Feeling angry makes people more likely to share news from low-credibility sources

A recent study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion suggests that feeling morally angry makes people more likely to rapidly share misinformation online. The research provides evidence that anger causes individuals to act impulsively and pay less attention to the credibility of the news source. These findings offer insights into how emotional reactions on social media fuel the spread of false information.

Social media platforms are filled with false or misleading news designed to trigger strong emotional reactions. While previous work suggests that moral outrage plays a big role in spreading these false claims, the specific emotions involved are not entirely understood. Moral outrage is often treated as a single feeling, but it actually contains distinct emotions like anger and disgust.

Xiaozhe Peng, an associate professor at the School of Psychology at Shenzhen University in China, wanted to look at these specific emotions. “As the [lead researcher] of the Emotion and Communication Neuroscience Lab, I have long been interested in how emotions shape communication,” Peng said. “This project was motivated in part by repeatedly seeing how emotionally provocative content on social media can accelerate the spread of misinformation and sometimes even escalate into online aggression.”

“We wanted to understand which specific moral emotions are most responsible for this process,” Peng added. Psychological theories propose that persuasion happens through different mental routes. Sometimes people evaluate the actual content of a message, and other times they rely on mental shortcuts like emotions or the credibility of a news source.

The researchers designed their experiments to see how these mental shortcuts compete when people browse social media. In the first experiment, scientists recruited 223 participants from China through an online platform. The participants read 24 different news headlines that were modified to represent false information.

These headlines varied in the severity of the moral wrongdoing described, ranging from completely neutral actions to severe moral violations. The researchers also randomly assigned different levels of source credibility to the headlines, ranging from zero percent to one hundred percent credible. Before deciding how willing they were to share each headline, participants were prompted to focus their attention on specific details.

They were asked to rate either the accuracy of the news, the morality of the events, or nothing at all. The scientists found that people were generally more willing to share news from highly credible sources. They also found that severe moral violations increased people’s willingness to share.

This was especially true when the participants were prompted to focus on the moral aspects of the story. When participants were prompted to focus on either accuracy or morality, they relied less on the credibility of the source to make their sharing decisions. Directing attention to the content of the message reduced their reliance on the external credibility label.

The second experiment involved 116 university students and focused specifically on comparing moral anger and moral disgust. Participants read 18 false news headlines that described minor or severe moral violations. This time, the headlines were presented as coming from either a highly credible source or a low credibility source.

The scientists wanted to see how different emotional states influenced the sharing of these headlines. They asked the students to rate their current feelings of anger, their feelings of disgust, or their neutral attention. After this emotional prompt, the students rated their willingness to share the news.

The researchers found that participants prompted to feel anger were significantly more willing to share headlines from low credibility sources compared to the disgust and control groups. The disgust prompt did not increase sharing willingness compared to the neutral control group. This suggests that moral anger actively reduces a person’s reliance on credibility when deciding to share information.

“What surprised us most was how consistently moral anger, rather than moral disgust, drove sharing across studies,” Peng said. “Although both emotions are often grouped together under ‘moral outrage,’ they did not have the same behavioral consequences.” This aligns with theories suggesting that anger motivates people to confront issues, while disgust tends to motivate people to distance themselves.

The third experiment investigated the deeper cognitive processes behind how anger influences sharing decisions. The scientists recruited 63 university students to evaluate 36 true and false headlines. These headlines were paired with low, ambiguous, or high source credibility labels.

To create a strong emotional state, participants completed a memory task before evaluating the news. They wrote about a personal memory that made them intensely angry. After recalling this angry memory, they rated their willingness to share the different headlines.

The researchers used mathematical models to measure how fast participants made decisions and how much mental evidence they required before choosing to share. In psychology, these models help explain whether a person is making a slow, cautious choice or a fast, impulsive one. They track the speed of decision-making and the threshold of evidence needed to take action.

The models showed that the anger induction lowered the participants’ decision thresholds. This means the students required less evidence and less time to make the choice to share a headline. The feeling of anger caused participants to make faster, less cautious sharing decisions across the board.

“We also found that anger was associated with lower decision thresholds, suggesting that it can make people decide to share more quickly and with less caution,” Peng noted. The models also showed that anger did not change a person’s ability to tell the difference between true and false information. Instead, the emotion simply lowered the mental barrier required to hit the share button.

While this research provides evidence regarding the mechanics of online sharing, there are a few limitations to keep in mind. “Our studies were conducted in controlled experimental settings, and we measured willingness to share rather than actual sharing behavior on live social media platforms,” Peng noted. “That allowed us to identify mechanisms more precisely, but real-world online environments are more complex.”

The studies were also conducted entirely within a specific cultural context in China. “In addition, our samples came from a specific cultural context, so future work should examine how broadly these findings generalize across countries and platforms,” Peng explained. Emotional expression and differentiation can vary across different cultures, which might influence the results.

Scientists suggest that future research should test these mechanisms in more naturalistic settings. “One long-term goal is to better understand how specific emotions shape not only whether people share information, but also how they weigh cues such as accuracy, source credibility, and social signals when making that decision,” Peng stated.

The team also plans to explore ways to reduce the spread of false content. “We are also trying to develop interventions that target emotional and decisional processes, not just belief accuracy, for example, lightweight prompts that warn users when a post contains highly emotion-arousing or outrage-provoking content,” Peng added. “More broadly, we are interested in interventions that could reduce misinformation sharing without substantially disrupting user engagement on social media platforms.”

“One broader message of this study is that misinformation is not only a problem of false belief; it is also a problem of emotionally charged communication,” Peng observed. “Moral anger seems especially powerful because it is action-oriented: it pushes people toward expression, condemnation, and rapid dissemination.” “That makes it highly relevant for understanding why some misleading content spreads so quickly online,” he added.

“Together, our findings suggest that moral anger is a particularly potent driver of misinformation sharing,” Peng said. “People may share not only because they believe something is true, but because anger changes the emotional and decisional processes behind sharing and can even override more analytical evaluation.”

For people browsing social platforms, the researchers offer practical advice. “For everyday users, a practical takeaway is simple: if a post makes you instantly angry, that is exactly the moment to pause before liking, commenting, or sharing,” Peng advised.

The study, “Moral anger accelerates misinformation sharing: evidence from experimental manipulations and hierarchical drift-diffusion modelling,” was authored by Haoyang Jiang, Hongbo Yu, Shenyuan Guo, and Xiaozhe Peng.