The Psychology of Hate

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The Psychology of Hate

People hate other people because, well, they're not people

By Romantic Heretic

Science • March 2014 • Views: 1,817

My news aggregator pulled up an interesting article: The Psychology of Hate.

Simply put, we don’t, or won’t, empathize with the other. They don’t think, don’t feel, aren’t really people. So we hate them.

There was an interesting bit on casualty rates in war, on how few people got shot considering the number of shots fired. It happened because those being shot at were people, not targets. They became real. They hurt and bled just like those we do regard as people.

I wish there was some way to make every one read this article. So few understand why they hate. I’m looking at you, teahadis.

Psychology Hate

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6 comments

jvic Sun, Mar 2, 2014 9:59:29am

Yes, the article is titled The Psychology of Hate and it’s interesting, but…

Hate is such a strong and widespread (in potential and in actuality) emotion that it must have served an evolutionary purpose. Surely understanding hate’s evolutionary role is essential to understanding hate, yet the article does not touch on that at all.

Romantic Heretic Sun, Mar 2, 2014 12:02:04pm

re: #1 jvic

Yes, the article is titled The >Psychology of Hate and it’s interesting, but…

Hate is such a strong and widespread (in potential and in actuality) emotion that it must have served an evolutionary purpose. Surely understanding hate’s evolutionary role is essential to understanding hate, yet the article does not touch on that at all.

As David Wong put it, “Humans are social animals, and by that I of course mean we are bred by evolution for group murder.”

Once upon a time, yes, hate served a purpose. It kept tribes together as societies from the tribal level to modern nations control people by focusing their hate.

Now? I’m not so sure. Hate served a purpose when the best we had was fire sharpened sticks. The best we could do was kill everyone ‘not us’ in a day’s walk. In the present day we can kill people on the other side of the world at the push of a button. In fact we could probably kill everyone in the world at the push of a button.

Which means as often happens in evolution that what was a positive trait in one environment becomes a negative one in a different environment.

We humans are supposed to be able to direct our own fates. If we direct them with hatred as the main motivator, we’ll be extinct.

b_sharp Sun, Mar 2, 2014 3:15:45pm

re: #2 Romantic Heretic

As David Wong put it, “Humans are social animals, and by that I of course mean we are bred by evolution for group murder.”

Once upon a time, yes, hate served a purpose. It kept tribes together as societies from the tribal level to modern nations control people by focusing their hate.

Now? I’m not so sure. Hate served a purpose when the best we had was fire sharpened sticks. The best we could do was kill everyone ‘not us’ in a day’s walk. In the present day we can kill people on the other side of the world at the push of a button. In fact we could probably kill everyone in the world at the push of a button.

Which means as often happens in evolution that what was a positive trait in one environment becomes a negative one in a different environment.

We humans are supposed to be able to direct our own fates. If we direct them with hatred as the main motivator, we’ll be extinct.

We evolved in small groups generally with fewer than 100 people primarily made up of relatives and women kidnapped or bargained for from other groups. Although we are now stuck in groups much larger than 100 members that primarily contain people unrelated to us, we aren’t able to deal with larger groups without strategies developed and enforced socially.

Our propensity for categorizing everything helps, because it enables us to view groups of unrelated people as ‘one of our groups’ but our hyper sensitivity to danger pushes us to see others as either with us or against us.

There has been some speculation that our brains increased in size in order to track levels of relatedness and to bookkeep favours owed and owing. If we look at our cousins, chimps, their group sizes seldom go over 40 members. Keeping track of more than 40 would have been tough for early pre-homo hominids.

CuriousLurker Sun, Mar 2, 2014 3:44:02pm

re: #1 jvic

Yes, the article is titled The >Psychology of Hate and it’s interesting, but…

Hate is such a strong and widespread (in potential and in actuality) emotion that it must have served an evolutionary purpose. Surely understanding hate’s evolutionary role is essential to understanding hate, yet the article does not touch on that at all.

I don’t doubt it served an evolutionary purpose, however I think it’s less important that we understand what that role was than that we recognize that our technological evolution has far outpaced our biological & cultural evolution, leaving us ill-equipped to deal with the modern world in which we live unless we, as a species, make an effort to consciously evolve.

I read several books back in the ’90s by psychologist Robert Ornstein that were excellent. One of the best, New World New Mind, was co-authored with biologist Paul Ehrlich and originally released in 1989, then re-released in 2009. IMO, it is still every bit as relevant today as it was 25 years ago—or for that matter nearly 70 years ago, when Einstein tried to warn us about the same thing:

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” —Albert Einstein, May 1946

palmerskiss Sun, Mar 2, 2014 4:56:30pm

someone once said: ‘hate exists in the vacuum created by a lack of interest in, or empathy towards, nuance’

b_sharp Sun, Mar 2, 2014 6:56:52pm

re: #4 CuriousLurker

I don’t doubt it served an evolutionary purpose, however I think it’s less important that we understand what that role was than that we recognize that our technological evolution has far outpaced our biological & cultural evolution, leaving us ill-equipped to deal with the modern world in which we live unless we, as a species, make an effort to consciously evolve.

I read several books back in the ’90s by psychologist Robert Ornstein that were excellent. One of the best, New World New Mind, was co-authored with biologist Paul Ehrlich and originally released in 1989, then re-released in 2009. IMO, it is still every bit as relevant today as it was 25 years ago—or for that matter nearly 70 years ago, when Einstein tried to warn us about the same thing:

Knowing how and why we act as we do gives us the power to go beyond those limitations. If we recognize the source of actions, it simplifies developing strategies. Cultural evolution is horribly slow if left to normal selection, but we can speed it up with a little careful social engineering in the education system.

Sometimes natural evolution takes too damn long.

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