Creating Outrage with Loaded Words

When I was a little kid, I always enjoyed going to my grandmother’s house because she kept a stack of National Enquirers (and other assorted tabloids) in a wicker basket, beside a large chair in her living room. It was a delight to peruse them, because my parents always read the local newspapers and never bought any tabloids. Even as a youngster, I knew that these stories weren’t really news; they were just presented that way. They were simply light entertainment and were not meant to be taken seriously.

In those days – well before social media – there was a clear delineation between legitimate media sources and tabloids. Newspaper articles were written to convey information, and in the most unbiased way possible. That was the editorial style that I grew up with during my formative years. If you are of a certain vintage, then you did as well.

That style changed with the advent of the Internet, the democratization of media, and the emergence and popularity of social media. Reporting, even among mainstream outlets, embarked on a slow but precipitous descent into the realm of tabloid journalism. Articles on news and “news-style” web sites are no longer free of bias. In fact, there is now a web site called Media Bias Fact Check, which is dedicated to measuring the political reporting bias of online news sources.

Headlines no longer summarize the story. Today, many are written in a style called “clickbait” – they entice the reader with a provocative or even salacious statement, so that they will click on the link, which then generates ad revenue for the web site owners. Headlines are often written, not to convey relevant information, but to elicit an emotional response.

This continuous appeal to our emotions is, in my opinion, leading to a society-wide increase of discontent, and in many cases, even outrage. We are no longer learning about local news or world events; we are becoming unnecessarily emotionally attached and, eventually, emotionally drained by these stories. In fact, some people have already used the label The Age of Outrage.

This writing style not only grates on my nerves, it’s actually considered a logical fallacy, called argumentum ad passiones. This fallacy is also known as Appeal to Emotion or Argument by Emotive Language.

What can we do about the emotional toll that social media is taking on all of us? Ideally, I would like to see the elimination of media bias, tabloid journalism and clickbait, followed by a return to the journalism standards of my youth. Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle. The democratization of media means that everyone now has a platform and a voice, but sadly, very few of these nascent voices have graduated from journalism school or possess the requisite skills.

However, we can guard ourselves against this onslaught by becoming cognizant of the ways in which we are being manipulated. Many of you might be thinking “I can’t be manipulated by what I read – I’m too smart! My B.S. detector is finely-tuned, and I can see through any ruse!“. Perhaps, but let me give you a couple of examples that demonstrate how reader outrage can be manufactured simply by using loaded words. Loaded, or emotionally-charged words, are words that, in addition to having a denotative meaning, also come with their own connotative baggage. They trigger our emotions, and much of the time, we can’t even pinpoint why.

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The News Story Experiment

Example #1: Back in high school, my English teacher told our class of an experiment involving loaded words. He explained that it was very easy to be manipulated by journalists – which is why it was was important that journalists don’t do this inadvertently and introduce their own biases into their writing. Naturally, we students thought that we were immune to such things. We were intelligent, educated and keenly observant – no one could put anything over on us!

The experiment involved separating a large group of people into four groups. Each person was given a newspaper article, asked to read it, and then fill out a questionnaire describing how they felt about the article. The news item was about a woman in her early 20s who was sexually assaulted. In addition to reporting the facts of the case from the police, the reporter interviewed her older brother for some additional comments. What the participants didn’t know was that there were four slightly different versions of this article, and each version differed by a single word. However, the emotional responses to the story varied widely among the four groups.

The single difference was in the way that the victim was described by the reporter, while interviewing her brother:

Version 1: “his sister was sexually assaulted.”
Version 2: “his younger sister was sexually assaulted.”
Version 3: “his little sister was sexually assaulted.”
Version 4: “his baby sister was sexually assaulted.”

You can probably guess which groups experienced the greatest and least amount of outrage over this story. That single word changed how people felt, and determined their level of emotional outrage.

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Fast Food in First Class

Example #2: Last week, I read an article about a man who was on an airplane and became annoyed when a fellow passenger brought some McDonald’s fast food into the first-class cabin. While he wasn’t outraged, he nevertheless had an emotional response to the situation, and felt strongly enough to write that article.

In this example, the root of the author’s anger is a little more difficult to determine because it’s something to which we’ve all become inured. The culprit is the term “first class”, which contains the loaded word, class. We aren’t even consciously aware of it, but we are tacitly accepting all of the connotations (and expectations) of that word. We expect first-class passengers to be refined, cultured and sophisticated.

The airlines also work diligently to manufacture this illusion. First class passengers sit in wide, leather seats that actually recline more than two inches. They savour fancier meals served with real silverware. While I realize that this is mere speculation, I’m pretty sure that there’s also a tuxedo-clad string quartet (or at least a mariachi band) strolling up and down the aisle and taking requests.

The idea of first class appeals to our aspirational nature. We all want to be the proverbial Emperor of the flight, as we gaze approvingly across our first-class fiefdom – and then, somewhat sneeringly, behind us at the great unwashed masses, sitting shoulder-to-proletarian-shoulder in the wretched economy section. Stand-up comedian Brian Regan longs for chance to sit in one of these exalted thrones, so that he, too, may proclaim himself to be an airborne Emperor and exclaim: “Bring me the head of a pig! And… a goblet of something cool and refreshing to drink.“

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. There are no behavioural or actual class requirements to buy airline seats – any yokel with enough money can buy a first-class ticket and claim part of that exalted space at the front of the plane.

Now consider the following re-labelled seating arrangement.

White = cheap seats
Blue = expensive seats
Orange = ridiculously expensive seats

As a marketing strategy, this obviously isn’t going to fly, but the emotional baggage would vanish into thin air. We would now have a more accurate view of those sitting in the first few rows: regular people, who probably enjoy fast food as much as we do, and who are simply paying more money for their seats.

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Emotionally-Charged Words

Those were just two examples in which outrage and annoyance were created in the reader through the use of emotionally-charged words. If you’d like to learn more loaded words, and protect yourself from being manipulated, here are a couple of detailed resources: 380 High-Emotion Words and 400 Words That Trigger Emotional Responses on Social Media. While the original goal of the second article is to make your writing more persuasive, I would instead like you to view these as trigger words. Pay special attention to them, and to how they are intended to alter your emotional state.

The next time you’re perusing social media news feeds, ask yourself this question “Does the headline convey information, or is it written to elicit an emotional response?”. If so, then just keep scrolling. When we are emotionally engaged, our critical thinking skills often suffer, and in this age of democratized media, robust critical thinking skills are essential.

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