'Perfect outrage incident': Psychologist dissects MAGA's new 'social media shaming mobs'

In an article for the New York Times published Sunday, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, argued that modern political outrage operates according to what he calls mob logic, a form of communal outrage grounded in shared expectations and social coordination.

Pinker began by describing how the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk elicited an intense wave of symbolic reactions: Kirk was sanctified as a martyr, and dissenters were attacked for failing to show proper devotion.

The response, he contended, aligns with the phenomenon that economist Thomas Schelling and anthropologist John Tooby termed “common knowledge,” in which an event becomes a shared social signal that everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, and so on.

According to Pinker, communal outrage follows a predictable sequence:

A public attack is framed as targeting a person because of group identity. The story spreads rapidly — sometimes amplified or distorted. The victim becomes a symbolic figure for the group. The incident is treated as an intolerable violation, and doubt or questioning is stigmatized.

The group then retaliates disproportionately, often targeting perceived enemies regardless of their actual involvement.

Pinker sees the post‑Kirk reaction as a textbook case: political leaders threatened reprisals, agencies pressured media, and public figures called for broad retribution. Meanwhile, private citizens demanded firings and punishments of anyone whose statements deviated from the sanctified narrative.

The psychologist distinguished communal outrage from calculated revenge. He noted that revenge is targeted, proportional and strategic. Communal outrage, by contrast, solves a coordination dilemma — the problem of how a group acts in concert when multiple strategies exist but only one can succeed. Outrage becomes a focal point: a visible, unanimous act that signals dominance and enforces internal solidarity, he argued.

He identified two coordination problems that outrage resolves:

Dominance contest, when a group that fails to defend a member signals weakness and invites further attacks. A conspicuous rebuttal reasserts status in the face of the audience of rivals.

Internal cohesion, which means Individuals may hesitate to act unless they see others doing so. An outrage incident makes public the moment to unite and act together.

Pinker drew parallels with historical episodes of communal outrage — from the U.S. battleship Maine explosion, to the Reichstag fire, to the Arab Spring, to the reaction sparked by George Floyd’s killing — and notes that the outcomes differ depending on how the incident is framed and how “outrage entrepreneurs” shape the narrative.

"It’s often been pointed out that Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement have a chronic sense of being disrespected. Mr. Trump fumed for decades about being looked down on by coastal elites, and his pique has grown with each investigation, indictment and impeachment. For many of his followers, these insults merged with a smoldering resentment at the creeping takeover by leftist values in public life, from government mandates to popular entertainment," Pinker wrote.

He added: "Mr. Kirk’s killing is, for all of them, a perfect outrage incident. As an advocate of MAGA willing to take the battle to the enemy, Mr. Kirk was a pre-eminent symbol of the coalition. And his suspected killer, an internet-addled loner with a gun, nonetheless has enough left-adjacent trappings (a transgender partner, some antifascist memes) that he can be mentally fitted into a vast liberal conspiracy. The shooting was an unendurable public offense, which mobilized the coalition to muster its forces, in this case a combination of government muscle and social media shaming mobs, to rectify the affront."