split it up into specific modules. A single overall source of morality as described in this book makes much more sense to me. That said, I’m curious what Haidt’s rebuttal would be on this topic.
I guess I also need to say, that while I agreed with most of what was in the book, it just didn’t seem all that deep or original. Mostly kind of common sense.
One quibble: there was way too much description about standard social science experiments that he and others have done. My advice: just say what you think is true in the text, and stick the long descriptions of the not-likely-to-be-replicated, low-n experiments in the notes. Social science experiments have become the laughing-stock of the science world for years now. If these experiments were higher quality than average, or have been replicated in other labs the author didn’t take any time to mention it.
May 15, 2025
I admit, I think my expectations were too high for this book. The first chapter was riveting. It was full of ideas and statements that got me thinking & excited….but then the middle of the book lost me. I pushed through a majority of the book (I was listening to the audio book, which was a nice experience)… however I did skip a few chapters to rush to the end. I think I was expecting more of a conflict-resolution type book with this one. Like what can I do or put into practice, but rather the book focused on more of the fundamental “why” behind people’s feelings and stances towards different topics. It was rather insightful but some chapters were a bit too repetitive & didn’t add as much value. I would recommend the beginning & ending chapters of this book as it was well written. I plan to take the concepts I learned into the real world.
Overall, I did like how this book emphasizes how to humanize people who have different opinions & stances, which is a big win & I left feeling hopeful.
Overall, I did like how this book emphasizes how to humanize people who have different opinions & stances, which is a big win & I left feeling hopeful.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 20, 2025
This book started out a bit slowly for me, but I stuck with it. About a third of the way into the book the author summarizes the main point of the first 100 pages of the book.
“In Part 1, we saw how the threat of harm has shaped human nature. Because we evolved as a prey species, we are wired to remain vigilant for danger. To avoid getting eaten by predators, we moved into groups which also kick started the development of our powerful social brains. Living with so many other people helped to keep us safe, well fed, and prosperous, but other people also posed a threat.”
The next section of the book deals with moral psychology and how morality developed to help us avoid harm. Whether you lean left or right, the author contends that all moral judgements are psychologically grounded in harm. For example, those who support or oppose abortion evaluate harm differently. Those who support abortion are generally more concerned about the possible harm to the mother if she is not permitted to have an abortion while those who oppose abortion are generally more concerned about the harm to a fetus.
The author contends that most people think facts best help bridge moral divides, but in political arguments, people disagree about which facts are true and which facts are relevant. Political disagreements often involve dehumanizing the other side to justify cruelty towards political opponents. The author suggests that we tell stories of harm which generally resonate with our feelings (rather than present a factual argument) if we wish to reduce the outrage and increase rational thought and understanding between people with opposing points of view.
The author writes, “Ultimately, this whole book is about moral humility. Moral humility is rejecting the easy idea that people who disagree with you are motivated to destroy. Moral humility is about recognizing that we have something to learn from those who disagree with us.”
Unfortunately, the idea that we can learn something from those who disagree with us seems to have been lost. I really don’t think it’s possible for us to get this idea back, but I sure hope so.
Overall, there were some interesting ideas in this book, but it should have had more editing to make it more concise.
If you are interested in this topic, I would recommend another book that I read many years ago. It’s called “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most” by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, and Roger Fisher.
“In Part 1, we saw how the threat of harm has shaped human nature. Because we evolved as a prey species, we are wired to remain vigilant for danger. To avoid getting eaten by predators, we moved into groups which also kick started the development of our powerful social brains. Living with so many other people helped to keep us safe, well fed, and prosperous, but other people also posed a threat.”
The next section of the book deals with moral psychology and how morality developed to help us avoid harm. Whether you lean left or right, the author contends that all moral judgements are psychologically grounded in harm. For example, those who support or oppose abortion evaluate harm differently. Those who support abortion are generally more concerned about the possible harm to the mother if she is not permitted to have an abortion while those who oppose abortion are generally more concerned about the harm to a fetus.
The author contends that most people think facts best help bridge moral divides, but in political arguments, people disagree about which facts are true and which facts are relevant. Political disagreements often involve dehumanizing the other side to justify cruelty towards political opponents. The author suggests that we tell stories of harm which generally resonate with our feelings (rather than present a factual argument) if we wish to reduce the outrage and increase rational thought and understanding between people with opposing points of view.
The author writes, “Ultimately, this whole book is about moral humility. Moral humility is rejecting the easy idea that people who disagree with you are motivated to destroy. Moral humility is about recognizing that we have something to learn from those who disagree with us.”
Unfortunately, the idea that we can learn something from those who disagree with us seems to have been lost. I really don’t think it’s possible for us to get this idea back, but I sure hope so.
Overall, there were some interesting ideas in this book, but it should have had more editing to make it more concise.
If you are interested in this topic, I would recommend another book that I read many years ago. It’s called “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most” by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, and Roger Fisher.
May 27, 2025
I don’t agree with everything in here but the scientific basis for polarization and the moral mind — principally, “different perceptions of harm” — changed my perspective on not only argument but the act of debate. Seeing an issue as having different (re: black and white, wrong and right) sides is a perspective turned on its head when presented with one of the simplest yet most seemingly outrageous concepts at the start of the book: that humans have been prey far longer than we have been predators. It’s easy to say that humans are above animals because of our capacity for complex thought, but when one is presented with a challenge, it is instinct rather than intellect that drives reaction. If our moral judgements are made by fear of harm vis-à-vis instinct, are we really a superior species because of some invented moral code? A code that is not even remotely close to being universally understood among members of the species?
My concern is the implication that bridging divides requires a certain amount of moral compromise that minimizes the feeling of harm for another entity, party, or “side”. One is reminded of the challenges of pluralism; how can one have a successful and efficient free market of ideas, when the existence of certain ideas or schools of thought intrinsically disavows and even encourages the annihilation of a free market ideas? Take that, spin it, make it tactile. Must a bridge be built when one side of shore wants only to burn it down? Perception of harm aside (though still present), the implication that all disagreements can be or rather should be solved is, in my opinion, not only shallow but dangerous at times. Perception of harm is just as deeply primal an experience as hunger. If you put two starving insects in a jar, they will kill each other not due to a fear harm from the other but due to hunger. Perception of harm from the universe, I suppose. But this is not a book about arguing with the universe. This is a book about arguing with conservatives and in-laws and high school bullies and strangers in traffic. I’ll turn to moral philosophy for the larger questions.
This was a great beach read.
My concern is the implication that bridging divides requires a certain amount of moral compromise that minimizes the feeling of harm for another entity, party, or “side”. One is reminded of the challenges of pluralism; how can one have a successful and efficient free market of ideas, when the existence of certain ideas or schools of thought intrinsically disavows and even encourages the annihilation of a free market ideas? Take that, spin it, make it tactile. Must a bridge be built when one side of shore wants only to burn it down? Perception of harm aside (though still present), the implication that all disagreements can be or rather should be solved is, in my opinion, not only shallow but dangerous at times. Perception of harm is just as deeply primal an experience as hunger. If you put two starving insects in a jar, they will kill each other not due to a fear harm from the other but due to hunger. Perception of harm from the universe, I suppose. But this is not a book about arguing with the universe. This is a book about arguing with conservatives and in-laws and high school bullies and strangers in traffic. I’ll turn to moral philosophy for the larger questions.
This was a great beach read.
May 7, 2025
The "finding common ground" part was a little blip at the end. The rest was morally repulsive situations explained and why "technically it's not bad if you think about it!!!" Gross.
I did appreciate that this author essentially said that politicians would basically be without a job if they didn't invent topics to argue about.
I did appreciate that this author essentially said that politicians would basically be without a job if they didn't invent topics to argue about.
May 28, 2025
This book was fascinating. If you care about people and relationships and you have people in your life that don’t see things (especially political issues) the way you do, this book can give you both insight and a way to find common ground so that you can both listen and hear.
March 10, 2025
I'm in a decade-long book club of a half-dozen secular Jews, and a group member asked me to see if Outraged (just published in 2025) might be a good choice for our group. No, I've decided. It's not right for me, anyway. The shout-outs to the libertarian Cato Institute (co-founders Charles Koch and Murray Rothbard), Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker might be a clue.
I was skeptical from the beginning with the reference to Daryl Davis, a Black man who "has personally befriended more than two hundred KKK members," apparently to help them be less racist — immediately followed by a mention of canvassers, "many of whom were transgender themselves," who door-knocked in Miami-Dade in 2014 to educate about a new housing and employment nondiscrimination law that protected trans people. They were "trained to listen deeply as voters explained their views, to refrain from condemnation, and to humbly offer their experiences during the ten-minute conversation. They also encouraged voters to engage in perspective taking by imagining a time that they felt judged for being different and connecting that experience to the experience of transgender people." Result: Voters who spoke to these canvassers came away with a lasting feeling of being, "on average, 10 points warmer [toward trans people] than people who didn't [speak with a canvasser]." So, look, I don't know what "10 points warmer" means — I mean I couldn't pull a couple transphobes out of a lineup and tell you which is 10 points warmer than the other — but anyway, for me, what's missing from this discussion is any acknowledgment of what it's like to knock on someone's door and initiate a conversational intervention about (indirectly) why they should hate you less or at least tolerate your presence on this Earth and by the way explain the effects of housing and employment discrimination on human beings. And sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes they warm up only 3 points. Sometimes they inform you that you're doing a terrible job of arguing for your own humanity and that, having met you, they're more inclined to vote against you (reader, this happened to me). Never mind that the world is constantly telling queer/trans people to downplay and hide our identities, telling us we're supposed to "not shove it down everyone's throat" or "keep it in the bedroom," but then when they vote against our rights it's because all along they secretly wanted us to knock on their doors and explain it to them.
Also, it isn't 2014 anymore. We can't rely on a 2014 example of anything to draw a conclusion about transphobia in 2025. Popular awareness of trans people's existence dramatically changed over the past decade. Right now the battle front isn't a housing and employment nondiscrimination law that gets passed (yay) and just has to be gently explained with a smile to everyone after the fact. Right now we have (checks notes) 456 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in the US in the first two months of the year. Everyone knows that we exist, they are trying to erase us in various dimensions, and they continue to do this even though we have explained millions of times that we aren't harming anyone. They do not want to talk to us because the anti-trans ethos is predicated on not talking to trans people.
I could tell, right here at this early spot in the book, that trans rights were going to be used as examples despite no trans people having been consulted in the making of the book. (Especially ironic given the author's call for conversations between strangers to question assumptions about who is truly vulnerable to harm.) The philosophical problem of "other minds" is going on here. Not only is the book not written primarily for me, it didn't anticipate I could be one of its possible readers.
I can get on board with the idea that people tend to operate with a protection narrative ("trying their best to protect themselves, their loved ones, and members of society") rather than a destruction narrative (they're not "comic book villains who inexplicably want to cause maximum harm"). That seems basically true. The book could have taken viable routes from there.
However, the author brings up the Tocqueville paradox which claims that, when a society is in terrible "economic and moral" shape, people have rather basic demands, but when there is "(historically speaking) unprecedented equality" with "(historically speaking) minor social injustices," people get outraged as they haggle over "smaller and smaller injustices." This, he says, reflects "concept creep" of what true injustice is. OK, so I'm unprepared to say whether the Tocqueville paradox might be true in principle, but as a diagnosis of our interactions today (as Gray certainly intends to use it), I find it very unfair. Yes, average life expectancy is longer, and so forth, but of course any individual may suffer greatly. Further, it is hard to measure whether an injustice today is "minor" relative to an injustice in a completely different social context (another time and place) since moral meanings are so contextual. There are also some major 20th- and 21st-century challenges that are unprecedented in human history, such as human-caused climate change, mass extinctions, nuclear bombs, technological surveillance, and so forth. It's pointless to argue whether the polycrises of today are "minor" relative to the polycrises of the past, but it's worth observing that these are in fact injustices, threats, problems, etc. They're simply different from other problems in human history. When we talk about current problems, we're bringing them up because they're real and they need to be discussed and solved. There's no paradox here. Responding to a complaint with an argument like well, isn't your life better than if you'd been born into chattel slavery? feels like a trolling attitude. I also think it's debatable whether we collectively have "expanding compassion for animals." Yes, today people spend a lot on their pets, but there's also factory farming and deforestation. Anyway, vegetarianism is an ancient practice, going back thousands of years, especially in India; it's hardly new to the 21st century. It isn't true that "we care so much about the well-being of all living creatures because society today is so safe." Even in unsafe societies, people care for each other and for non-human animals. This has always been true.
Then there's mention of a Gallup survey that repeatedly asked USAmericans over a 55-year span if they'd recently "helped a stranger," "been assaulted or mugged," or "let a stranger go ahead of you in line." The survey found no "moral decline" over the long term. OK, but those aren't the sum total of moral behaviors. The US is right now undergoing a coup and transitioning to authoritarianism. The culture is increasingly fascist. If individuals (or groups?) have had no moral decline, how did we end up in this political situation?
He asks why people "express moral outrage online." He doesn't think it's "moral grandstanding" in pursuit of "fame and power" (since of course that isn't readily delivered via social media). Instead, he thinks, outrage is "driven by feelings of threat"with a desire to "collectively punish and exile" the evildoers. Well, that doesn't seem obvious to me. People share stories of their own lives, as well as stories that have happened to others, in search of understanding and sympathy. People have dialogues online, and sometimes those dialogues involve expressions of moral outrage because outrage is an appropriate sentiment for whatever's being discussed. They may or may not primarily want to punish the perpetrators. They may be trying to educate themselves or others about the problem first. They may just want to talk about what happened. They're allowed to be mad about it. And just as he assumes that, due to "concept creep," whatever harms we experience today are "relatively mild" compared to what humans experienced in the past, he assumes that social media creates a bubble of illusion around whatever suffering and evil is being narrated within it because 21st-century suffering and evil is very unlikely to be real.
The bigger part of Gray's thesis is that people take political and moral positions in good faith based on a desire to avoid whatever they truly believe is harmful. "Conservative Christians," he insists, oppose gay marriage because they have a "sincere belief that gay marriage was harmful and would inevitably lead to suffering." His example of a "good faith" opponent of gay rights, on the basis of the presumed "harmfulness" of those rights, is Anita Bryant. And why should we believe that Anita Bryant acted in good faith? Because she "sacrificed her entire music career" to be an anti-gay crusader, and she made words that sounded like arguments, like a slippery slope to "murderer rights" and her belief that "homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit." These are bad faith arguments, mostly because they are nonsense, as I do not have time to explain further here. And, sadly, people sometimes do sacrifice honest career opportunities to boldly live more terrible versions of their own lives. Though the choice to be a bad-faith troll is often an economically poor one, that doesn't entail that the person acts in good faith.
In my experience, opponents of gay and trans rights are not always casually ignorant but quite often willfully ignorant. Propaganda teaches them which lies to tell, and if they go pro, they manufacture disinformation. Also, frequently, their attitude is trolling, which can be detected not from a single statement but from the context and cadence of their conversations and soapboxes.
I don't think Gray would have attempted to use race or religion as an example of his claim that people generally speak and act in good faith when they take political positions. Most readers would find it implausible or uncomfortable to hear, for example — should it have been said — that antisemites genuinely believe that Jews cause harm to themselves and others and are not simply trolls who make things up. (Jews are aware that very many antisemites are trolls who make things up.) But for some reason this is supposed to play out differently when it's about anti-gay people, who supposedly have sincerely held Christian beliefs, or anti-trans people, who supposedly just need a trans person to knock on their door and inform them of their transness and humanity. Anyway, this is why I won't bring this book to my Jewish book club. All of us are seasoned adults between the ages of 45 and 80 and we don't have time to litigate this kind of stuff from the beginning.
Gray acknowledges: "Soon after the Obergefell decision, I co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times with Chelsea Schein where we used our scientific studies to argue that many conservative Christians intuitively perceived harm in gay marriage." Some readers "accused me of being antigay or being in league with conservatives," to which he says he responded that he was only trying "to better understand people's conflicting moral positions," which I suspect doesn't fully reflect nor address the criticism.
Anyway he's saying that conservatives and liberals have different "assumptions of vulnerability," i.e., about who's the real victim. I guess when someone says that white Christians are the most oppressed group, I'm supposed to take them at their word that they truly believe this and are not just trolling me?
Then he talks about "the Othered" who are those "outside the traditional center of American society, including Muslims, illegal immigrants, and transgender people." He cites a 2015 Trump quote about Mexico "not sending their best," apparently to support the idea that Trump supporters genuinely do "believe that a country with more of the othered will undermine the success of citizens." Counterclaim: Trump is racist in bad faith, and insofar as his supporters know it, they're racist in bad faith too. Per my example demonstration just now, yes, liberals do argue that the groups are othered "for misguided and malevolent reasons," but what's missing from this book is any significant acknowledgment of structural discrimination.
He brings up the 2016 North Carolina bathroom ban against trans people, in which political propaganda campaign the anti-trans lawmakers had "argued that trans women would be tempted to rape young women using the bathroom, by virtue of their innate male impulses for sexual aggression" — a nonsense trash slur that trans people are very very tired of spending an entire decade debunking, in part because trans people have always used the bathroom because we existed before 2016, obviously — while liberals "argued vehemently" to the contrary by "citing statistics." What the author's point is supposed to be here is not at all clear.
Toward the end, he does talk about "competitive victimhood," i.e., Oppression Olympics. He thinks, though, that people tend to talk about victimhood on social media because "it provides a moral currency that everyone can understand...talking about harm makes sense to everyone." He thinks people discuss injustice on social media primarily because it's a good conversation starter and not because the injustice really happened, had real material effects, and produced real thoughts and feelings in someone?
He says his postdoc researcher conducted an experiment asking Americans "to imagine 'someone who disagrees with you on moral issues,' for example, on same-sex marriage or abortion, and then to report 'what would make you respect their opinion.'" Um, the issue here is that same-sex marriage for me is not primarily a moral issue on which I take some position; it is my actual marriage. If someone morally disagrees with my marriage, I do not want to be made to respect their opinion. I would not benefit from respecting their opinion, and I don't think they would benefit from having my respect for that particular opinion. Why should we assume otherwise? In fact, given that I actually have a same-sex marriage, my showing deference to someone's anti-gay moral opinion would diminish our ability to engage in civil conversation on other issues, since I would be colluding in my own devaluation or dehumanization — and then why would they want or need to talk to me at all about anything? As I recently wrote: I can't make someone's anti-gay argument for them.
The conversations he wants people to have are about "politics," their "views," how they "voted" in the "election." But depending on who you are, the conversation would be about your own identity, which is a non-negotiable fact. That's what is missing here.
I was skeptical from the beginning with the reference to Daryl Davis, a Black man who "has personally befriended more than two hundred KKK members," apparently to help them be less racist — immediately followed by a mention of canvassers, "many of whom were transgender themselves," who door-knocked in Miami-Dade in 2014 to educate about a new housing and employment nondiscrimination law that protected trans people. They were "trained to listen deeply as voters explained their views, to refrain from condemnation, and to humbly offer their experiences during the ten-minute conversation. They also encouraged voters to engage in perspective taking by imagining a time that they felt judged for being different and connecting that experience to the experience of transgender people." Result: Voters who spoke to these canvassers came away with a lasting feeling of being, "on average, 10 points warmer [toward trans people] than people who didn't [speak with a canvasser]." So, look, I don't know what "10 points warmer" means — I mean I couldn't pull a couple transphobes out of a lineup and tell you which is 10 points warmer than the other — but anyway, for me, what's missing from this discussion is any acknowledgment of what it's like to knock on someone's door and initiate a conversational intervention about (indirectly) why they should hate you less or at least tolerate your presence on this Earth and by the way explain the effects of housing and employment discrimination on human beings. And sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes they warm up only 3 points. Sometimes they inform you that you're doing a terrible job of arguing for your own humanity and that, having met you, they're more inclined to vote against you (reader, this happened to me). Never mind that the world is constantly telling queer/trans people to downplay and hide our identities, telling us we're supposed to "not shove it down everyone's throat" or "keep it in the bedroom," but then when they vote against our rights it's because all along they secretly wanted us to knock on their doors and explain it to them.
Also, it isn't 2014 anymore. We can't rely on a 2014 example of anything to draw a conclusion about transphobia in 2025. Popular awareness of trans people's existence dramatically changed over the past decade. Right now the battle front isn't a housing and employment nondiscrimination law that gets passed (yay) and just has to be gently explained with a smile to everyone after the fact. Right now we have (checks notes) 456 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in the US in the first two months of the year. Everyone knows that we exist, they are trying to erase us in various dimensions, and they continue to do this even though we have explained millions of times that we aren't harming anyone. They do not want to talk to us because the anti-trans ethos is predicated on not talking to trans people.
I could tell, right here at this early spot in the book, that trans rights were going to be used as examples despite no trans people having been consulted in the making of the book. (Especially ironic given the author's call for conversations between strangers to question assumptions about who is truly vulnerable to harm.) The philosophical problem of "other minds" is going on here. Not only is the book not written primarily for me, it didn't anticipate I could be one of its possible readers.
I can get on board with the idea that people tend to operate with a protection narrative ("trying their best to protect themselves, their loved ones, and members of society") rather than a destruction narrative (they're not "comic book villains who inexplicably want to cause maximum harm"). That seems basically true. The book could have taken viable routes from there.
However, the author brings up the Tocqueville paradox which claims that, when a society is in terrible "economic and moral" shape, people have rather basic demands, but when there is "(historically speaking) unprecedented equality" with "(historically speaking) minor social injustices," people get outraged as they haggle over "smaller and smaller injustices." This, he says, reflects "concept creep" of what true injustice is. OK, so I'm unprepared to say whether the Tocqueville paradox might be true in principle, but as a diagnosis of our interactions today (as Gray certainly intends to use it), I find it very unfair. Yes, average life expectancy is longer, and so forth, but of course any individual may suffer greatly. Further, it is hard to measure whether an injustice today is "minor" relative to an injustice in a completely different social context (another time and place) since moral meanings are so contextual. There are also some major 20th- and 21st-century challenges that are unprecedented in human history, such as human-caused climate change, mass extinctions, nuclear bombs, technological surveillance, and so forth. It's pointless to argue whether the polycrises of today are "minor" relative to the polycrises of the past, but it's worth observing that these are in fact injustices, threats, problems, etc. They're simply different from other problems in human history. When we talk about current problems, we're bringing them up because they're real and they need to be discussed and solved. There's no paradox here. Responding to a complaint with an argument like well, isn't your life better than if you'd been born into chattel slavery? feels like a trolling attitude. I also think it's debatable whether we collectively have "expanding compassion for animals." Yes, today people spend a lot on their pets, but there's also factory farming and deforestation. Anyway, vegetarianism is an ancient practice, going back thousands of years, especially in India; it's hardly new to the 21st century. It isn't true that "we care so much about the well-being of all living creatures because society today is so safe." Even in unsafe societies, people care for each other and for non-human animals. This has always been true.
Then there's mention of a Gallup survey that repeatedly asked USAmericans over a 55-year span if they'd recently "helped a stranger," "been assaulted or mugged," or "let a stranger go ahead of you in line." The survey found no "moral decline" over the long term. OK, but those aren't the sum total of moral behaviors. The US is right now undergoing a coup and transitioning to authoritarianism. The culture is increasingly fascist. If individuals (or groups?) have had no moral decline, how did we end up in this political situation?
He asks why people "express moral outrage online." He doesn't think it's "moral grandstanding" in pursuit of "fame and power" (since of course that isn't readily delivered via social media). Instead, he thinks, outrage is "driven by feelings of threat"with a desire to "collectively punish and exile" the evildoers. Well, that doesn't seem obvious to me. People share stories of their own lives, as well as stories that have happened to others, in search of understanding and sympathy. People have dialogues online, and sometimes those dialogues involve expressions of moral outrage because outrage is an appropriate sentiment for whatever's being discussed. They may or may not primarily want to punish the perpetrators. They may be trying to educate themselves or others about the problem first. They may just want to talk about what happened. They're allowed to be mad about it. And just as he assumes that, due to "concept creep," whatever harms we experience today are "relatively mild" compared to what humans experienced in the past, he assumes that social media creates a bubble of illusion around whatever suffering and evil is being narrated within it because 21st-century suffering and evil is very unlikely to be real.
The bigger part of Gray's thesis is that people take political and moral positions in good faith based on a desire to avoid whatever they truly believe is harmful. "Conservative Christians," he insists, oppose gay marriage because they have a "sincere belief that gay marriage was harmful and would inevitably lead to suffering." His example of a "good faith" opponent of gay rights, on the basis of the presumed "harmfulness" of those rights, is Anita Bryant. And why should we believe that Anita Bryant acted in good faith? Because she "sacrificed her entire music career" to be an anti-gay crusader, and she made words that sounded like arguments, like a slippery slope to "murderer rights" and her belief that "homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit." These are bad faith arguments, mostly because they are nonsense, as I do not have time to explain further here. And, sadly, people sometimes do sacrifice honest career opportunities to boldly live more terrible versions of their own lives. Though the choice to be a bad-faith troll is often an economically poor one, that doesn't entail that the person acts in good faith.
In my experience, opponents of gay and trans rights are not always casually ignorant but quite often willfully ignorant. Propaganda teaches them which lies to tell, and if they go pro, they manufacture disinformation. Also, frequently, their attitude is trolling, which can be detected not from a single statement but from the context and cadence of their conversations and soapboxes.
I don't think Gray would have attempted to use race or religion as an example of his claim that people generally speak and act in good faith when they take political positions. Most readers would find it implausible or uncomfortable to hear, for example — should it have been said — that antisemites genuinely believe that Jews cause harm to themselves and others and are not simply trolls who make things up. (Jews are aware that very many antisemites are trolls who make things up.) But for some reason this is supposed to play out differently when it's about anti-gay people, who supposedly have sincerely held Christian beliefs, or anti-trans people, who supposedly just need a trans person to knock on their door and inform them of their transness and humanity. Anyway, this is why I won't bring this book to my Jewish book club. All of us are seasoned adults between the ages of 45 and 80 and we don't have time to litigate this kind of stuff from the beginning.
Gray acknowledges: "Soon after the Obergefell decision, I co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times with Chelsea Schein where we used our scientific studies to argue that many conservative Christians intuitively perceived harm in gay marriage." Some readers "accused me of being antigay or being in league with conservatives," to which he says he responded that he was only trying "to better understand people's conflicting moral positions," which I suspect doesn't fully reflect nor address the criticism.
Anyway he's saying that conservatives and liberals have different "assumptions of vulnerability," i.e., about who's the real victim. I guess when someone says that white Christians are the most oppressed group, I'm supposed to take them at their word that they truly believe this and are not just trolling me?
Then he talks about "the Othered" who are those "outside the traditional center of American society, including Muslims, illegal immigrants, and transgender people." He cites a 2015 Trump quote about Mexico "not sending their best," apparently to support the idea that Trump supporters genuinely do "believe that a country with more of the othered will undermine the success of citizens." Counterclaim: Trump is racist in bad faith, and insofar as his supporters know it, they're racist in bad faith too. Per my example demonstration just now, yes, liberals do argue that the groups are othered "for misguided and malevolent reasons," but what's missing from this book is any significant acknowledgment of structural discrimination.
He brings up the 2016 North Carolina bathroom ban against trans people, in which political propaganda campaign the anti-trans lawmakers had "argued that trans women would be tempted to rape young women using the bathroom, by virtue of their innate male impulses for sexual aggression" — a nonsense trash slur that trans people are very very tired of spending an entire decade debunking, in part because trans people have always used the bathroom because we existed before 2016, obviously — while liberals "argued vehemently" to the contrary by "citing statistics." What the author's point is supposed to be here is not at all clear.
Toward the end, he does talk about "competitive victimhood," i.e., Oppression Olympics. He thinks, though, that people tend to talk about victimhood on social media because "it provides a moral currency that everyone can understand...talking about harm makes sense to everyone." He thinks people discuss injustice on social media primarily because it's a good conversation starter and not because the injustice really happened, had real material effects, and produced real thoughts and feelings in someone?
He says his postdoc researcher conducted an experiment asking Americans "to imagine 'someone who disagrees with you on moral issues,' for example, on same-sex marriage or abortion, and then to report 'what would make you respect their opinion.'" Um, the issue here is that same-sex marriage for me is not primarily a moral issue on which I take some position; it is my actual marriage. If someone morally disagrees with my marriage, I do not want to be made to respect their opinion. I would not benefit from respecting their opinion, and I don't think they would benefit from having my respect for that particular opinion. Why should we assume otherwise? In fact, given that I actually have a same-sex marriage, my showing deference to someone's anti-gay moral opinion would diminish our ability to engage in civil conversation on other issues, since I would be colluding in my own devaluation or dehumanization — and then why would they want or need to talk to me at all about anything? As I recently wrote: I can't make someone's anti-gay argument for them.
The conversations he wants people to have are about "politics," their "views," how they "voted" in the "election." But depending on who you are, the conversation would be about your own identity, which is a non-negotiable fact. That's what is missing here.
May 4, 2025
This was a disappointment. I am reasonably confident that we can all see (and feel) the social/moral outrage currently dividing much of America and I was really hoping this work my provide some understanding and potentially a way to mitigate it. Yeah … probably not a realistic expectation; however, even worse, significant parts were completely undermined by my own experience and understanding of the human psyche and social mind. After a reasonable start, the author tries to make the case that humans didn’t evolve as apex predators (completely ignoring the actual definition of apex predator) arguing that if we go back in time far enough, we were obviously not predators … news flash … take ANY predatory organism on the planet and go back far enough and you will find an ancestor that was not a predator, so that is a pretty silly hill to die on … but the need here is because his entire premise is based upon the idea that evolution only accretes and never eliminates (a theory of evolution that is not supported). Okay … so ever worse … if humans are not apex predators … we much be prey? Yeah … No … Not really. But it only gets worse … because “as prey” we must have obviously adopted survival strategies common To prey … such as social groups designed to “dilute” the zone so that predators are over whelmed by too many targets … yeah … it doesn’t actually work that way either … 1) that specific strategies requires a rate of reproduction that out-paces predation, which, given human juvenile timeframes, birthrates and survival stats, doesn’t seem like a good argument and 2) social grouping are common even among apex predators … such as orcas … so there are other reasons for this that are likely to be a better fit to our human evolution. This whole line of reasoning completely undermined part 1 and I almost abandoned the book at that point.
It gets a little better with Part 2 and the author’s examination of harm … while I believe this is still too simplistic an answer that would be better described by using the term “threat [or harm]” it was close enough to get the general idea and more or less seems to be a good fit … especially the idea that, in general, our moral mind, or sense of morality, is founded on the perception of [potential] harm against the individual [or group in which the individual is a member]. What is missing is the how and why this is the mechanism, that determines/encourages social conformity (order vs chaos to improve survivability of the social unit) AND “othering” (briefly discussion without any indication or acknowledgment that ejection from the social group means that the moral mind no longer applies). There was elements that were good and useful, but they are generally hidden by imprecise language and/or outright misrepresentations of organizational dynamics.
Part 3 was the best part of the work and could easily stand on its own. The basic premise here is that facts don’t really matter because human nature isn’t really optimized for facts, but for story telling. This is almost an intuitive observation … if still overly simplified. The best way to counter moral outrage is to share stories from both sides … in other words, to re-humanize opponents (because the first step of justification for violence against an opponent is to dehumanize them). This does help turn down the temperature, but if does’t persuade (then again … the whole author continually emphasizes that the purpose here is NOT persuasion.
The chapters and sections in this work are …
Introduction - Swerve: The Power of Harm
Chapter 1 War: Is Understanding Betrayal?
PART 1: Human Nature - Myth 1 The Myth of Human Nature: We Evolved as Apex Predators
Chapter 2 Prey: The New Human Nature
Chapter 3 Social: The Rise of Morality
Chapter 4 Dangerous: Ignoring Our Obvious Safety
PART 2 Our Moral Mind - Myth 2 of the Moral Mind: There are No Harmless Wrongs
Chapter 5 Legacy: A Recent History of Harm
Chapter 6 Intuitive: The New Harm
Chapter 7 Vulnerability: Explaining Political Differences
Chapter 8 Blame: Moral Typecasting
Chapter 9 Suffering: Self-Focused Victimhood
PART 3 Bridging Moral Divides - Myth 3 Facts Bridge Divides
Chapter 10 Understanding: Telling Stories of Harm
Chapter 11: Hope: Opening Up
Epilogue Humility: Always Learning
Some of the other points that really got my attention (regardless of whether or not I agreed with them) are:
I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.
#Outraged #NetGalley.
It gets a little better with Part 2 and the author’s examination of harm … while I believe this is still too simplistic an answer that would be better described by using the term “threat [or harm]” it was close enough to get the general idea and more or less seems to be a good fit … especially the idea that, in general, our moral mind, or sense of morality, is founded on the perception of [potential] harm against the individual [or group in which the individual is a member]. What is missing is the how and why this is the mechanism, that determines/encourages social conformity (order vs chaos to improve survivability of the social unit) AND “othering” (briefly discussion without any indication or acknowledgment that ejection from the social group means that the moral mind no longer applies). There was elements that were good and useful, but they are generally hidden by imprecise language and/or outright misrepresentations of organizational dynamics.
Part 3 was the best part of the work and could easily stand on its own. The basic premise here is that facts don’t really matter because human nature isn’t really optimized for facts, but for story telling. This is almost an intuitive observation … if still overly simplified. The best way to counter moral outrage is to share stories from both sides … in other words, to re-humanize opponents (because the first step of justification for violence against an opponent is to dehumanize them). This does help turn down the temperature, but if does’t persuade (then again … the whole author continually emphasizes that the purpose here is NOT persuasion.
The chapters and sections in this work are …
Introduction - Swerve: The Power of Harm
Chapter 1 War: Is Understanding Betrayal?
PART 1: Human Nature - Myth 1 The Myth of Human Nature: We Evolved as Apex Predators
Chapter 2 Prey: The New Human Nature
Chapter 3 Social: The Rise of Morality
Chapter 4 Dangerous: Ignoring Our Obvious Safety
PART 2 Our Moral Mind - Myth 2 of the Moral Mind: There are No Harmless Wrongs
Chapter 5 Legacy: A Recent History of Harm
Chapter 6 Intuitive: The New Harm
Chapter 7 Vulnerability: Explaining Political Differences
Chapter 8 Blame: Moral Typecasting
Chapter 9 Suffering: Self-Focused Victimhood
PART 3 Bridging Moral Divides - Myth 3 Facts Bridge Divides
Chapter 10 Understanding: Telling Stories of Harm
Chapter 11: Hope: Opening Up
Epilogue Humility: Always Learning
Some of the other points that really got my attention (regardless of whether or not I agreed with them) are:
I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.
#Outraged #NetGalley.
September 21, 2025
The strange thing about outrage is that it feels both deeply personal and profoundly collective. It rattles around our bodies like a private fever, and yet it bursts out into the world in chants, in hashtags, in political rallies, in quiet eye-rolls at the dinner table. Kurt Gray’s Outraged takes this ubiquitous emotion and holds it up to the light, showing us the cracks and the contours, the shadows and the shine. The book asks not only why we feel outrage but what it means for our shared life. Reading it is like being given a mirror that does not flatter, but also does not condemn. It shows us a face twisted in fury, and then gently explains why the expression makes sense.
Gray begins with war. Not literal battlefields, though those appear in the telling, but the metaphor of war that now frames politics. Democrats and Republicans are not opponents within a shared democratic game but enemies locked in combat. To try to understand the other side feels like treason. Gray illustrates this with anecdotes from media figures and ordinary conversations, reminding us that empathy, in a culture of outrage, is suspect.
The chapter that introduces this motif is strong not because it provides new facts but because it makes the familiar newly strange. We all know that politics has become vicious, but Gray names the mechanism: the destruction narrative. When we imagine the other side bent on ruining our country, compromise is impossible. Yet his research shows that most people are not extremists; rather, we are misled by loud conflict entrepreneurs who profit from keeping us in battle mode.
This opening move exemplifies Gray’s style: history (the Christmas Truce of 1914), psychology experiments (feeling thermometers), and cultural commentary folded together into a narrative that feels both authoritative and accessible.
The most surprising section of the book is the claim that humans are not apex predators but evolutionary prey. Gray emphasizes that for much of our history we were not the hunters but the hunted, scanning the grass for lions or leopards. Outrage, then, is not a modern glitch but an ancient defense. To survive in small groups, we needed to punish aggressors, protect the vulnerable, and stay vigilant.
The idea reshapes the way one reads the headlines. If our ancestors’ lives were precarious, it makes sense that we leap at shadows today. Harm creep—the tendency to label more and more actions as dangerous—is the legacy of an old brain in a new world. The gap between actual safety and perceived danger is wide, and it explains why a stray tweet can feel like a mortal wound.
This part of the book is compelling, though it sometimes leans too heavily on metaphor. The prey-to-polarization connection is evocative, but the evidence can feel stretched. Still, the narrative power carries the reader forward.
The middle chapters form the intellectual heart of Outraged. Here Gray turns to the debates in moral psychology, especially Jonathan Haidt’s influential Moral Foundations Theory. Haidt argued that liberals and conservatives are built on different moral foundations—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Gray pushes back, insisting that beneath the variety lies a single principle: harm.
Even so-called “harmless wrongs”—incest between consenting adults, flag desecration, unusual food practices—are condemned because they are felt as harmful to something, whether family systems, collective identity, or sacred order. Morality is not modular but unified.
This argument is presented with both data and drama. We are told about experiments where people struggle to explain why they disapprove of certain acts, stumbling into what Haidt called “moral dumbfounding.” Gray reframes those moments: the dumbfounding is not evidence of multiple foundations but of intuition outpacing reason. Harm is felt before it is articulated, just as color is seen before it is described.
The critique is persuasive, though not airtight. Harm is a flexible concept, so expansive it risks becoming a catch-all. If everything is reducible to harm, then the theory may flatten moral life into a single note. Yet Gray’s insistence on harm as perception—something we feel, not calculate—adds nuance and guards against reductionism.
Once morality is grounded in harm, the political divide becomes clearer: liberals and conservatives differ not in moral architecture but in who they see as vulnerable. For liberals, it is marginalized groups, ecosystems, and citizens under corporate or governmental power. For conservatives, it is the unborn, the faithful, and communities threatened by crime or cultural upheaval.
Gray’s examples are vivid. Immigration is seen as harm to children at the border by one side, harm to citizens facing competition by the other. Abortion is harm to women lacking care or harm to fetuses denied life. Police are either sources of harm or bulwarks against it.
This lens is clarifying, but also somewhat obvious: of course people differ in what they fear. The strength of the chapter lies less in novelty and more in its gentle reframing: our opponents are not devoid of morals, but attentive to different vulnerabilities.
The discussion of moral typecasting is sharper. Once victims are identified, villains are conjured. Victims are innocent, villains are irredeemable. This binary makes compromise impossible. Each side insists it is the true victim, while the other is evil. Here Gray captures the tragic symmetry of outrage politics: two groups locked in a mirror, each convinced of its own righteousness.
Victimhood, Gray notes, is paradoxical: it signals weakness, but it also confers power. To be a victim is to hold the moral high ground, to command empathy and protection. This makes victimhood a prize worth competing for. Groups exaggerate harms, individuals highlight slights, and the public square becomes a contest of wounds.
The chapter on self-focused victimhood is both sobering and familiar. It explains why political debates devolve into dueling narratives of oppression, and why even within families, conflicts spiral when each person insists their pain is greater.
If the analysis feels repetitive at times, that is because victimhood is everywhere. But the repetition may be the point: the ubiquity of self-centered suffering makes outrage both universal and inescapable.
The final section of the book shifts from diagnosis to prescription. Gray champions pluralism—not the fantasy of agreement but the discipline of valuing disagreement. Democracy requires both change and stability, both left and right. Seeing opponents as enemies of democracy is itself the true danger.
Humanization is the first tool. Instead of caricaturing opponents as villains, we can listen to their stories, recognize their vulnerabilities, and restore complexity. Contact, perspective-taking, and resisting caricature can reintroduce humanity into politics.
But empathy, Gray warns, is not enough. Empathy is biased toward those like us, exhausting when stretched, and easily manipulated. What we need instead is connection through vulnerability. When we recognize that everyone is fragile—facing loss, fear, mortality—we can find solidarity without erasing disagreement.
The closing chapter ties the threads together: outrage is ancient, harm is universal, politics is polarized not because of alien minds but because of divergent harm maps. Common ground is possible if we ask, “What harm do they see?” and if we remember that beneath difference lies a shared moral mind.
Gray’s prose is clear, narrative-driven, and studded with anecdotes. He moves easily from World War I trenches to modern Twitter storms, from lab experiments to dinner table disputes. The style is persuasive because it feels conversational, yet authoritative. He does not scold but explain, inviting the reader into a frame of curiosity.
At times the book risks oversimplification. Harm is stretched to cover too much; solutions, while hopeful, can feel thin against the scale of outrage industries and disinformation ecosystems. Yet the clarity of the framework makes the book accessible to general readers and useful as a conversation starter.
I found the book illuminating in its synthesis, humane in its tone, but not wholly convincing in its solutions. On balance, I rate Outraged 74 out of 100.
To read Outraged is to be reminded that our enemies are not monsters but fellow humans animated by the same ancient system of harm detection. Outrage is not an alien force but part of us. The task is not to abolish it but to understand it, to channel it toward justice rather than destruction.
Gray’s contribution is not a final word but a crucial reframing. He shows us that moral understanding is possible, not by eliminating outrage, but by seeing it clearly. The book is less a manual for political reform than a mirror for the human condition, a reminder that beneath our divisions lies the simple, terrifying, and unifying truth: we are all vulnerable.
Gray begins with war. Not literal battlefields, though those appear in the telling, but the metaphor of war that now frames politics. Democrats and Republicans are not opponents within a shared democratic game but enemies locked in combat. To try to understand the other side feels like treason. Gray illustrates this with anecdotes from media figures and ordinary conversations, reminding us that empathy, in a culture of outrage, is suspect.
The chapter that introduces this motif is strong not because it provides new facts but because it makes the familiar newly strange. We all know that politics has become vicious, but Gray names the mechanism: the destruction narrative. When we imagine the other side bent on ruining our country, compromise is impossible. Yet his research shows that most people are not extremists; rather, we are misled by loud conflict entrepreneurs who profit from keeping us in battle mode.
This opening move exemplifies Gray’s style: history (the Christmas Truce of 1914), psychology experiments (feeling thermometers), and cultural commentary folded together into a narrative that feels both authoritative and accessible.
The most surprising section of the book is the claim that humans are not apex predators but evolutionary prey. Gray emphasizes that for much of our history we were not the hunters but the hunted, scanning the grass for lions or leopards. Outrage, then, is not a modern glitch but an ancient defense. To survive in small groups, we needed to punish aggressors, protect the vulnerable, and stay vigilant.
The idea reshapes the way one reads the headlines. If our ancestors’ lives were precarious, it makes sense that we leap at shadows today. Harm creep—the tendency to label more and more actions as dangerous—is the legacy of an old brain in a new world. The gap between actual safety and perceived danger is wide, and it explains why a stray tweet can feel like a mortal wound.
This part of the book is compelling, though it sometimes leans too heavily on metaphor. The prey-to-polarization connection is evocative, but the evidence can feel stretched. Still, the narrative power carries the reader forward.
The middle chapters form the intellectual heart of Outraged. Here Gray turns to the debates in moral psychology, especially Jonathan Haidt’s influential Moral Foundations Theory. Haidt argued that liberals and conservatives are built on different moral foundations—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Gray pushes back, insisting that beneath the variety lies a single principle: harm.
Even so-called “harmless wrongs”—incest between consenting adults, flag desecration, unusual food practices—are condemned because they are felt as harmful to something, whether family systems, collective identity, or sacred order. Morality is not modular but unified.
This argument is presented with both data and drama. We are told about experiments where people struggle to explain why they disapprove of certain acts, stumbling into what Haidt called “moral dumbfounding.” Gray reframes those moments: the dumbfounding is not evidence of multiple foundations but of intuition outpacing reason. Harm is felt before it is articulated, just as color is seen before it is described.
The critique is persuasive, though not airtight. Harm is a flexible concept, so expansive it risks becoming a catch-all. If everything is reducible to harm, then the theory may flatten moral life into a single note. Yet Gray’s insistence on harm as perception—something we feel, not calculate—adds nuance and guards against reductionism.
Once morality is grounded in harm, the political divide becomes clearer: liberals and conservatives differ not in moral architecture but in who they see as vulnerable. For liberals, it is marginalized groups, ecosystems, and citizens under corporate or governmental power. For conservatives, it is the unborn, the faithful, and communities threatened by crime or cultural upheaval.
Gray’s examples are vivid. Immigration is seen as harm to children at the border by one side, harm to citizens facing competition by the other. Abortion is harm to women lacking care or harm to fetuses denied life. Police are either sources of harm or bulwarks against it.
This lens is clarifying, but also somewhat obvious: of course people differ in what they fear. The strength of the chapter lies less in novelty and more in its gentle reframing: our opponents are not devoid of morals, but attentive to different vulnerabilities.
The discussion of moral typecasting is sharper. Once victims are identified, villains are conjured. Victims are innocent, villains are irredeemable. This binary makes compromise impossible. Each side insists it is the true victim, while the other is evil. Here Gray captures the tragic symmetry of outrage politics: two groups locked in a mirror, each convinced of its own righteousness.
Victimhood, Gray notes, is paradoxical: it signals weakness, but it also confers power. To be a victim is to hold the moral high ground, to command empathy and protection. This makes victimhood a prize worth competing for. Groups exaggerate harms, individuals highlight slights, and the public square becomes a contest of wounds.
The chapter on self-focused victimhood is both sobering and familiar. It explains why political debates devolve into dueling narratives of oppression, and why even within families, conflicts spiral when each person insists their pain is greater.
If the analysis feels repetitive at times, that is because victimhood is everywhere. But the repetition may be the point: the ubiquity of self-centered suffering makes outrage both universal and inescapable.
The final section of the book shifts from diagnosis to prescription. Gray champions pluralism—not the fantasy of agreement but the discipline of valuing disagreement. Democracy requires both change and stability, both left and right. Seeing opponents as enemies of democracy is itself the true danger.
Humanization is the first tool. Instead of caricaturing opponents as villains, we can listen to their stories, recognize their vulnerabilities, and restore complexity. Contact, perspective-taking, and resisting caricature can reintroduce humanity into politics.
But empathy, Gray warns, is not enough. Empathy is biased toward those like us, exhausting when stretched, and easily manipulated. What we need instead is connection through vulnerability. When we recognize that everyone is fragile—facing loss, fear, mortality—we can find solidarity without erasing disagreement.
The closing chapter ties the threads together: outrage is ancient, harm is universal, politics is polarized not because of alien minds but because of divergent harm maps. Common ground is possible if we ask, “What harm do they see?” and if we remember that beneath difference lies a shared moral mind.
Gray’s prose is clear, narrative-driven, and studded with anecdotes. He moves easily from World War I trenches to modern Twitter storms, from lab experiments to dinner table disputes. The style is persuasive because it feels conversational, yet authoritative. He does not scold but explain, inviting the reader into a frame of curiosity.
At times the book risks oversimplification. Harm is stretched to cover too much; solutions, while hopeful, can feel thin against the scale of outrage industries and disinformation ecosystems. Yet the clarity of the framework makes the book accessible to general readers and useful as a conversation starter.
I found the book illuminating in its synthesis, humane in its tone, but not wholly convincing in its solutions. On balance, I rate Outraged 74 out of 100.
To read Outraged is to be reminded that our enemies are not monsters but fellow humans animated by the same ancient system of harm detection. Outrage is not an alien force but part of us. The task is not to abolish it but to understand it, to channel it toward justice rather than destruction.
Gray’s contribution is not a final word but a crucial reframing. He shows us that moral understanding is possible, not by eliminating outrage, but by seeing it clearly. The book is less a manual for political reform than a mirror for the human condition, a reminder that beneath our divisions lies the simple, terrifying, and unifying truth: we are all vulnerable.
March 8, 2025
Very informative. Gray presents and cohesive and compelling picture of what's going on psychologically and socially when we talk about contentious issues. And describes practical strategies to move towards mutual understanding. It's a worthwhile read.
Want to read
February 21, 2025Outraged by Kurt Gray
January 20, 2025
If you’ve lived through an election season, you understand quite well how people are easily stirred up into outrage. Politicians and their marketers have come to understand how primal and deeply seated outrage and fear can be, and how effectively it motivates people to vote and act in certain ways.
Kurt Gray has done great service in presenting the results of a lot of his psychological and sociological research into people in Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (galley received as part of early review program).
The author’s main thesis, broadly, is that the avoidance of harm is hard-wired as the basic proposition of human morality, and all moral reasoning can be understood in terms of mitigating the prospect and threat of moral harm.
The work is organized in three parts, with a common myth under exploration in each, its refutation, and what it means for us.
The first such myth involves humans as evolved to be apex predators. Using current evolutionary theory, he argues instead how ancestral humans were often preyed upon by larger creatures on the African savanna, and humanity developed its communal nature in part to mitigate this threat. In this way he would explain why we are hard-wired to be constantly on the alert for harm and why we prioritize our safety from harms.
It is understandable how many would consider this to be at variance with the portrayal of humanity in Scripture, but it does go a long way to explain how we behave in comparison to “true” apex predators like lions, tigers, etc.
The second myth is that of the moral mind and “harmless wrongs” as advocated for by Jonathan Haidt and his moral minds theory. I confess I have always been skeptical of Haidt’s thesis because the idea conservatives would have so many more moral domains than liberals seemed more as if there was something missing in the analysis than actual reality. The author well argued how it is really considerations of harm that underlie human moral reasoning: system 1 thought will always see certain things as harmful, even if system 2 thought can be persuaded those possible harms have been thoroughly mitigated. When we understand concern about harm as underneath all moral reasoning, we can understand how our views on political and moral subjects involve which harms we prioritize over other possible harms. The author does well at showing how we naturally sympathize more with those we deem “victims” than “victimizers,” even in contexts in which the “victimizer” is not responsible for what they have suffered (i.e., if both a victim and victimizer both have houses that burn down in a wildfire, people will want to provide more assistance to the former rather than the latter, even though neither are responsible at all for what they have suffered in this particular situation). The author also expresses how DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) works so well: we all ironically want to see ourselves as the victim so that we can obtain the appropriate moral standing, especially if and when we are accused of being the victimizer (and this kind of thought is very pervasive in political discourse, with white men now somehow feeling as if they are the victims in society).
The final myth involves our almost religious confidence in reason and rationality: facts as bridging divides. Instead, the author does well at showing, through research, how facts don’t really change minds. Stories change minds. One has to tell stories of how one or another has been harmed in order to get people to consider how it is seen by the other side. That is how the other side ceases to look like immoral monsters.
The author also encourages humility in these matters, which is very important. In truth, everyone fears their fears, and a lot of our political issues are profitably understood that way. Abortion? Obsessive concern regarding harm to a child versus harm to the mother. Social services? Concerns regarding the harms suffered by the poor and marginalized versus the harm of wealthy people having their wealth extracted by taxes. Immigration? The harms suffered by immigrants which lead them to immigrate versus the harm to employment prospects or living situations for those already here. Guns? The harm done by guns versus the harm suffered by someone who does not have a gun.
In this way, the people with whom you disagree are not cold-blooded monsters who hate all which is good, right, and holy. Instead, they fear different things than you fear. Their harm calculations are different from yours. That does not mean they should be fearing what they fear to the extent they fear it, or that their harm calculation is more correct than yours. But it provides a starting point for real conversation and hopefully better understanding.
I highly recommended this work; everyone should read it.
Kurt Gray has done great service in presenting the results of a lot of his psychological and sociological research into people in Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (galley received as part of early review program).
The author’s main thesis, broadly, is that the avoidance of harm is hard-wired as the basic proposition of human morality, and all moral reasoning can be understood in terms of mitigating the prospect and threat of moral harm.
The work is organized in three parts, with a common myth under exploration in each, its refutation, and what it means for us.
The first such myth involves humans as evolved to be apex predators. Using current evolutionary theory, he argues instead how ancestral humans were often preyed upon by larger creatures on the African savanna, and humanity developed its communal nature in part to mitigate this threat. In this way he would explain why we are hard-wired to be constantly on the alert for harm and why we prioritize our safety from harms.
It is understandable how many would consider this to be at variance with the portrayal of humanity in Scripture, but it does go a long way to explain how we behave in comparison to “true” apex predators like lions, tigers, etc.
The second myth is that of the moral mind and “harmless wrongs” as advocated for by Jonathan Haidt and his moral minds theory. I confess I have always been skeptical of Haidt’s thesis because the idea conservatives would have so many more moral domains than liberals seemed more as if there was something missing in the analysis than actual reality. The author well argued how it is really considerations of harm that underlie human moral reasoning: system 1 thought will always see certain things as harmful, even if system 2 thought can be persuaded those possible harms have been thoroughly mitigated. When we understand concern about harm as underneath all moral reasoning, we can understand how our views on political and moral subjects involve which harms we prioritize over other possible harms. The author does well at showing how we naturally sympathize more with those we deem “victims” than “victimizers,” even in contexts in which the “victimizer” is not responsible for what they have suffered (i.e., if both a victim and victimizer both have houses that burn down in a wildfire, people will want to provide more assistance to the former rather than the latter, even though neither are responsible at all for what they have suffered in this particular situation). The author also expresses how DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) works so well: we all ironically want to see ourselves as the victim so that we can obtain the appropriate moral standing, especially if and when we are accused of being the victimizer (and this kind of thought is very pervasive in political discourse, with white men now somehow feeling as if they are the victims in society).
The final myth involves our almost religious confidence in reason and rationality: facts as bridging divides. Instead, the author does well at showing, through research, how facts don’t really change minds. Stories change minds. One has to tell stories of how one or another has been harmed in order to get people to consider how it is seen by the other side. That is how the other side ceases to look like immoral monsters.
The author also encourages humility in these matters, which is very important. In truth, everyone fears their fears, and a lot of our political issues are profitably understood that way. Abortion? Obsessive concern regarding harm to a child versus harm to the mother. Social services? Concerns regarding the harms suffered by the poor and marginalized versus the harm of wealthy people having their wealth extracted by taxes. Immigration? The harms suffered by immigrants which lead them to immigrate versus the harm to employment prospects or living situations for those already here. Guns? The harm done by guns versus the harm suffered by someone who does not have a gun.
In this way, the people with whom you disagree are not cold-blooded monsters who hate all which is good, right, and holy. Instead, they fear different things than you fear. Their harm calculations are different from yours. That does not mean they should be fearing what they fear to the extent they fear it, or that their harm calculation is more correct than yours. But it provides a starting point for real conversation and hopefully better understanding.
I highly recommended this work; everyone should read it.
February 26, 2025
This was one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking books I’ve read on moral psychology. It directly challenges Jonathan Haidt’s “Moral Foundations Theory” (MFT)—described in The Righteous Mind—providing plenty of compelling evidence and argumentation to support the claim that our moral intuitions all ultimately spring from harm-based assessments.
Some highlights:
-Despite objectively living in a safer environment nowadays than our ancient (and less ancient) ancestors, our subjective perception of harm is still on full alert, such that we perceive smaller and smaller harms with similar degrees of vigilance, sensitivity, and threat. This phenomenon is known as concept creep, leading us to see relatively mild harms as traumatic. Social media amplifies this concept creep-infused threat perception by providing a functionally infinite supply of potential threats, seeming to justify moral panics. (Part 1)
-One of Gray’s core claims is that there is no such thing as a “harmless wrong”. To summarize key supporting evidence debunking Haidt’s MFT and supporting the harm-based (evolutionarily evolved) moral mind, Gray writes (in Part 2):
“Finding that harm is intuitively perceived is the key piece of evidence for a harm-based moral mind, and therefore the key piece of evidence against the idea of a mind divided into different moral foundations. Harm can serve as the master key to morality and can unlock even moral judgments that seem “objectively harmless.” ” (p. 165)
This conclusion is based on a series of studies and evolutionary reasoning. Our minds are “hardwired” to detect threats, which carries over into how we judge moral actions. Even if we know, analytically, that something is safe (like the Grand Canyon skywalk), we still feel fear viscerally because evolution endowed to be cautious about heights. The same phenomenon was observed in the lab, where subjects responded to having to “shoot” another subject in the leg with a fake gun as if real harm was occurring. This demonstrates that intuitive, emotional (system 1) reactions can overpower attempts to override such reactions using more reflective, logical (system 2) reasoning when it comes to perceiving harm.
Another piece of evidence is that, when people are under time pressure, they are more likely to give an intuitive harm-based response than when they have more time to reflect. For example, most people intuitively recoil at incest, even if it’s difficult to pinpoint actual harms coming from it in a contrived scenario (as concocted in Jon Haidt’s incest thought experiment).
-Gray’s main suggestion to bridge moral divides (Part 3)—based on another body of evidence—is to tell each other stories of harm rather than focus merely on facts. Since those with conflicting moral frameworks to ours tend to be moved by a distinct set of issues they care about, yet their concerns are also rooted in harm, it makes sense to highlight harm stories as a way to first establish that our interlocutors overlap with us morally on some level. I find the lessons from this section hard to instantiate because I feel like I have to undermine my own epistemology—which I try to ground in empirical evidence and logic—in order to successfully communicate differing moral views with others. That said, it’s a good challenge to be a more effective communicator without having to dilute a commitment to facts. One just has to ensure that the harm stories one tells are consistent with the body of facts, and not mere outlier stories of harm.
Overall, a fantastically invigorating, thought-provoking, and largely persuasive read. Highly recommended.
Some highlights:
-Despite objectively living in a safer environment nowadays than our ancient (and less ancient) ancestors, our subjective perception of harm is still on full alert, such that we perceive smaller and smaller harms with similar degrees of vigilance, sensitivity, and threat. This phenomenon is known as concept creep, leading us to see relatively mild harms as traumatic. Social media amplifies this concept creep-infused threat perception by providing a functionally infinite supply of potential threats, seeming to justify moral panics. (Part 1)
-One of Gray’s core claims is that there is no such thing as a “harmless wrong”. To summarize key supporting evidence debunking Haidt’s MFT and supporting the harm-based (evolutionarily evolved) moral mind, Gray writes (in Part 2):
“Finding that harm is intuitively perceived is the key piece of evidence for a harm-based moral mind, and therefore the key piece of evidence against the idea of a mind divided into different moral foundations. Harm can serve as the master key to morality and can unlock even moral judgments that seem “objectively harmless.” ” (p. 165)
This conclusion is based on a series of studies and evolutionary reasoning. Our minds are “hardwired” to detect threats, which carries over into how we judge moral actions. Even if we know, analytically, that something is safe (like the Grand Canyon skywalk), we still feel fear viscerally because evolution endowed to be cautious about heights. The same phenomenon was observed in the lab, where subjects responded to having to “shoot” another subject in the leg with a fake gun as if real harm was occurring. This demonstrates that intuitive, emotional (system 1) reactions can overpower attempts to override such reactions using more reflective, logical (system 2) reasoning when it comes to perceiving harm.
Another piece of evidence is that, when people are under time pressure, they are more likely to give an intuitive harm-based response than when they have more time to reflect. For example, most people intuitively recoil at incest, even if it’s difficult to pinpoint actual harms coming from it in a contrived scenario (as concocted in Jon Haidt’s incest thought experiment).
-Gray’s main suggestion to bridge moral divides (Part 3)—based on another body of evidence—is to tell each other stories of harm rather than focus merely on facts. Since those with conflicting moral frameworks to ours tend to be moved by a distinct set of issues they care about, yet their concerns are also rooted in harm, it makes sense to highlight harm stories as a way to first establish that our interlocutors overlap with us morally on some level. I find the lessons from this section hard to instantiate because I feel like I have to undermine my own epistemology—which I try to ground in empirical evidence and logic—in order to successfully communicate differing moral views with others. That said, it’s a good challenge to be a more effective communicator without having to dilute a commitment to facts. One just has to ensure that the harm stories one tells are consistent with the body of facts, and not mere outlier stories of harm.
Overall, a fantastically invigorating, thought-provoking, and largely persuasive read. Highly recommended.
August 17, 2025
Destructive Narrative
Believe that those on the other side are more like villains who want to cause maximum harm.
In reality the policy trade-offs are "usually unintended and often regretted" like when Democrats lobby for stronger environmental regulations to protect ecosystems, they regret the loss of jobs in the fossil fuel sector. Or when Republicans want to ease environmental regulations to provide more blue-collar jobs, they regret the harm to the environment (pg 23).
But most people are not motivated to destroy. Study showed more motivated to make your own party look good than to make the other party look bad---UNLESS the group feels threatened, then they are more willing to lash out and publish a news story that attacks the other side (33% to now 50% willing) (pg. 24).
Protection narrative is more accurate. People are trying their best to protect their loved ones, themselves, and members of society (pg 24).
Studies show that the best way to teach kids that something is wrong, is to tell them that it causes harm (pg. 158).
Assumptions of Vulnerabilities: (pgs. 178-192)
1. The Environment (74% of Dems and 31% of Republicans agreed)
2. The Divine
3. The Powerful
4. The Othered (marginalized/disadvantaged)
Liberals *amplify* group differences, dividing the moral world into the very vulnerable (Environment and Othered) and the very invulnerable, whereas Conservatives *dampen* group differences, seeing more similarity among different clusters of entities (pg 187).
The pain of loss looms larger than the pleasure of gain (pg. 227)
Opioid painkillers dampen only the affective regions of our brain, not the sensation regions, which means people can still feel the particular sensation of pain, like throbbing, without it "hurting" (pg 227).
Elain Scarry, "The Body in Pain:" "to have great pain is to have certainty"--certainty of our own victimhood, but "to hear that another has pain is to have doubt" about their victimhood. People in pain are convinced that they are the "real" victim within a situation (pg. 228).
Notable notes:
Humans were prey long before they were predators. So we evolved to be stellar threat detectors (like our amygdala). Now that we have relative few actual threats, we often fall prey to "concept creep" where things that aren't that threatening now seem scary. Explains why parents are forever worried about kidnappings and other crimes despite the lower and lower amounts of crime being committed.
Protection vs. Destructive narrative
We want to protect what matters to us more than we want to destroy others. What we want to protect, though, can be very different from one another. Pro-guns---worried about protecting their homes/family from a break-in. Pro-gun control--concerned about protecting innocent bystanders from gun violence. Worried about easy access to weapons that can lead to domestic violence or suicide.
Once you know about the protection theory, you can see it out in the wild all over. Also be on the lookout for dehumanization, which is language that talks about evil, animals, robotic, etc.
Harm stories are better at persuasion than facts.
Dr. Gray on Hidden Brain, worth a listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Believe that those on the other side are more like villains who want to cause maximum harm.
In reality the policy trade-offs are "usually unintended and often regretted" like when Democrats lobby for stronger environmental regulations to protect ecosystems, they regret the loss of jobs in the fossil fuel sector. Or when Republicans want to ease environmental regulations to provide more blue-collar jobs, they regret the harm to the environment (pg 23).
But most people are not motivated to destroy. Study showed more motivated to make your own party look good than to make the other party look bad---UNLESS the group feels threatened, then they are more willing to lash out and publish a news story that attacks the other side (33% to now 50% willing) (pg. 24).
Protection narrative is more accurate. People are trying their best to protect their loved ones, themselves, and members of society (pg 24).
Studies show that the best way to teach kids that something is wrong, is to tell them that it causes harm (pg. 158).
Assumptions of Vulnerabilities: (pgs. 178-192)
1. The Environment (74% of Dems and 31% of Republicans agreed)
2. The Divine
3. The Powerful
4. The Othered (marginalized/disadvantaged)
Liberals *amplify* group differences, dividing the moral world into the very vulnerable (Environment and Othered) and the very invulnerable, whereas Conservatives *dampen* group differences, seeing more similarity among different clusters of entities (pg 187).
The pain of loss looms larger than the pleasure of gain (pg. 227)
Opioid painkillers dampen only the affective regions of our brain, not the sensation regions, which means people can still feel the particular sensation of pain, like throbbing, without it "hurting" (pg 227).
Elain Scarry, "The Body in Pain:" "to have great pain is to have certainty"--certainty of our own victimhood, but "to hear that another has pain is to have doubt" about their victimhood. People in pain are convinced that they are the "real" victim within a situation (pg. 228).
Notable notes:
Humans were prey long before they were predators. So we evolved to be stellar threat detectors (like our amygdala). Now that we have relative few actual threats, we often fall prey to "concept creep" where things that aren't that threatening now seem scary. Explains why parents are forever worried about kidnappings and other crimes despite the lower and lower amounts of crime being committed.
Protection vs. Destructive narrative
We want to protect what matters to us more than we want to destroy others. What we want to protect, though, can be very different from one another. Pro-guns---worried about protecting their homes/family from a break-in. Pro-gun control--concerned about protecting innocent bystanders from gun violence. Worried about easy access to weapons that can lead to domestic violence or suicide.
Once you know about the protection theory, you can see it out in the wild all over. Also be on the lookout for dehumanization, which is language that talks about evil, animals, robotic, etc.
Harm stories are better at persuasion than facts.
Dr. Gray on Hidden Brain, worth a listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 20, 2025
Kurt Gray wades into the by now very familiar territory of trying to understand why the modern body politic is so polarized as to make civil discussion of public policy impossible in the United States and everywhere else for that matter. His research led him to conclude that prehistoric man was prey before he became predator and that this undergirds how we react to stuff we don’t agree with. He emphasizes a “harm-based” model of public discourse. That people act and react according to what is a threat to them first.
Worse, he believes the “creep” of harm and evil into public discourse on smaller and smaller injustices may lead us to destroy the institutions created to keep us safe, like the courts and police. Anonymity turns people callous and bold online. Moral grandstanding, the more outrage you show the more attention you get is enforced by social media algorithms.
He believes that people who lean left or lean right make different assumptions of vulnerability, that once we sort them out more civil discourse is possible.
He invites us to “connect” “invite” and “validate” one another’s point-of-view to help dismantle the walls been opposing views.
I’m still thinking about whether I think he’s right or not.
On a side note: the evolutionary record suggests humans were better at migration than hunting, that migration allowed groups to deal with extreme predation and escape harm. What could that mean for our present attitude toward migrants? Well, it could mean that we are stigmatizing people for a natural behaviour and doubling tragedies that shape their fate.
How cruel. How shortsighted.
Worse, he believes the “creep” of harm and evil into public discourse on smaller and smaller injustices may lead us to destroy the institutions created to keep us safe, like the courts and police. Anonymity turns people callous and bold online. Moral grandstanding, the more outrage you show the more attention you get is enforced by social media algorithms.
He believes that people who lean left or lean right make different assumptions of vulnerability, that once we sort them out more civil discourse is possible.
He invites us to “connect” “invite” and “validate” one another’s point-of-view to help dismantle the walls been opposing views.
I’m still thinking about whether I think he’s right or not.
On a side note: the evolutionary record suggests humans were better at migration than hunting, that migration allowed groups to deal with extreme predation and escape harm. What could that mean for our present attitude toward migrants? Well, it could mean that we are stigmatizing people for a natural behaviour and doubling tragedies that shape their fate.
How cruel. How shortsighted.
January 14, 2025
A fresh and insightful new look at the morality of human behavior!
If you have never read a book on morality before, this is an absolute must read. And if you have read a book about morality before, then it is even more essential that you read this book. You've been told the wrong story. Gray corrects the record with a comprehensive, new, and compelling take on our sense of morality.
For decades, everyday people and psychologists alike have misunderstood the nature of morality and how it operates from day to day. Drawing on over a decade of research, Gray shows us how we've been thinking about morality the wrong way, and persuasively shows us how humans have evolved not as predators but as prey, not as killers but as protectors. Our sense of morality is rooted in avoiding harm.
From the opening story of an incident on the road, and the question of who was to blame to discussions of political disagreements, why we need the "other side," moral panics, villains and victims and why it's all too easy to see ourselves as the victim, I couldn't put this book down. Gray shows us how we can use these insights to bridge divides, discussing not what we believe to be facts but discussions of harm and vulnerability. Opening up allows moral moral humility and moral understanding.
Moral divides are not unbridgeable once we understand the nature of our morality. Broad, deep, and enlightening, this is the best book on morality out there, and required reading for us all!
If you have never read a book on morality before, this is an absolute must read. And if you have read a book about morality before, then it is even more essential that you read this book. You've been told the wrong story. Gray corrects the record with a comprehensive, new, and compelling take on our sense of morality.
For decades, everyday people and psychologists alike have misunderstood the nature of morality and how it operates from day to day. Drawing on over a decade of research, Gray shows us how we've been thinking about morality the wrong way, and persuasively shows us how humans have evolved not as predators but as prey, not as killers but as protectors. Our sense of morality is rooted in avoiding harm.
From the opening story of an incident on the road, and the question of who was to blame to discussions of political disagreements, why we need the "other side," moral panics, villains and victims and why it's all too easy to see ourselves as the victim, I couldn't put this book down. Gray shows us how we can use these insights to bridge divides, discussing not what we believe to be facts but discussions of harm and vulnerability. Opening up allows moral moral humility and moral understanding.
Moral divides are not unbridgeable once we understand the nature of our morality. Broad, deep, and enlightening, this is the best book on morality out there, and required reading for us all!
May 21, 2025
4.5⭐️
"Most of us want to be less outraged, and understanding the truth about our moral minds will help"
I absolutely loved this book! I was hesitant to read it, worrying I couldn't deal with more heavy politics, but it wasn't that at all. I really appreciated that examples weren't always political and the amount of time spent on buy in for humanity as a whole rather than jumping straight to "so why do we all hate each other". I took this book slowly, reading just one chapter at a time to really process the importance of the content.
I am admittedly a psychology nerd, so the focus on human nature and why our minds do what they do was thrilling for me. I found myself and loved ones reflected greatly in these pages, always without judgement but rather with understanding and compassion. If you have loved ones, coworkers or spend a lot of time online exposed to people (so everyone 🙃) who disagree with you, this book could be life changing. Understanding and perspective really are everything.
The repetitiveness other reviews seem bothered by is IMO the whole point - we have to understand human nature to get where others are coming from. That doesn't mean agreeing with them, just seeing them as a human. Understanding takes time, effort and commitment. It's not an easy fix.
Took off .5 star only because I picked this up hoping to feel equipped to manage distress within close relationships and it provided mostly examples on how to deal with strangers and acquaintances.
"Most of us want to be less outraged, and understanding the truth about our moral minds will help"
I absolutely loved this book! I was hesitant to read it, worrying I couldn't deal with more heavy politics, but it wasn't that at all. I really appreciated that examples weren't always political and the amount of time spent on buy in for humanity as a whole rather than jumping straight to "so why do we all hate each other". I took this book slowly, reading just one chapter at a time to really process the importance of the content.
I am admittedly a psychology nerd, so the focus on human nature and why our minds do what they do was thrilling for me. I found myself and loved ones reflected greatly in these pages, always without judgement but rather with understanding and compassion. If you have loved ones, coworkers or spend a lot of time online exposed to people (so everyone 🙃) who disagree with you, this book could be life changing. Understanding and perspective really are everything.
The repetitiveness other reviews seem bothered by is IMO the whole point - we have to understand human nature to get where others are coming from. That doesn't mean agreeing with them, just seeing them as a human. Understanding takes time, effort and commitment. It's not an easy fix.
Took off .5 star only because I picked this up hoping to feel equipped to manage distress within close relationships and it provided mostly examples on how to deal with strangers and acquaintances.
January 15, 2025
This is a book I wish I’d been able to read earlier, not simply because I would have been able to add it to my syllabus for the seminar I’m teaching this term, Law and Mind Sciences (almost certainly boosting my teaching evaluations: “Best thing we read all term!” “Why can’t all scientists write like this and make it interesting?” “Way better than your books!”), but also because it would have provided such a useful tool for understanding difficult moments over the last decade. Like many Americans, in recent years, I’ve often felt frustration, anger, and confusion at those across the political divide from me. “How can you think that?” “What kind of person would do that?” “How are we in the same family?” Kurt Gray offers a powerful theory to make sense of our outrage, and offers a compelling path forward to bridge the partisan crevasse. This book is must read for those interested in moral psychology, yes, but it’s also one that I’d encourage anyone and everyone to pick up: OUTRAGED can help you better understand our shared humanity.
February 8, 2025
Mildly interesting in an eighth-grade-reading-level sort of way. (Maybe not the author's fault. Publisher might have told him to dumb it down.) Bibliography lists the usual suspects. I wonder how well the studies he cites will replicate. But then, I wonder that about every psychology study these days.
The author foregrounds our evolutionary heritage, but in a weird way, repeatedly stressing that our early hominin ancestors were prey, not predators. He seems to imagine that we need to be reminded of this, as if we're all mentally stuck in Robert Ardrey's Land of the Killer Apes. Even though most of us have long since encountered Lucy, the world's most renowned _Australopithecus afarensis_.She stood about 3'6" and could maybe run as fast as a modern first grader. Not my model of an apex predator.
Better guide for today's political climate: Gaius Musonius Rufus, a Stoic philosopher who survived the reign of Nero and multiple expulsions from Rome. A ketamine prescription might also help.
The author foregrounds our evolutionary heritage, but in a weird way, repeatedly stressing that our early hominin ancestors were prey, not predators. He seems to imagine that we need to be reminded of this, as if we're all mentally stuck in Robert Ardrey's Land of the Killer Apes. Even though most of us have long since encountered Lucy, the world's most renowned _Australopithecus afarensis_.She stood about 3'6" and could maybe run as fast as a modern first grader. Not my model of an apex predator.
Better guide for today's political climate: Gaius Musonius Rufus, a Stoic philosopher who survived the reign of Nero and multiple expulsions from Rome. A ketamine prescription might also help.
February 28, 2025
Outraged is the rare, shining example of a pop-psychology book worth reading. Many in the genre fall into the tropes of overextrapolation and padding out word counts on what are essentially blog posts.
This is not that.
In Outraged, Kurt Gray lays out a simple hypothesis, backed by mountains of science: all morality stems from a fear of harm. Humans are more prey than predators, our brains evolved to detect harm before it can harm us, meaning our ideologies are far more alike than they are different. Knowing this, Gray provides simple, actionable and proven steps on how we can bridge seemingly impossible gaps and foster understanding. (Bonus points for repeated, gentle dunking on Jonathan Haidt).
One of the few pop-psychology books actually worth your time and effort. Highly recommend.
This is not that.
In Outraged, Kurt Gray lays out a simple hypothesis, backed by mountains of science: all morality stems from a fear of harm. Humans are more prey than predators, our brains evolved to detect harm before it can harm us, meaning our ideologies are far more alike than they are different. Knowing this, Gray provides simple, actionable and proven steps on how we can bridge seemingly impossible gaps and foster understanding. (Bonus points for repeated, gentle dunking on Jonathan Haidt).
One of the few pop-psychology books actually worth your time and effort. Highly recommend.
January 14, 2025
As a longtime fan of Gray's work, I was eager for the book to come out. Can now confirm it's excellent!! Thought-provoking and practical, beautiful writing too. Perfect mix of research and storytelling as he practices what he teaches about persuasion. What I wasn't anticipating is that Outraged is so accessible and widely pertinent that I'm now buying a copy for my teen who's interested in morality and ethics.
If everyone could read this book, it would be a better world! I know Gray's research-based advice is going to help me navigate difficult conversations with people I disagree with. I'm seeing them with more empathy and understanding already.
If everyone could read this book, it would be a better world! I know Gray's research-based advice is going to help me navigate difficult conversations with people I disagree with. I'm seeing them with more empathy and understanding already.
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