Stop Dumbscrolling. It's Bad for Your Mental Health.

It's even worse for society.

Shotprime

When I was five, I failed my first IQ test.

When I didn’t understand instructions, my kindergarten teacher bent down in my face and screamed. My parents called me names. At the time, it felt like they enjoyed making me feel stupid. Now I know why. Making someone else feel stupid is the easiest way to make yourself feel smart.

Later, when I tested into a gifted program, everything changed. Suddenly, everyone wanted to direct my attention to how stupid someone else was. Everyone wants to feel smart. These days, few of us want to earn it.

So we dumbscroll.

We scroll and scroll, looking for the dumbest stuff we can find. We go hunting for the ignorant, the clueless, the cruel, the inane, the hypocritical, the inflammatory. The less self-awareness it shows, the better. Arguably, we’ve been scrolling dumb longer than we’ve been scrolling doom. If we want to add this word to the urban dictionary, I’ll offer up the first definition.

Dumbscrolling: A deliberate, sometimes unconscious effort to discover vast amounts of stupidity on social media to deflect attention from your own, or to redeem members of your own ingroup. It is an unhealthy behavior that leads to decreasing levels of self-awareness.

When we find dumb, we attack. We write snarky comebacks. We waste time arguing with trolls, even if we know they’re probably a bot. We repost it with sarcastic commentary. We share it with friends. We get angry. We laugh about it. We wonder what’s wrong with the world. Then when it’s over…

We do it again.
We feast.
Why?

Psychology tells us a little something about human nature, at least in the modern sense. We’re wired for outrage.

We enjoy feeling smarter, kinder, and more considerate than someone else. Righteous indignation triggers a dopamine boost in your brain. We can get hooked on that feeling. According to neuroscience research, “self-righteousness can have the same effects on the human mind as a drug addiction.”

Psychologists have discovered the secret birthplace of our righteous indignation. Often, it springs from a sense of guilt over our own actions.

So when someone expends their rage on social media, there’s a good chance they’re looking for a distraction from something they’ve done wrong. As one article in Motivation and Emotion states, “moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity.” The researchers found that personal guilt actually predicts moral outrage. Opportunities to express outrage at someone else, like a corporation, or MAGA, reduce that sense of guilt. As they put it, “directing moral outrage against a third party can serve to defend one’s moral identity.” The greater the threat to that identity, the greater the motivation.

So the more guilt someone feels over their own actions, they more motivated they feel to hold someone else accountable.

A deeply angry society is a deeply guilty one.

There are many kinds of indignation. You can feel intellectual indignation on top of moral indignation. The two often travel together. In some ways, they’re the same thing, because willful stupidity is deeply evil.

This newer understanding of righteous indignation contradicts the general understanding of it as a “prosocial emotion” rooted in “a desire to restore justice by fighting on behalf of the victimized.” Instead, people use moral outrage as a guilt-reduction strategy. They do it to convince themselves they’re a good person, even if they recently did something terrible.

Even worse, researchers have found that individuals ignore, excuse, or even justify the moral crimes of their own group. In the aptly named article, “It’s Moral When We Do It,” researchers observed that Americans condemn torture when it’s done by other countries, but they describe the same actions as “justified” when their own country does it. As the researchers conclude, “social identity concerns enable moral justification of harm doing.” In fact, “ingroup harmdoing” can “elicit expressions of outgroup-directed outrage.”

That’s wild.

In other words, someone will decline to express moral outrage at members of their own group, whether that’s a nationality or a political party. They won’t condemn those actions. They won’t get angry at those members, even when those members do great amounts of harm. They’ll save it for the other group, especially a group they’ve been trained to despise. The more harm members of someone’s own group do, the harder they work to hold another group accountable.

Wait, it gets even better.

Another study observed that when you remind someone of their own moral responsibilities, it makes them more likely to blame someone else for their own actions. Whether it’s the environment or sweatshop conditions, people are constantly looking for someone else to blame in an effort to deflect moral guilt and restore their belief that they’re a good person. People shift blame specifically to “maintain a sense of moral identity without the often extensive cost of attempting to undo one’s wrongdoing.” They take the easy way out.

So instead of making things right, because that’s hard, many people seek moral redemption by finding a bigger villain.

Interesting, huh?

All this research puts our online behavior in a new context, especially on social media. When we go out scrolling for the latest stupid thing the fascists have said or done, we’re looking for a dopamine hit. More importantly, many of us are also looking to alleviate our own guilt. We’re looking for something to convince us that we’re still the good guys, or that our leaders are.

That’s dumbscrolling in a nutshell. It’s endlessly scrolling social media, looking for evidence that we’re the ones who believe in truth, justice, knowledge, and science, and we would never chug down gallons of misinformation. Our side would never accept comforting lies for the sake of convenience. They would never engage in oppression or deceit for an ulterior motive. Even if they did, it would be justified because the other side always does it worse.

When dumbscrolling becomes our dominant habit, it has the unfortunate side effect of deflecting our attention away from our own behavior. When someone spends all day dumbscrolling, they’re not examining the consequences of their actions. They’re hyperfocusing on someone else’s actions.

Dumbscrolling enables someone to ignore or excuse the harm they’re doing, by giving them a bigger villain to blame.

We’ve become a society fueled by righteous indignation at everyone else’s ignorant, cruel behavior. Many of us secretly delight in finding someone else who’s worse than us, crueler than us, dumber than us.

It takes the pressure off.

It’s a mistake to think moral or intellectual indignation accomplishes anything on its own, other than make someone feel better about themselves. Look at what’s happening. Someone like Elon Musk is perfectly happy to assume the title of worst human being on the planet, because it made him rich. Everyone is pouring their moral outrageous on him, laughing at how dumb he sounds. Sure, it’s true. The guy demonstrates the self-awareness of a newt. And yet, nobody out there is making a serious effort to hold him accountable.

Nobody is wondering if they’ve unconsciously perpetuated eugenic ideology over the last five years, not when they can just dumbscroll until they find someone or something that does it even worse.

This behavior is unhealthy.

It’s unhealthy because it fosters a general lack of self-awareness. It nurtures emotional and intellectual fragility, something pop psychologists have railed against for the last twenty or thirty years. More than anything, it leads to a lack of agency. If someone is always focusing on how dumb their arch-enemies are, I highly doubt they’re spending much time on their own moral, intellectual compass. They’re lowering the bar for themselves and everyone around them.

Too much dumbscrolling can lead someone down a dangerous path, one where they have to tell themselves bigger and bigger lies to convince themselves what a smart, kind, decent human being they are.

Here’s the thing:

Society seems to have made an unconscious, unpleasant agreement with MAGA. They will absorb all of our moral indignation and project their own back at us, but not in any substantive way that sparks a real conversation about how everyone could be doing a better job. Instead, the conversation devolves into finger-pointing, about who did worse on public health, who did worse on climate issues, who did worse on misinformation, who did worse on human rights, who did worse on genocide, when the truth is they all did terrible things.

Fortunately, there’s an antidote.

I think it’s important to take a break from dumbscrolling. Sit for a few minutes and think about harm you might’ve done to someone else. Think about something you could do that actually helps them, even if it makes you uncomfortable. (I’m not talking about putting yourself at risk of harm.) You could even journal about it. Think about what you can do to make it right, other than just scroll until you find a bigger villain to alleviate that guilt. If even one person does something like that after reading my article, then it was worth writing. If you can’t undo the harm, you can remember it and do a better job next time.

It’s hard, but it’ll make you a happier human.

And a wiser one.