Effects of Viral Outrage on Women’s Participation in Collective Action for Gender Equality

Abstract

Outrage against moral violations motivates people to take collective action. But in the digital age, expressing moral outrage against perceived injustices has become commonplace. In a way, this has led to effective social change movements such as the #Metoo and #BlackLivesMatter campaigns. However, there is also a downside to excessive outrage on social media – people might find it easy to pile on against a moral offender without engaging in meaningful actions such as volunteering or donating money for a cause. We hypothesised that viral outrage hinders collective action, and this relationship is moderated by people’s support for the status quo, i.e., their system-justification beliefs. Indian women (n = 219) participated in an online experiment where they either witnessed viral or non-viral outrage against a sexist post on Twitter and filled intentional and behavioural measures of collective action for gender equality. Witnessing viral outrage on social media hindered women’s intentions for collective action but did not relate to policy support or performance on a donation task. Keywords: viral outrage, social media, collective action, system-justification theory, gender equality