The Evolutionary Reason Why Rage Bait Affects Us – And How To Deal With It This Holiday Season

It’s a pretty sad indictment of the current state of things that “rage bait” was recently crowned the word of the year by the Oxford University Press. Referring to online content that is intentionally designed to make us mad, the term may in fact be a product of our evolutionary psychology, reflecting an innate tendency to jump on the bandwagon when we see an opportunity for outrage.

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Even in the offline world (remember when we used to hang out there?), humans have always loved a scandal, so the newness of this vocabulary reflects the novel channels through which we indulge our anger rather than any recent increase in ire. For instance, research into online behavior has highlighted something called the “confrontation effect”, whereby people are more likely to engage with content that they disagree with than posts that mirror their own views and values.

Rage bait is therefore the inevitable result of the endless race for clicks, likes, and attention, with online influencers taking advantage of the confrontation effect by deliberately antagonizing as many people as they can in order to drive up their engagement figures. And while this may sound somewhat undignified, you can’t really blame these irritating internet celebrities once you realize that we’re all programmed to jump on negative content.

For instance, several studies have demonstrated the importance of “emotional contagion” in humans, whereby people automatically take on the anger of those around them. The theory is that this tendency evolved to help us respond to danger by enabling threat-based fear to spread rapidly through a group.

It’s worth pointing out that emotional contagion also works for positive states like happiness, although some researchers suggest that the effect may be stronger for anger, fear, and other negative emotions due to their importance for our survival. After all, if everything’s fine then there’s no need for us to do anything, but when something’s wrong it’s vital that we are motivated to act.

In the modern age, this ancient evolutionary impulse may explain why we’re more likely to leave negative online reviews of products or services after a bad experience than a positive one when we are satisfied.

Interestingly, emotional contagion has been observed in numerous animal species, including zebrafish, highlighting the primordial genetic roots of this psychological phenomenon. Considering how deeply programmed we are, then, it’s clear we never stood a chance of preventing the rise of rage bait.

The question, therefore, is how to avoid getting sucked into the online muck. According to some studies, the key may lie in simply recognizing the existence of the confrontation effect. In other words, by reminding ourselves that outrageous content is often posted with the explicit aim of activating our anger, it becomes easier to not fall into the trap.

One recent study also showed that the majority of antagonizing social media posts are actually created by a tiny minority of highly vocal users, creating the illusion that larger numbers of people are spreading vitriol. When people were educated about this reality, they became much less pessimistic about the state of society, and were more capable of staying positive once they realized that the majority of us just want to get along and that it’s only a few bad eggs trying to disrupt the harmony.

So if your social media timelines are bringing you down this holiday season, remember that all the negativity is simply the result of a small number of trolls battling for attention. Either that, or try going offline, where the rage bait can’t reach you.