How To Move Beyond Outrage Toward Understanding | DailyGood

“Many of us are outraged today. We dig in our heels around our beliefs on abortion, vaccines, immigration, or gender. We believe we are morally right and the other side is wrong. And the other side also believes they are morally right and we are wrong,” writes journalist Sahar Habib Ghazi. She interviews Kurt Gray, who for 20 years, has been researching how people make sense of the world when it comes to morality. Gray, a professor of psychology who directs the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Deepest Beliefs Lab describes, “No one gives up moral beliefs because of facts. If you have a deep conviction about immigration or abortion or tax and someone’s like, well, here’s this fact, you’re not going to say: You nailed it, I’m totally wrong, I give up my moral beliefs. … In our studies, when we compare the ability of sharing a true statistic or sharing a personal experience of suffering or harm with some of the other side, we find out that those personal experiences of suffering really create more understanding, more respect, and it does help people see you as rational.” Gray and Ghazi discuss how shifting our thinking away from right and wrong, black and white, to instead focus on concerns about harm could be the solution to our chronic outrage.



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