Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Fri, 28 Mar 2025
In this eye-opening conversation, Dr. Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and author of the new book Outraged, joins John R. Miles to explore why we live in such a morally charged world—and what we can do to repair it. Together, they unpack the psychology behind outrage, the evolutionary roots of our moral minds, and why our perceptions of harm often drive us apart.Kurt shares powerful stories and groundbreaking research to help us understand competitive victimhood, moral typecasting, and the dangers of social media-fueled moral panics. They also dive into practical strategies—like intentional listening, empathy, and storytelling—for bridging divides in families, communities, and politics. Whether you're trying to heal a relationship or navigate the culture wars, this episode is a must-listen.Full Shownotes here: https://passionstruck.com/kurt-gray-on-how-to-bridge-moral-divides/What You’ll Learn in This Episode:Harm Is the Master Key: Our moral minds evolved to detect and respond to harm—especially within our groups. This evolutionary lens explains much of today's outrage.Social Media Fuels Moral Panics: Platforms are wired to pair threats with virality, causing us to spiral into outrage and reactivity.Moral Typecasting Limits Empathy: We label people as either victims or villains, which prevents us from seeing their full humanity.Outrage Is Often Rooted in Unseen Pain: People’s perceptions of harm are deeply personal, shaped by past trauma, loss, or unacknowledged suffering.Mattering Matters: Feeling unseen or dismissed heightens moral conflict. Recognizing someone’s pain helps defuse moral tension.Connect with Kurt Gray: https://www.kurtjgray.com/Sponsors:Factor Meals: http://factormeals.com/factormeals50off and use code “FACTOR MEALS 50 OFF”Rosetta Stone: Unlock 25 languages for life at “ROSETTASTONE.com/passionstruck.”Prolon: Reset your health with 15% off at “ProlonLife.com/passionstruck.”Mint Mobile: Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at “MINT MOBILE dot com slash PASSION.”Hims: Start your journey to regrowing hair with Hims. Visit hims.com/PASSIONSTRUCK for your free online visit.Quince: Discover luxury at affordable prices with Quince. Enjoy free shipping and 365-day returns at quince.com/PASSIONNext on Passion Struck:In the next episode of Passion Struck, John sits down with Anne Marie Anderson, an Emmy Award-winning broadcaster, sports journalist, and leadership expert. Anne Marie has spent years breaking barriers in sports media, navigating high-stakes environments, and coaching top athletes and executives on leadership, resilience, and communication. In our conversation, we'll dive into the mental frameworks of high performers, the art of storytelling, and how to build confidence in any field.For more information on advertisers and promo codes, visit Passion Struck Deals.Join the Passion Struck Community!Sign up for the Live Intentionally newsletter, where I share exclusive content, actionable advice, and insights to help you ignite your purpose and live your most intentional life. Get access to practical exercises, inspiring stories, and tools designed to help you grow. Learn more and sign up here.Speaking Engagements & WorkshopsAre you looking to inspire your team, organization, or audience to take intentional action in their lives and careers? I’m available for keynote speaking, workshops, and leadership training on topics such as intentional living, resilience, leadership, and personal growth. Let’s work together to create transformational change. Learn more at johnrmiles.com/speaking.Episode Starter PacksWith over 500 episodes, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. We’ve curated Episode Starter Packs based on key themes like leadership, mental health, and personal growth, making it easier for you to dive into the topics you care about. Check them out at passionstruck.com/starterpacks.Catch More of Passion Struck:My solo episode on Why Mattering at Work Is the New Metric Leaders Must TrackCatch My Episode with Coach Matt Doherty on How You Rebound From Life’s Toughest MomentsWatch my interview with Jessica Kriegel on How to Build an Intentional WorkplaceCan’t miss my episode withJacob Morgan on the Vital Power of Leading With VulnerabilityListen to my interview with Ivo Brughmans on How to Navigate the Paradoxes of LeadershipCheck My solo episode on Why We All Crave To Matter: Exploring The Power Of Mattering.If you liked the show, please leave us a review—it only takes a moment and helps us reach more people! Don’t forget to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally.How to Connect with John:Connect with John on Twitter at @John_RMilesFollow him on Instagram at @John_R_MilesSubscribe to our main YouTube Channel and to our YouTube Clips ChannelFor more insights and resources, visit John’s websiteWant to explore where you stand on the path to becoming Passion Struck? Take our 20-question quiz on Passionstruck.com and find out today!
Chapter 1: Why do we experience constant moral outrage?
Have you ever wondered why we seem to be morally outraged all the time? Why even small disagreements can spiral into division and conflict? What if the root of our polarization wasn't just ideological, but deeply psychological? Today we're exploring these urgent questions with someone who has dedicated his life to Decoding the Moral Mind, Dr. Kurt Gray.
Kurt is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina and the incoming Weary Family Foundation Endowed Chair in the Social Psychology of Polarization and Misinformation Department at The Ohio State University. He's a social psychologist who studies how our moral minds work
and how we can use that understanding to bridge political and ideological divides he's also the author of the groundbreaking new book outraged why we fight about morality and politics and how to find common ground a must read for anyone navigating today's fractured world if you're new here thank you for joining us you're now part of a global movement of change makers living intentionally unlocking their potential and choosing to matter
And if you're a returning listener, welcome back. I am so grateful for your continued support. Let's take a quick look back at our recent episodes. On Tuesday, Wes Adams and Tamara Miles joined me to explore how to create meaningful work that fuels performance and purpose.
And then yesterday, Donald Miller unpacked the timeless power of storytelling and how it can transform both our personal lives and business impact. If you missed those, definitely go back and check them out.
And don't forget our curated starter packs on Spotify and at passionstruck.com slash starter packs, which can make it easy to dive into our favorite themes like leadership, emotional resilience, behavior change, alternative health, and so much more.
You can also sign up for my Live Intentionally newsletter at passionstruck.com to get weekly tools, challenges, and inspiration delivered to your inbox. Now, let's turn to today's conversation with Kurt Gray.
In this episode, we'll explore why we're so emotionally reactive to politics, morality, and perceived harm, the psychology behind outrage, and why it often misfires, how to recognize when your moral instincts are being hijacked, and practical ways to foster empathy, understanding, and real dialogue across divides.
Kurt's work is a gift for anyone who wants to turn down the volume on conflict and turn up the dial on compassion, reason, and common ground. Let's dive in. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so honored today to have Dr. Kurt Gray on the PassionStruck podcast.
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Chapter 2: What defining moment shaped Dr. Kurt Gray's interest in moral psychology?
Sure. It was an exciting story and it kicks off the book. I was driving, it was dark, the roads were wet. I just got my driver's license not too long ago. I was very confident in my abilities, probably too confident. I had friends in the back. We were driving to a movie theater. We were a little late.
And as we were driving towards the mall, a friend in the back says, you're going to miss the turn. You're going to miss the turn. And so I'm in the right lane. I swerve to turn left. I don't check my blind spot. I don't check to see if there's a car in the left-hand lane. There was a car there. I cut it off. I almost hit it. He's Reese on his wheel. We're squealing. We're spinning.
We eventually stopped spinning. We'd stop, everything's still. I open my window, look out and this guy gets out of this brand new Mercedes and I apologize and he says, You're fucking dead. And he starts walking across the intersection. No one's around towards me. And I panic and I stomp on the accelerator. So I'm flying through the strip mall. It's like surprisingly empty.
It's just the sodium glow, those orange lights. And I'm turning left, turning right. And he's right behind me, corralling me. Eventually corrals me into a loading dock behind a store like Home Depot. And he stops me against the loading dock with his car, kind of corrals me into a corner. terrified 16 year old. And he tries to open my door and I locked the door the last minute before he gets there.
Thanks to a clear thinking friend in the back. And I opened the window a little bit, roll it down to apologize. And he starts slapping me and trying to like grab my collar and push me around. I'm like terrified. So this goes on for some time. The kind of slapping he's threatening to kill me. And then my friend in the back seat, the clear thinking one who told me to lock the door.
She has a cell phone. Her mom is a manager of a cell phone store in the late nineties. Not many cell phones around, but she had one, one of those big bricks. And she says, look, we've got a cell phone. I'll call the cops. And so he slaps him around a couple more times and then it finally sinks in. And then he says, yeah, you call the cops and I'll tell them what you did.
And then walked away, got into his car and peeled off. But that moment stuck with me because. Here I was feeling like the victim. It seemed very clear that I was the victim here. He was slapping me. He was threatening to kill me. And yet he felt like he was the morally righteous person. He felt that the police would be on his side.
And so this is definitely a defining moment because I was confused at first for a long time. But then when I thought about it more, I realized that he too felt like a victim. And this really drove our competing kind of moral relationship. views of the situation. He was almost killed. I was driving recklessly. He maybe had his girlfriend in the car, who knows, right? I almost killed him.
And I think he felt morally justified. And of course, I don't excuse the violence, but it's allowed me to see things from his perspective. And that kicked off my interest in moral psychology.
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Chapter 3: How does storytelling influence moral outrage and resolution?
And I talked to the head of NASA flight operations and he said, literally no other astronaut could do this, but we asked Chris just to swap crews. So he went with the backup crew who he hadn't worked with practically at all. And they just said he was one of the few people who had the demeanor and the willingness that he could pull something like that off. Interesting.
I wonder once he got up there, if he did find what you're suggesting and habits or peculiar things that they did that drove him nuts. Well, yesterday I happened to be interviewing Donald Miller. I'm not sure if you know who Donald is, but he wrote this book here that sold a million copies called Building a Story Brand. And he said this quote to me that I thought fit into today's discussion.
He said that the wrong people have the microphone and his work, his attempt to fix that problem What role do you think that storytelling plays in both creating outrage and in potentially fixing it?
I think there are a lot of folks, Amanda Ripley calls them conflict entrepreneurs, who have the microphone and are using it to incite division. And oftentimes these folks are using stories to incite fear, to highlight threats. And it turns out that that's a smart decision because that's how our moral minds operate, right? We're fixated on threats. We're worried about harms, right?
We're driven by fear much of the time. And so they're using these kind of like storytelling, right? This person came across the border and the harm do this way, or this person tried to get an abortion and it didn't work this way, right? On the left and the right, like this person couldn't have a gun to defend themselves, right?
There's all these stories that are propagated to make people feel outraged and entrenched in their political views, motivate voting bases. But I think it's time for those of us who kind of fight for good in a sense, everyday civility, better conversations to really recognize the power of storytelling.
And I have lots of data that suggests that stories are the way to best bridge divides, to connect across others who disagree with us, particularly personal stories where we share the kind of harms that we're worried about, the suffering that we've had, the kind of vulnerabilities that we feel,
I mean, those are the stories that really connect us with others and allow them to see us as human beings. And so I think, you know, media elites are already using stories, but I think we need to take it back in a sense and take it back more locally as we're having these conversations at Thanksgiving, at the workplace, whatever, in a way that we can connect with others.
So I'm going to bring this all the way back to Chris the astronaut. So I mentioned that as he was looking down, it really changed his perception of things. And you argue that all mortality boils down to one thing, perceptions of harm. Can you explain why harm is the master key to understanding our moral minds?
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Chapter 4: Why is harm considered the master key to understanding morality?
We think we're safer, although as we have gone from that smaller village setting to now the global villages that we exist in, there are a whole bunch of nefarious characters out there who are influencing our perceptions and many of them want to do harm to us.
Could you highlight maybe then how social media amplifies this perception of harm and what role it plays in fueling outrage and moral panics?
You bet. So we have some work on moral panics and it's easy to see on social media, right? You log on and social media, those companies are motivated to get you to scroll and they measure your engagement. I just found out about this talking to someone at Facebook.
They measure your engagement in terms of like feet or yards or meters, like just how many meters you're willing to scroll the kind of endless feed for 10 meters. That's a ton of scrolling, obviously. And so. You know, they're motivated to get you to scroll and to click. And the way they do that is by inciting moral panics, right? So what they do is they pair a limitless supply of threats.
This is terrible. These people are out to get you, right? This is burning over here. There's these bad actors who are coming to get you. They're going to take this from you. And then what they do is they pair those threats with explicit measures of virality, right? So there'll be a little, this is how many times this has been retweeted or liked or shared.
And I think those are really powerful because our minds are not only attuned to harms, but also attuned to the kind of social feedback of others, especially when it comes to harms, right? So the analogy I like to use, it's from my post-doc Curtis Puryear, imagine you're sitting at a sidewalk cafe and you hear this roar in the distance, Godzilla roar.
And then all of a sudden you see 100 people running towards you screaming, right? What would probably happen at that cafe now is that you'd think, well, maybe I shouldn't finish my coffee. Maybe I should get up and run screaming along with these other people, right? Because there's a threat, you hear the roar, and now there's social feedback, everyone's running.
And so social media is a lot like those kind of Godzilla roars and everyone's screaming, right? There's a threat and then everyone's screaming on social media. And those feelings of moral panic happen every day, every hour even, every time you log in. because there's something that pairs the kind of threats with those signals of virality. And so it's not good for us.
We actually have some data that suggests that people who use social media to check on politics and who pay attention to virality metrics, they often have elevated symptoms of PTSD, sometimes above the clinical threshold, right? So it's actually giving you like PTSD to check on politics on social media if you do it often enough.
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Chapter 5: How does social media amplify perceptions of harm and fuel outrage?
it's at all rooted in our need to feel that we and our experiences matter? And if so, how does mattering influence our perceptions of victimhood and moral outrage?
That's a great question. I think the feelings of mattering and being seen and heard really do matter when it comes to political disagreement, right? Because I think what drives our political disagreement is this sense that I perceive a victim, I perceive a threat to me and my family, and you on the other side, you don't perceive that threat, you don't perceive that victim.
In fact, you maybe fundamentally deny its existence, right? And so anytime we feel like something so essential to our person, our morals is denied, right? You're wrong. It doesn't exist. It's not like that. Then, of course, we feel attacked, right? We feel maybe gaslit or just really not heard.
And so the way to bridge these divides and these conversations, whether it's at work or with a family member that you've fallen out with because of politics, is to really listen to what they are saying and when it comes to what they fear and what threatens them. And then you don't need to agree with them, but you do need to validate that feeling in a sense.
Be like, oh, that must be hard for you to fear that. I understand that you're worried about your family. I think that's what we need to make people feel heard about. That's what we need to make people feel like they matter. Like you are trying to protect yourselves. People are motivated by protection when it comes to politics and not destruction.
It's so easy to assume that the other side is just trying to burn the world down. And maybe we could talk about elites, right? Like elites are a whole different ballgame. But I think everyday people, they're just trying to do what best they can to protect themselves and their families. And I think recognizing that goes a long way to making them feel heard and like they matter.
I do want to jump on something that you said just before this, and that is how people are constantly looking at social media for different things, especially those that you identified who are looking for news or what's happening in politics for the day. And I think oftentimes when you take a step back, a lot of those people end up feeling like,
their perspectives or they themselves in the big scheme of politics don't matter and so what ended up happening and i see it even within my friend groups is that they then lash out or become entrenched in their views because of that perspective so how would you see that happening and how can if you're in that position like so many people are
How do you encourage people to see both sides of the coin as a way of maybe helping them feel more seen and valued? I'll just leave it there.
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Chapter 6: What role does mattering play in moral conflict?
And if you want to know who they are and really get them to share what they're all about, asking them about those kinds of feelings they have and the experience that they've had goes a long way to make people feel like they matter. And then to have better conversations about kind of contentious issues.
This whole discussion makes me think of something I read in the book. You were going into how feeling pain makes us the only and the ultimate victim. And you end up writing about a quote that Elaine, I think her name is pronounced Scarry, S-C-A-R-R-Y. She's an American essayist and author of The Body in Pain. And she writes, to have great pain is to have certainty.
And you follow that up with certainty over our victimhood. But to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt about their victimhood. People in pain are convinced that they are the real victim within a situation. And then you follow it up later on that luckily most people in moral disagreements are not actively in physical pain.
but can still be self-focused when it comes to feelings of victimhood. So I just wanted to bring that up because I think that pain is deeply rooted, even from the time that we're a teenager to later on in life, we can still be feeling that perspective. And that sometimes is that whole viewpoint that we're coming at a certain situation.
Absolutely. I really like you brought up this quote. I really like it. I really like Elaine Skari's work. And it doesn't have to be physical pain. Although if someone is in physical pain, probably not the best time to have an argument with them about morality and victimhood, right? If someone stubbed their toe, you want to be like, oh, I think what you did somewhere was wrong.
I can't believe you did this or you said this to my mother. And they're actively in pain gripping their toe. It's not going to be a good conversation. Yeah. The idea that you can feel victimized by society or have a sense of grievance, or if you lost your job, or your spouse left you, or your kids don't talk to you.
All these things can make you feel like you're suffering, and they're internal emotional pains. not only do you feel like a victim, but you look for someone to blame for your victimhood, right? If you're suffering, then our minds are compelled to find a kind of agent or villain responsible for that suffering. And so maybe that's someone else in your life.
Maybe, I don't know, your ex-partner or something like that. But often it could be politicians or regimes or the other party. And so I think we really need to pay more attention to people's feelings of being aggrieved or victimized in the current political landscape because they really drive our kind of moral judgments and I think ultimately our voting.
I wanted to ask one more question on this whole harm topic, and that is political divides. So liberals and conservatives see harm differently, focusing on different groups as being vulnerable. How do you break down these contrasting perceptions that both sides have?
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