Wired: Ragebait Successful – Why We Watch Things We Hate

This year’s World Cup has become a masterclass in ragebait. FIFA reported that a total of 89,000 online abusive posts were identified across the group stage alone, up 13-fold since the previous tournament in Qatar.

Whether it is outrage from a disallowed Vinícius Júnior goal against Scotland, an Iran stoppage-time winner wiped out against Egypt or the Qatar-Switzerland penalty call graphics mishap that FIFA blamed on a “technical outage”, football has become a delivery system for rage on the internet.

While yelling at a ref through the TV is as old as the game itself, the biggest moments in football are now clipped, captioned, stitched and served to those who enjoy to contest it most.

It’s why millions tune into Emily in Paris while insisting it’s terrible and why viewers dissect every episode of Love Island long after the credits roll.

By the time Euphoria’s final season limped to its finale in May, it was hauled before its own standing tribunal of TikTok reviews, Reddit threads and fervent online debate. The show’s perceived shortcomings became part of the entertainment itself.

Entire creator ecosystems also exist purely to react to influencers, with creators and podcasters like The Diary of a CEO generating days of outrage over a single clip. Closer to home, the success of Dubai Bling – endlessly compared to Selling Sunset and Bling Empire – and much of the actual conversation around it is a running argument about how real any of it is.

“The fact that it’s been renewed for a fourth season suggests this debate isn’t hurting the show commercially,” suggests Dr Hadeel Alhaddadeh, assistant professor at Canadian University Dubai’s School of Communication and Creative Industries. “If anything, it seems to be part of the engine.” It also explains why ragebait works as reliably as it does, and has become an online content genre in its own right in the last year.

Yet, psychologists and media scholars who actually study this stuff insist hate-watching and ragebait are often mistaken for disengagement, when they’re actually quite the opposite. A 2025 consumer survey found that nearly two in five Americans would watch shows they actively disliked, most of which are Gen Z.

“The brain is designed to notice what feels important, unpredictable or potentially consequential, not simply what feels pleasant,” explains Dr Robert Chandler, clinical psychologist at mental health and wellness clinic, LightHouse Arabia. This explains why your brain automatically locks into any sign of contempt when consuming media.

Bethany Teachman, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, locates the same instinct even deeper in the wiring. Anger, she explains, functions as “a powerful communication signal that suggests something unfair has occurred,” and it recruits the amygdala accordingly.

The circuitry that scans for predators also scans reality contestants and controversial figures for the same signal. And as far as this year’s World Cup is concerned, any referee on the pitch fits neatly into the exact anticipatory loop Chandler describes: “Anger can feel psychologically useful because it gives people energy.”

Essentially, when you hate-watch your rival team, contempt gives you something to do with it, be it reacting, predicting, arguing and “that can create a temporary sense of control or involvement,” he adds.

If the neuroscience explains why one person hate-watches, the sociology explains why they watch together – and why the review video or comment section, not the show, is often the real thing being consumed here.

A qualitative study published in First Monday, titled, “The Road to Moral Superiority Was Paved With Hate-Watching”, found that participants overwhelmingly hate-watched either reality television or political and news figures, and did so to feel better than the person on-screen.

The study’s lead researcher, T Phillip Madison, tells WIRED Middle East that his participants “felt better about themselves by looking down on the bad behaviour, bad taste or bad politics on-screen.”

Several participants described watching trashy reality TV, or a politician’s speech, specifically to “do commentary” with friends and family. It gave people “a sense of moral clarity” and, physiologically, “an adrenaline rush”, with several participants feeling “riled up” and energised by the act of hating something on cue.

The study also found that viewers who despised a host still formed what Madison calls “conflict-oriented parasocial relationships” consisting of a hostile but very real sense of connection to a person they’ll never meet.

“Contempt is unusually bonding because it combines emotion, morality and social comparison,” he says, which is particularly true of Love Island discourse as viewers actively engage in widespread criticism of the cast’s real behaviours. This year’s all-stars series of Love Island UK received over 11,000 OfCom complaints, quickly veering off the screen and into real action.

This effectively means that when the conversation is so loud and consequential, not watching the show – thus not forming an opinion – is a form of social liability.

“Discovering that a stranger shares your mild dislike of someone or something can make you like them more than discovering a shared enthusiasm does,” says Alhaddadeh.

Perhaps what’s driving the shift, argues Dr Ruta Vaidya, senior lecturer in journalism and digital media at Middlesex University Dubai is that “audiences today seem to be drawn more to realism than pure escapism. Part of that comes from the sheer amount of content available. As a result, people often gravitate towards stories that feel authentic or reflect the issues they see around them. The downside is that this kind of content can also provoke strong emotions, including anger, frustration and disagreement.”

Add “an element of humour,” says Elizabeth Cohen, a media psychologist at West Virginia University, “even if it’s attached to darker affective experiences like annoyance, contempt, jealousy or resentment” and you get something closer to entertainment than punishment.

Hate-watching can also function as a form of cultural distinction. Madison’s study demonstrated that the genres most hate-watched were reality TV franchises and celebrity programming. “Hating these shows allows viewers, especially educated or upwardly mobile ones, to distinguish their own cultural taste from the supposedly vulgar, consumerist or ‘basic’ tastes they attribute to the audience on-screen,” he says.

Yet, prestige content gets hate-watched too, she insists, much like the scrutiny of Emerald Fennell’s big-budget adaptation of Wuthering Heights earlier this year. “We also hate-watch when there’s a visible gap between a show’s aspirations and its execution,” she says, “whether that gap points down towards ‘lowbrow’ or up towards ‘overreach’.”

Hate-watching, despite its many convolutions, isn’t inherently a problem, Chandler adds. But when someone’s attention starts organising itself around outrage or seeking out the most provocative interpretation available, assuming bad faith faster, or gravitating towards content that confirms a bleak view of other people – that’s the threshold. He warns that hate-watching behaviour should be a concern once it begins “shaping mood, attention, emotional regulation and possibly the way a person sees the social world.”