Kurt Gray never has a dull rideshare.
Whenever a driver asks him what he does, and he replies, “I study morality and politics,” it often opens a can of worms he can’t get the lid back onto. Democrats. Republicans. Communists. Christian nationalists. They all want to talk to Gray.
Thankfully, the social psychologist teaches a class on the science of moral understanding at UNC-Chapel Hill and knows how these conversations go — and how to keep them from going off the rails.
“You need to listen,” he says. “You need to give people the benefit of the doubt, to understand that they’re trying to be good and usually have the best intentions. And when someone steps over the line, you need to respectfully say: ‘Let’s back up a little instead of name-calling or judging.’ It can be tough to keep your cool, but every time I talk to someone it reaffirms that this is important work, and people are willing to bridge divides.”
For more than a decade, Gray has been researching morality, which he defines as “a set of norms shared by a group that revolve around encouraging cooperation and kindness, and discouraging selfishness and aggression.” He runs the Deepest Beliefs Lab to study the hot-button topics that stimulate our moral minds, like religion, artificial intelligence, and politics.
Unsurprisingly, politics has motivated much of Gray’s current work. In 2019, he founded the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding to identify why we argue about our political beliefs and how we can bridge those divides.
This is also the topic of his latest book, “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground,” slated to release in January 2025.
“I want to connect with everyday people who have tension and outrage in their lives,” he says. “I want to make sense of that across the country, bridge divides in their lives, and just help people be less outraged.”
Predators and prey
In the book, Gray argues that morality is stimulated by the need to protect others from harm. The abortion debate, for instance, often hinges on contrasting viewpoints regarding the protection of potential life and the rights and safety of women.
He calls this moral outrage.
“At its core, moral outrage is a response to the feeling that others are acting immorally and that their immorality is destroying society,” he writes.
Kurt Gray (photo by Megan Mendenhall)
Before diving into the messiness of our polarized political system, Gray builds a foundation for how we got here, including an anthropology 101 lesson on human evolution. He takes issue with the narrative that humans are apex predators by positing that we are, instead, more like prey.
He shares a story from his early 20s about being stuck in the woods near the Canadian arctic while working on a team looking for natural gas. He and his team were snowed in and needed to stay overnight in the forest. They built a fire and fell asleep but then woke up in the middle of the night “feeling uneasy.”
“It was hard to put a finger on what exactly was wrong because everything was so miserable, but it felt as if we were being watched,” Gray writes. “It was a ridiculous feeling: this was no horror movie. The next person was 25 miles away. But we still felt as if something were menacing, lurking in the darkness.”
They tried to ignore their fears, returned to sleep, and awoke to find large pawprints all around their camp. Their uneasiness was warranted: They were being stalked by lynx. While these wildcats don’t hunt humans, they attack in self-defense and can take down deer.
Anthropologists have long labeled humans as predators because of our ability to throw things and run long distances, according to Gray. He argues that our early ancestors were making light, wobbly spears that likely couldn’t kill animals and that persistence hunting — running prey to exhaustion — was rare.
Understanding that we are more prey than predator matters because, as Gray writes, “it fundamentally changes who we think we are and how we understand moral conflict. […] If people are scared deep down, then their attacks are driven more by desperation than a drive for dominance.”
Creeps and panics
Gray argues we are safer than ever before. Many of us live in trusting communities, enjoy the benefits of safer cars, homes, and schools, and rely on medicines that help us fight disease and live longer.
“Despite this safety, we cannot relax,” he writes. “Because our minds are wired to scan for threats, we still see danger everywhere.”
This is called concept creep: when severe cases of harm like violent crime become rarer, and the threat of milder harms like offensive language become exaggerated. In other words, as society becomes safer, people feel more harmed by less harmful events. And if our morality is based in harm, like Gray suggests, then it’s no surprise that many of us feel constantly threatened and attacked.
For one study, Gray and postdoctoral researcher Curtis Puryear measured the mental health of people who use Twitter to engage with politics. They found that those who pay attention to virality metric, like retweets, reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including random outbursts of anger and hypervigilance. The reason: these people felt threatened — and outraged — by all the viral warnings about societal harms.
“Humans express online outrage for the same reason they expressed outrage in Stone Age tribes: to guard against societal harm and reinforce moral norms,” Gray writes.
This brought up another question for Gray and Puryear. Can feelings of threat fuel moral panics, or large-scale outrage, on social media?
To answer it, Puryear analyzed hundreds of thousands of tweets about charged political topics, including climate change, immigration, and COVID-19. Of the tweets that went viral, 40% of replies used emotionally outraged language.
“The more any dangerous idea seems to be spreading in society, the more people try to combat its spread with outrage,” Gray writes.
Feelers and doers
In addition to morality, Gray has spent more than a decade studying mind perception, or how we perceive the minds of other entities, which is the topic of his first book.
In a previous study, Gray and his collaborators asked over 2,000 people to compare the minds of different entities — like babies, chimpanzees, dead people, dogs, God, and robots — and rate their ability to communicate, exert self-control, remember things, plan, have thoughts, and feel hunger, fear, pleasure, pain, and rage.
The results suggested that people perceive two different kinds of mind. Vulnerable feelers experience emotions, are susceptible to harm, and often need protection. Thinking doers communicate, plan, exert self-control, and can harm someone or something. For example, babies are often seen as vulnerable feelers and God is a thinking doer. Human adults are both.
Gray tied mind perception to morality by asking participants questions about which entities would be more painful to harm and which entities would be more deserving of punishment if they caused someone’s death.
A famous example of this dilemma took place in 2016, when a 3-year-old boy climbed into the enclosure of a 450-pound gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo — and zookeepers had to decide whose life was worth more. They killed the gorilla, resulting in praise from some and outrage from others.
Perceptions of vulnerability often follow party lines. Liberals and conservatives see different entities as being especially vulnerable to victimization. Gray discovered this in a study that gathered people’s perceptions about the environment, the divine, the powerful — like police officers and corporate leaders — and the othered, which includes marginalized communities.
Most people agreed that the environment and the othered were most vulnerable to victimization, followed by the powerful and then the divine. But “compared with conservatives, liberals have higher assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs) about the environment and lower AoVs about the divine, which explains why they see more immorality in Arctic drilling, but less immorality in burning the Bible,” Gray writes. “Overall, these data show that AOVs are stable perceptions that explain political differences.”
Facts and stories
Gray’s biggest piece of advice for feuding families, friends, and colleagues who are on different sides of the political aisle is to share stories that support your beliefs — not facts.
“A major driver of conflict is dehumanization,” he writes. “Seeing the other side as less than human — as irrational and invulnerable — licenses cruelty toward them. The best way to make each other seem fully human is by telling stories of harm. […] Studies find that sharing stories of personal suffering foster perceptions of rationality and respect across moral divides.”
Emily Kubin, another postdoctoral researcher in Gray’s lab, studied how people debated the morality of guns using facts versus stories. After analyzing 153 conversations, she found that those who told stories of harm — like how a family member was injured by guns or used a gun to protect themselves — were perceived as more rational and treated with more respect compared to those who used facts to make their points.
The key here is listening and understanding, like Gray does during his rideshare experiences.
“You should not be trying to win, but to understand,” he says. “And, in particular, you should invite people to help you to understand them, to share their perspective. But that can be hard to do.”
Gray’s book ends on a hopeful note, sharing how hundreds of organizations are already dedicated to bridging divides. He leaves readers with three tips for having constructive conversations with people of differing beliefs: connect, invite, and validate.
“It is true that many of us today are outraged,” he writes. “But most of us want to be less outraged, and understanding the truth about our moral minds will help.”