We’ve all seen rage bait posts on social media. They might be political or personal. They might be rude or outright false. What they have in common is the ability to make our blood boil.

To provoke outrage is the point of rage bait — the Oxford Word of the Year for 2025. Research is starting to explain how rage bait hacks the way our brains decide what we choose to read, watch and even click and swipe online. What’s more, the worse we feel, the more we seem to prefer it.

“We were pretty surprised about that one,” said Richard Huskey, associate professor of communication in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. “We thought with all the terrible things in the world you might imagine that everyone wants to just go home and watch Ted Lasso or look at puppy videos on TikTok, which tend to do pretty well, but that also tended to be the rarity.”

In his Cognitive Communication Science Lab, Huskey studies how the brain processes information and motivates people’s attitudes and behaviors. He and his team have uncovered how and why we choose negative media like rage bait as well as how we might break the spiral of endless negativity.

How rage bait affects what we read

Choosing the media we consume starts with two decisions, said Huskey, and they happen mostly unconsciously. The first is called the value function, which is your estimated reward for a specific choice. For example, if you have to decide between a salad or a burrito for lunch, you start by estimating the value of each option.

The salad is healthier but less fun. The burrito might be all fun but not nearly as healthy. It could also be that you skipped breakfast, or that this would be the tenth burrito you ate this week. All of this contributes to the estimated value of either a salad or a burrito.

The second decision is the decision function, which is a simple comparison between the accumulated value of each option and chooses the highest one.

In his lab, Huskey has been studying how these two functions play out when people view media. With media, we make these same two decisions. The choice we make is ultimately an emotional one.

In a recent experiment, Huskey asked participants to read pairs of movie summaries and to choose which one they preferred. Each movie summary was rated in advance by its level of emotion, from negative to positive, and the level of arousal it provokes, from really boring to incredibly exciting. People made hundreds of choices during a session.

Just like with food, how we feel can have a powerful effect on the media we prefer, so Huskey showed participants various images before they made their movie summary choices to test the effect of different emotional states.

“If I show you 20 pictures of people getting violently assaulted, that's going to bring you down a little bit,” said Huskey, “If I show you 20 pictures of kids at their birthday party, Blue Angels or Olympians winning gold medals, that puts you in a pretty good mood.”

The result helps explain the consistent draw of horror movies: people preferred content that was both highly negative and highly exciting. What’s more, when people were in a negative mood, their preference for negative movie summaries increased.

This could have implications for our experience with social media. As platforms show us content that gets us more and more upset, this research suggests that these negative emotions in turn increase our preference for that upsetting content, at least to a point.

“This is the shocking thing,” said Huskey. “From decades of theory, we expect that if we're in a bad mood, we'll want to watch something uplifting to help get us out of that dark place. But we simply didn't see that.”

How curiosity can lead to unexpected rewards

Rage bait doesn’t have to lead to an endless negative spiral, however. Curiosity, chance and a little bit of mindfulness can help us escape.

In another study, currently under submission for peer-reviewed publication, Huskey examined how people choose new books. Buying a book involves three types of calculations, he said.

One is called reinforcement learning, which is trying to do more of what you like and less of what you don’t like. It’s a trial-and-error process.

The second is reward generalization, which extends past experiences to the likely outcomes of future, unknown experiences. For example, if a person loved Taylor Swift’s albums “The Tortured Poets Department” and “1989,” they can be pretty sure they’ll also love “The Life of a Showgirl.”

The third calculation is something the brain does to push us toward what we’ve never tried before. It could be a horror movie when we only watch rom coms. It could be taking a risk by ordering an omelet instead of our usual pancakes. Huskey calls this priority for novel information the “information bonus.”

With access to a database of nearly 2 million Amazon book purchase ratings by about 35,000 people, Huskey found that people tend to buy books similar to books they have bought before.

This wasn’t surprising, but what did surprise him had to do with the information bonus: it was strongest for the most curious people. These people were most likely to try a book that was very different than others they had enjoyed and they were also more likely to enjoy it.

“Curiosity not only makes you seek out more novel information but also seems to amplify the likelihood that you enjoy that information,” said Huskey.

Breaking out of the rage bait rut

Whatever media we consume, Huskey said it’s also important that a person’s personal goals match up with their actions. This way, we can take control over the kinds of content we see even if we can’t change how it makes us feel.

“It's really easy to get kind of captivated by negative content, but one of the best things you can do is step back a little bit and ask yourself about your own personal goals, like, what is important for me to know about this information,” said Huskey.

“Above all else,” he added, “cultivate your curiosity, especially if you are consuming a lot of the same type of negative content. That will help you seek out newer, more enjoyable things.”