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The Individual Psychology of Group Hate

January 2012
Journal of Hate Studies 10(1):15

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Revenge is often taken against people who were not perpetrators of the original offense, provided that they belong to the perpetrator’s group. People react as if they believed that if one member of a group attacked, then they all did or would. Groups are culturally defined, though the tendency to relate to them is universal. It is proposed that “the enemy” is an inherited category while the identity of the groups placed into that category is learned. Enemies are subject to hate, fear, and coldness (the inhibition of empathy). We are prepared to experience an entire outgroup as “enemy” if any of them attack us. We anticipate the same reaction in outgroups by experiencing them as “enemy” when any of us attack them. We mirror fellow ingroup members’ hatreds

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JOURNAL OF

HATE STUDIES

The Individual Psychology of

Group Hate

Willa Michener

Suggested Citation:

APA: Michener, W. (2012). The Individual Psychology of Group Hate. Journal of Hate Studies,

10(1), 15-48. Retrieved from: http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/article/view/177.

Bluebook: Willa Michener, The Individual Psychology of Group Hate, 10 J. HATE STUD. 15 (2012),

available at http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/article/view/177.

ALWD: Willa Michener, The Individual Psychology of Group Hate, 10 J. Hate Stud. 15 (2012),

available at http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/article/view/177.

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The Individual Psychology of Group Hate

Willa Michener

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

BSTRACT

Revenge is often taken against people who were not perpetrators of the

original offense, provided that they belong to the perpetrator’s group.

People react as if they believed that if one member of a group attacked,

then they all did or would. Groups are culturally defined, though the

tendency to relate to them is universal. It is proposed that “the enemy” is

an inherited category while the identity of the groups placed into that

category is learned. Enemies are subject to hate, fear, and coldness (the

inhibition of empathy). We are prepared to experience an entire outgroup

as “enemy” if any of them attack us. We anticipate the same reaction in

outgroups by experiencing them as “enemy” when any of us attack them.

We mirror fellow ingroup members’ hatreds.

Keywords: hatred, ethnocentrism, racism, misia, xenophobia, hate crime

On September 11, 2001, after the South Tower at the World Trade

Center fell and while the North Tower still stood burning, a caller to the

Howard Stern radio program in New York City said this:

Howard, I’ll tell you what. The first second I hear on the news that it has

anything to do with a towelhead or a dothead bastard I’m gonna go out

there and start goin’ to those A-rab stores and I’m gonna start kickin’ ass

. . . get those assholes out of the whole freakin’ neighborhood [here the

hosts interrupt to say “Stop it, stop it . . . ” but the caller goes on] and I

implore all Americans to get your arms together, baby, get out there on

the streets and go to your local freakin’ deli [Here the radio host hangs up

on him, saying to the audience “He’s just upset” and the co-host says “I

know but he’s an idiot.”].

Another caller said:

Whoever claims this whether we have proof or not just freakin’ annihilate

Willa Michener holds a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College, a

J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.P.A. from Harvard

University, and a Ph.D. in physiological psychology from the University of

Pennsylvania. She is a research affiliate at the Center for International

Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is interested in

the evolutionary psychology of emotion.

16 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

the country. Don’t worry about the kids, the old people. Just freakin’

wipe the country out . . . You see how they wiped out the twin towers.

Wipe out the country! Babies? Who cares about their babies?

One of the hosts responded:

Yeah no one cares about their babies. Not me! (From a recording of the

September 11, 2001 broadcast)

The hosts went on to advocate annihilating the entire population of

Afghanistan or any other country that might be harboring terrorists.

Four days later, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death as he planted

flowers outside his filling station in Mesa, Arizona. News accounts stated

blandly that Frank Roque killed him in revenge for the attacks of September

11 (Gallegus, 2001). They did not explain why Roque had targeted a per-

son who was not a perpetrator of the 9/11 crimes. It was assumed that

readers would already know that people take revenge against innocents who

belong to the same group as a guilty person. It was pointed out that Roque

got his victim’s group membership wrong, since Balbir Singh Sodhi was

neither Muslim nor Arab. On the same day, a Pakistani Muslim was shot to

death in Dallas, Texas, and an Egyptian Christian was killed in San Gabriel,

California (Mozingo, 2001; Vaishnav, 2001).

These murders could be called

third-party revenge

because the victims

were not involved in the original offense, either as perpetrator or as victim.

They were third parties. Third-party revenge has also been called “vicari-

ous retribution” (Lickel, Miller, Stenstrom, Denson, & Schmader, 2006). It

appears in many cultures.

In Rwanda, the Hutu genocide against Tutsis began hours after the

assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu (Des Forges,

1999). Hutu Power leaders blamed the murder on the Tutsi-dominated

rebel force, though the accusation was never proved. When Straus (2003)

interviewed self-confessed

genocidaires

in prison afterwards, 70% gave the

Habyarimana murder as a reason for the genocide. One man put it suc-

cinctly: “We killed them because they were Tutsi and because the Tutsi had

killed Habyarimana” (Straus, 2003, p. 8). Straus summarizes the logic of

this as “all Tutsi had to be blamed for the killing of Habyarimana” (p. 8).

Tutsi babies were killed too (Des Forges, 1999). Perhaps the Hutu Power

leaders had anticipated these events; certainly they had prepared for the

genocide in advance (Des Forges, 1999; Powers, 2002). It is possible that

they killed Habyarimana themselves and accused the Tutsi of having done it

in order to provoke the reaction (Des Forges, 1999).

On February 27, 2002, the Sarbamati Express train stopped in the town

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 17

of Godhra in India. Its passengers were Hindu activists returning from a

pilgrimage to the disputed Babri Mosque/Ram Temple site in Ayodhya.

Some of the passengers taunted a Muslim vendor at the train station. The

dispute escalated until local Muslims set fire to the train, killing 58 people.

The next day, other Hindus conducted a pogrom against other Muslims.

Hindu extremists of Ahmedabad raped Muslim women, then cut them and

burned them to death. In all, hundreds of men, women, and children were

killed. The Muslims of Ahmedabad were said to be surprised and uncom-

prehending (Human Rights Watch, 2002; ur Rahman, 1998; Varshney,

2002).

When David Blumenfeld was a schoolboy in New York, he was

attacked by a gang of Gentiles he had never seen before. One gang member

pushed a knife against his stomach, saying, “You son of a bitch. You killed

Jesus! I’m going to kill you.” David escaped when his friends came to his

aid (Blumenfeld, 2002, p. 178).

What is the psychological origin of the impulse for third-party

revenge? Evidently the impulse is often thoughtless, but what feeling is it

that comes before thought in these cases? After describing crimes against

humanity in the former Yugoslavia, Ignatieff summed up:

The atrocities are held to reveal the essential identity—the intrinsic geno-

cidal propensity—of the peoples in whose name they were committed.

All the members of the group are regarded as susceptible to that propen-

sity even though atrocity can be committed only by specific individuals.

(1977, p. 197)

People seem to feel as if all the members of an outgroup are responsi-

ble for the misdeeds of any one member (Lickel et al., 2006). If one did it,

then they all did it, or at least any of them might do it, or “that’s how they

are.” In addition, people desire to take revenge against the miscreant out-

group: “one did it/they all did it/get them back.” We may call this the

Roque effect

after Frank Roque, the man who murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi.

It is curious that the rule of “one did it/they all did it” not only causes

blame to jump from one individual to another, but also causes blame to

jump across time. In 1915, Gourgen Yanikian lost 26 members of his fam-

ily in the Turkish government’s genocide of ethnic Armenian citizens.

Fifty-eight years later, he shot to death Consul Mehmet Baydar and Vice

Consul Bahadir Demir of Turkey, in Santa Barbara, California. Before

committing the murders, he mailed out a press release saying that he had a

personal war against “the Turkish beasts and their government” because of

the genocide. In court, he said that he had not committed murder because

his victims were “not human.” He had not “killed two men” but had

18 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

destroyed “two evils.” Neither Mehmet Baydar nor Bahadir Demir had yet

been born in 1915 (People v. Yanikian, 1974; “Armenian Guilty of Killing

Turks,” 1973, p. 9).

“One did it/they all did it” applies only to hurtful deeds. Good deeds

are not generalized with so much feeling (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1998; Hewstone

& Cairns, 2001). Good deeds may be generalized in the way that any

example is generalized back to its category (McCauley, Stitt, & Segal,

1980), or perhaps in the way that traits are generalized to every member of

an animal species (Gil-White, 2001), but they are not given the special

force and importance that bad deeds get. Christians do not have a 2000-

year-old tradition of thanking Jews for redeeming the world because Christ

was a Jew. Osama bin Laden did not thank Americans for Norman

Borlaug’s work on the Green Revolution because Norman Borlaug was an

American. The Green Revolution saved millions of lives, some Muslim,

but what does that have to do with Americans generally?

It is evident that “one did it/they all did it” does not apply to one’s own

group. Americans would be astonished if anyone said that Americans

ought all to suffer for what Frank Roque did. The absurdity would be plain,

to Americans.

These points demonstrate that “one did it/they all did it” is not a simple

result of the ordinary tendency to generalize and simplify. What is it then?

I. I

“O

HEY

”

VOLVED

SYCHOLOGICAL

LLUSION

From Darwin on, evolutionary psychologists have speculated that we

evolved to compete, group against group (Alexander, 1987; Barkow, 1989;

Darwin, 1871; Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001; Richerson & Boyd,

1998; van den Berghe, 1981; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). The definition

group

is obviously cultural, since some persons identify by nationality,

some by tribe or ethnic group, some by clan or lineage, some by religion,

some by party or ideology, some by village or region, some by race, and

some by caste or social class. Nevertheless, the tendency to identify some

one group as our own, and others as alien, may be an inherited species-wide

trait. If we did evolve to compete group against group, then there are prob-

ably many separate inherited traits that enable that competition.

The most obvious test of whether a trait is inherited is

heritability,

the

proportion of the variation in the trait that may be explained by variation in

the genes. The tendency to have phobias is known to be heritable as con-

cordance, for the trait is higher in identical than in fraternal twins. The

specific content of the phobia is not (Kendler, Karkowski, & Prescott,

1999). Possibly the tendency to generalize hatred to all of an outgroup will

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 19

prove to be heritable even though the identity of the group to be hated can

not be.

The heritability of a trait is zero either when the trait is not genetic, or

when it is but there is no variation in the genes across individuals. Having

two legs is genetic but not heritable: All the variation in number of legs is

due to environmental factors. How can a species-wide genetic influence on

a behavior be detected, when the genes involved are unknown? The prob-

lem is not simple (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Eibl-Eibesfeldt,

1989; Rozin, 2000).

One test is whether the trait in question crosses cultural lines. For

example, in most cultures, disgust is expressed by gestures for the rejection

of food, such as curling the upper lip and extruding the tongue. These

facial expressions are considered impolite in Japan, so the Japanese usually

suppress them. However, they make the same expressions while watching

disgusting films if they think no one will see. Japanese also recognize the

meaning of the expressions in others. In every culture tested, people recog-

nize these expressions as signs of disgust. Consequently, the use of food

rejection gestures to indicate disgust is thought to be inherited (Ekman,

1982).

The example suggests that one should be able to identify traces of a

species-wide evolved trait in any given culture, regardless of the culture’s

overt evaluation of the trait. French culture generally favors individual

responsibility, but the diarist H.C. Robinson recorded an exception to the

rule. A French soldier had once been rescued by Englishmen just as he was

about to be killed by Spanish soldiers. On encountering Robinson some

time later, he said, “Oh, you are English, so I like you! If you were Spanish

I would have slit your throat.” “What! Kill me when I have done nothing to

you?” asked Robinson. “If it wasn’t you, it was your brother. If not your

brother, then your cousin. It’s the same thing. One can’t find the individ-

ual, it’s impossible” (Fison & Howitt, 1967, p. 157, author’s translation).

Fison and Howitt repeated Robinson’s story in an 1880 work on the South

Pacific. They remarked on the fact that certain Fijian groups saw a commu-

nity as “one body” so that if anyone were injured by an attack from outside

the community, everyone in the community would feel himself hurt and

entitled to strike back. Furthermore, since the other community would also

be only “one body,” it would not matter which “part” of the other commu-

nity one struck. Fison and Howitt supposed that the Frenchman’s spontane-

ous outburst and the formal Melanesian belief came from the same human

feeling.

Many cultures have institutionalized and regularized third-party

revenge. During the 1930s in what is now Sudan, the Nuer people main-

tained that revenge killing was right and proper as against any relative of a

20 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

murderer, provided that the relationship was through the male line (“your

brother . . . your cousin . . . same thing”). Revenge could be taken against

infants just as well as against adults (Evans-Pritchard, 1968). In southern

Africa, among the !Kung San, the relatives of a murder victim may raid the

murderer’s group, killing anyone they can (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996).

Various traditional cultures of Melanesia made revenge for a murder a

moral obligation for male relatives. The murderer would be the preferred

target, but a different member of the outgroup would do (Trompf, 1994).

Among the Yanomamo of Brazil, the key grouping is a kind of mobile

village or band. A killing by a man from another village must be repaid by

a killing of someone in the murderer’s village. A brisk anger against all of

the other group accompanies these killings (Chagnon, 1992).

The idea of collective responsibility can take hold even in a modern

culture. At the same time that Evans-Pritchard was studying the Nuer,

Adolf Hitler was preaching notions of collective responsibility in Germany.

“The Jews” were subjected to all sorts of fantastic accusations, which were

widely believed. Jews, every individual Jew included, were blamed for

Germany’s surrender in World War I, as well as for the evils of capitalism,

communism, and disease. Eventually 6,000,000 Jews were murdered

(Goldhagen, 1996; Lifton, 1986).

The doctrine of individual responsibility was reintroduced to Germany

after the Nazi defeat. First, however, the newly liberated peoples of Europe

avenged themselves by conducting an “ethnic cleansing” of the

Volk-

sdeutsch

, the ethnic Germans living outside the borders of Germany. It is

estimated that somewhere between 500,000 and 2,000,000 civilian Germans

were murdered or died of hardships after being forced out of their homes

(de Zayas, 1986).

American culture supports the idea of individual responsibility. Nev-

ertheless, a sort of folk culture of group responsibility shows up in the

United States from time to time. In 1969, a European American police

officer named Henry Schaad was killed by African Americans in York,

Pennsylvania in revenge for an alleged attack by European Americans on an

African American youth. No one claimed that Schaad had taken part in the

attack. A gang of European Americans then killed a young African Ameri-

can mother named Lillie Belle Allen. They pumped bullet after bullet into

her body as she lay slumped and helpless against the side of her car. Allen

had nothing to do with Henry Schaad’s death. She was a minister’s daugh-

ter visiting from out of town (Bunch, 2001; Robertson, 2001). The Euro-

pean American police officer at the scene, Charles Robertson, explained

why no arrests were made: “Everyone knew who was involved. But every-

one just thought it was even. One black had been killed and one white.

Even” (Bunch, 2001, p. 29).

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 21

According to Pascal Boyer, third-party revenge shows up readily in

children. “[A]fter being attacked by one member of the group one can

retaliate by attacking another member,” he writes, and, “This elementary

intuition is easily acquired by children the world over” (Boyer, 2001, 529).

Admittedly, evolutionary adaptation is not the only possible explana-

tion for third-party revenge. One could argue that it appears in many cul-

tures because it is, sometimes, a realistic approach to security. Political

scientists Fearon and Laitin point out (1996) that third-party revenge gives

all members of an outgroup an incentive to control even their most violent

members. This incentive could improve the security of one’s own self and

group (Prunier, 1995). However, if the rational pursuit of one’s own secur-

ity were one’s only motivation, hatred would be unnecessary. Pity might be

more appropriate, given that the victims are selected at random. But third-

party revenge is often accompanied by a vivid hatred.

Rational self-interest (or rational group interest) and evolutionary

adaptation are not mutually exclusive. If the tendency to commit third-

party revenge is an adaptation, it is possible that it evolved because a show

of the strength of one’s own group tends to deter the outgroup. In appropri-

ate cases, inherited emotional preferences and rational considerations would

reinforce each other. This means that one must ask whether “one did it/they

all did it” also shows itself in inappropriate cases. If “one did it/they all did

it” is due to an evolved mechanism, it ought to arise even when it does not

actually add to one’s security.

Evolved patterns of feeling and behavior are not necessarily irrational,

but they are a-rational. When the conditions that produced them are pre-

sent, the strategies involved may appear rational, and when they are absent,

they may appear irrational. For example, in humans and rats there is a

simple rule for learning taste aversion. The animal becomes averse to any

flavor that it consumed before experiencing nausea. A delay of hours

would block the association of a sound with a shock, but it does not block

the association of flavor with nausea (Garcia & Koelling, 1966). Human

beings also come to dislike a novel flavor given to them before they are

made nauseated by chemotherapy (Bernstein & Webster, 1980). Such

inherited, channeled learning has been called “prepared learning” (Selig-

man, 1971; Seligman & Hager, 1972).

There is another well-known example. Human children raised

together are sexually inhibited towards each other, whether they are geneti-

cally related or not (Shepher, 1971; Wolf & Huang, 1980). Sexual attrac-

tion between biological siblings raised apart has not been studied, but there

is anecdotal evidence that it occurs (Herbert, 2001). The mechanism is evi-

dently similar in other mammalian species in which adult siblings live in

proximity to one another. Individuals who associated with each other in

22 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

infancy do not mate in adulthood, though actual siblings raised apart do

(Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). The function of the inhibition against familiars is

obviously the avoidance of inbreeding, but the inhibition applies whether

there is an actual danger of inbreeding or not.

These two simple rules of prepared learning appear rational or func-

tional in some contexts and not in others, but they apply forcefully in both

situations. A human being may know that it was chemotherapy and not

food that made him nauseated, but he will still be repelled by the flavor of

the food he ate just before the chemotherapy. Unrelated couples who were

raised together on the same kibbutz are in no danger of inbreeding, and they

face no cultural taboo, but they simply can’t feel much sexual attraction to

each other (Shepher, 1971). Conscious thought has nothing to do with it.

Similarly, “one did it/they all did it” appears in conditions where it

does not make sense. In particular, its tendency to skip blame across time is

illogical.

Gourgen Yanikian did not improve his personal security when he mur-

dered the two Turkish diplomats in California in 1973. Perhaps he

improved his group’s security, if future attacks by Turks on Armenians are

considered a realistic possibility.

The Gentiles attacking the Jewish boy in New York were under no

security threat from him or from Jews generally. The victim they claimed

to speak for, Christ, was beyond the need of their defense.

In Norway, 10,000 children were born to German fathers and Norwe-

gian mothers between 1940 and 1945. After the war, Norwegian hatred of

“Germans” was directed at these half-German children. One woman testi-

fied that a dentist intentionally drilled into her gums to show her the pain

Norwegians suffered under Nazi torture (Mellgren, 2002). One can make

sense of this, if at all, only by supposing that the dentist really felt that she

was German and that she shared in other Germans’ guilt.

The writer Amos Oz recalls meeting a young nun on a train in France.

On learning that he was Jewish, she asked about Christ: “He was so sweet;

how could the Jews do it to him?” Her voice was so sad that he was

tempted to answer, “It wasn’t me–I just happened to have had a dentist

appointment on that particular Friday” (Oz, 2000, p. C1). Her question had

nothing to do with her personal safety, or even her group safety. However,

if she simply, really believed that “one did it/they all did it/they all would

do it,” then it would make sense that she would ask the question. Surely if

he would kill Christ, he would know why.

It is possible to experience “one did it/they all did it” as an emotion

even when it contradicts one’s own conscious beliefs. Primo Levi exper-

ienced it in this way in Auschwitz.

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 23

In 1944, the camp of Auschwitz was supplying prisoner-slaves to

nearby industry. Slaves were allowed to live for a while before being

gassed, so assignment as a slave brought the hope of survival. Levi was

sent to be tested in chemistry, to see if he could qualify to work in a labora-

tory. His examiner was one Doktor Ingenieur Pannwitz. Levi writes of his

feelings as he entered the office of this man:

Pannwitz is tall, thin, blond; he has eyes, hair and nose as all

Germans ought to have them, and sits formidably behind a complicated

writing-table. I, Haftling 174517, stand in his office, which is a real

office, shining, clean and ordered, and I feel that I would leave a dirty

stain whatever I touched.

When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

From that day I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times

and in many ways. I have asked myself how he really functioned as a

man; how he filled his time, outside of the Polymerization and the Indo-

Germanic conscience; above all when I was once more a free man, I

wanted to meet him again, not from a spirit of revenge, but merely from a

personal curiosity about the human soul.

Because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known

how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if

across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in

different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great

insanity of the third Germany.

One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all

thought and said of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue

eyes and those manicured hands said: “This something in front of me

belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this

particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some

utilizable element.” And in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin:

“Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked. No communication pos-

sible. I am a specialist in mine chemistry. I am a specialist in organic

syntheses. I am a specialist . . . ” (1986, p. 105)

“Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked

. . .” He knows that it is not

so, and yet he feels it.

Similarly, Fania Fenelon reported that she began to hate “all Germans”

while she was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Fenelon, 1977). She

considered that stereotyping was precisely the vice of the concentration

camps, so she resisted her urge to stereotype.

When the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot, his brother

Charles resolved to go and kill European Americans. He wanted to shoot or

poison one white bigot in each county of Mississippi. He bought guns. But

a voice in his mind kept saying to him that Medgar would not want it that

way. He decided to continue the civil rights work that his brother was

24 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

killed for instead. He consoled himself with the thought that black voting

would aggravate the bigots more than revenge killings would anyway

(Evers, 1971).

An Israeli tank shell struck the house of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish in

Gaza as he spoke on the phone with a reporter. His three daughters and a

niece died. He saw their familiar hands and feet torn from their bodies and

scattered about the room. With effort he held to his previous abhorrence of

hatred and his dedication to peace. He said that he had always worked hard

not to attribute misdeeds of particular Israelis to all Israelis, just as he

would wish Israelis to work hard not to attribute the deeds of suicide bomb-

ers to all Palestinians (Abuelaish, 2010; Berger, 2011).

A European American prisoner of war named Robert Knight died of

starvation and abuse in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. Years

afterwards, his sister, Anne Knight Ruff, found herself feeling dislike for an

individual American of Japanese ancestry. She was applying for a job at

the American Friends Service Committee, where this man would be her

supervisor. She wrote, “I hadn’t realized I still felt prejudiced against the

Japanese people. I blamed them for the death of my brother” (Ruff, 2001,

p. 238). She knew that this man was an American citizen. She knew that

he was a Quaker. She knew that he was a pacifist. She knew that his life’s

work consisted of providing for the needs of impoverished refugees. She

also knew that as a Japanese American, he was interned during the war, so

that it would have been physically impossible for him to hurt her brother if

he had wanted to. Still she blamed him for her brother’s death. Her feeling

did not seem to be a consequence of her cognitions, since the feeling con-

tinued in effect even when she rejected it cognitively. Whatever this is, it is

not

rational

self-interest. Ruff herself did not think it was rational.

There are two points to note here. One is that “one did it/they all did

it” was irrational in the five cases. Levi and Fenelon knew that there were

antifascist Germans, some with fair hair and blue eyes. Evers knew that

there were white civil rights workers. Abuelaish personally knew Israelis

who grieved with him over the death of his children. Ruff knew that the

American Quaker had not harmed her brother. The other point is that Ruff,

Levi, Fenelon, Abuelaish, and Evers personally thought that “one did it/they

all did it” was wrong. Their feeling didn’t spring from their core beliefs; it

opposed them. There was an automatic aspect to the emotion. “One did it/

they all did it” may be best understood as a psychological illusion, compa-

rable to an optical illusion—just as normal, just as convincing, and just as

false.

An enduring inherited trait must serve a function; otherwise it would

not have been conserved in evolution. An optical illusion produces a false

perception, but it is a side effect of modes of perceiving that ordinarily

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 25

work well. The rule against mating with the people one lived with as a

child does prevent inbreeding; it is simply “misapplied,” so to speak, in the

kibbutz case. “One did it/they all did it” must also have a function if it is an

evolved trait, or it must have had one in the evolutionary past.

“One did it/they all did it” might have evolved to give individuals pre-

cautionary fear (McDonald, Navarrete, & Van Vugt, 2012; van der Dennen,

1999). This hypothesis would explain the fact that bad deeds are genera-

lized to an entire group, while good deeds are not. The point of evolution is

survival, not truth. It would be more accurate to generalize good and bad

deeds equally, but it is safer to generalize bad deeds more. If James Byrd

had mistrusted all European Americans, he wouldn’t have gotten into a

truck with European American men near Jasper, Texas, and he wouldn’t

have ended up being dragged to his death at the end of a chain (Cropper,

1998). Too little trust is an error, but it is a less dangerous error than too

much trust. Collective mistrust may even produce errors more often than

not, and yet it may produce a net gain in fitness. Evolution may have erred

on the side of safety.

A feeling of “one did it/they all would” can be beneficial to the indi-

vidual who has it if it induces a precautionary fear. However, the discus-

sion cannot end here. The rule can be beneficial only if there is a body of

hostile or potentially hostile others, an enemy. It may produce errors often,

but it must also produce accurate fears sometimes or else it is useless. It

would have been useful if group violence was the usual social environment

as humans evolved. It is also significant that “One did it/they all did it”

involves more than fear. It involves hate. Presumably hatred is a motiva-

tion for initiating attacks on others. One must ask how attacks might serve

the interests of the individual’s genes.

It seems likely that the feeling “one did it/they all did it” is an inherited

trait. However, if we are to understand its function, we must consider it in

its social context, now and in the evolutionary past.

II. I

“O

HEY

” I

S AN

DAPTATION

HAT

UNCTION

We cannot be certain of the course of evolution of a behavior. We

can’t observe the behaviors of the prehistoric past. However, we know that

capacities for behavior evolve along phylogenetic lines just as structures do.

Chimpanzees are our cousins and not our ancestors; nevertheless, their

behavior is suggestive evidence of what our ancestors may have done.

Their behavior is more likely to reflect an ancestral form where there is still

something in common between their behavior and ours.

Chimpanzee males go out in groups to raid neighboring communities.

26 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

Young males are especially eager to take part in raids. They enter the other

community’s range quietly. If they find an isolated individual, they attack,

screaming with excitement. A mother and baby are often targeted, since

mothers often forage without other adults nearby. The invading males seize

the baby and kill it by biting it and tearing it apart. They may kill the

mother in the same way. If they encounter a stronger party, they turn and

run. If the invading males do not flee fast enough, the native males may kill

them (de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson,

1996).

It is thought that destroying individuals in foreign communities serves

the reproductive advantage of the males because it removes competitors, or

future competitors. Male chimpanzees remain in the group of their birth

and so have few close relatives in the outgroups, but many in the ingroup.

The removal of competition benefits the male and his ingroup, which con-

tains many of his genes. By contrast, female chimpanzees migrate to new

groups at puberty or soon afterwards. Females do not ordinarily take part in

raids. Their close kin would not be favored if they did (de Waal & Lanting,

1997; Goodall, 1986; Nishida & Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, 1986; Wrangham &

Peterson, 1996). In the Belding’s ground squirrel, the sex roles are

reversed. It is the males who migrate out, and the females who remain in

their natal territory. Females make forays to unrelated neighbors’ burrows

to kill the young (Sherman, 1981).

It is important to note that chimpanzee raids occur in the absence of

any specific dispute over resources, territory, or mates. Apparently, the

animal’s psychological goal is the attack itself (Wrangham, 1999). We do

not know if the chimpanzees experience a subjective hatred. Perhaps they

simply enjoy the violence. We do know that they attack forcefully without

provocation. Typically, some of the raiders hold down the victim while

others hit, stamp, bite, and tear. Sometimes the raiders twist off limbs, or

drink the victim’s blood. These techniques are similar to those that chim-

panzees use against large prey, rather than those they use in intracommunity

fights. In all observed cases, the attack continues until the victim stops

moving (Goodall, 1986).

Chimpanzee males also fight each other for status within the commu-

nity, but the behavior is different. Group killing of an individual within the

community occurs, but it is unusual (Wrangham, 1999). Typically,

intracommunity fights involve threats and blows rather than biting, twisting

off limbs, and so forth. Fights usually end when the loser indicates submis-

sion by groveling or presenting sexually, and the winner accepts by a

friendly touch or gesture. The combatants have an ability to reconcile that

is surprising to human observers (de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986;

Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Blair concludes that chimpanzees must have

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 27

a “violence inhibition mechanism” or “VIM” that is activated by gestures of

submission. He suggests that normal human beings also have a VIM (Blair,

1995, p. 3).

A chimpanzee who has been attacked by foreign invaders will attempt

to placate the intruders by showing submission, but the attackers typically

ignore these attempts at appeasement (de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall,

1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Apparently the violence inhibition

mechanism does not engage in this circumstance.

Chimpanzees form factions within the community. These are fre-

quently changed. The course of chimpanzee politics—who is aligned with

whom, who remains loyal, who has betrayed whom, or who has rebelled—

is a matter of great interest to the chimpanzees themselves and to the human

observers (de Waal, 1982; de Waal & Lanting, 1997; Goodall, 1986;

Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Chimpanzees have politics in a sense quite

similar to the human sense. As noted, in intracommunity fights, gestures of

submission are often accepted peacefully, but they are rejected in intercom-

munity fights. Clearly, for chimpanzees, war (or raiding) is not the continu-

ation of politics by other means. It has different causes and it involves

different behaviors. It must depend upon different proximate, psychologi-

cal rewards.

In their book

Demonic Males

(1996), Wrangham and Peterson draw a

parallel between chimpanzee raids and human behaviors, especially the

raids and counter-raids of small, hostile human groups. We may ask

whether the analogy works.

Human wars are different from chimpanzee raids. Usually there are

resources in dispute. Most pogroms also involve motives in addition to the

violence itself. Pogroms against Jews in Europe and Armenians in Turkey

involved rape and plunder as well as unprovoked slaughter (Morgenthau,

2000; Strom & Parsons, 1982). Rape and plunder were significant factors

in the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda (Des Forges, 1999). In many

traditional societies, raiding would also involve the taking of slaves, espe-

cially women and children (Keeley, 1996). Women’s hostility to enemy

groups may be related to the fear of rape (Navarrete, McDonald, Molina, &

Sidanius, 2010).

Certain crimes in the United States do seem to resemble the chimpan-

zee raids. In some cases, coalitions of young men travel together to find

strangers to kill (Ranalli & Belkin, 2002; Manly & Nealon, 1992). For

example, in 2009, four teenaged boys in New Hampshire picked an isolated

house. On finding a sleeping mother and daughter, they slashed both with

machetes until their screaming stopped (MacQuarrie, 2010). There have

been reports of young men going out to find homeless people to beat and

28 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

murder (Ellement & Levenson, 2007; Lewan, 2007). In these incidents the

victims were not hated. The killings were done for fun.

In other cases, groups of men pick out a member of another ethnic

group to kill. There is no robbery (Levin & McDevitt, 1993). Such hate

crimes are often marked by overkill, that is, by torture before death and

continued attacks on the body after death (Allen, Als, Lewis, & Litwack,

2000). Women sometimes go along to watch, but rarely participate (Blee,

2002).

In 1981, three members of the Ku Klux Klan went hunting for an Afri-

can American to kill. There was an element of third-party revenge: Klan

leaders had asked for a killing of an African American because there had

been a hung jury in the case of an African American accused of killing a

European American (Smith, 1997). The three Klansmen selected a pass-

erby and forced him into a car at gunpoint. They asked his name, and he

told them: Michael Donald. They drove him to a secluded place and then

attacked him. At first he fought back with all his might, but finally he gave

over and lay still. They hit him more than 100 times with a tree limb. They

strangled him with a rope, slit his throat, and stomped on his face with their

boots. Then they hung his body from a tree. He was 19 years old (Smith,

1997; Toronto Star, February 5, 1988).

The prolongation of the killing suggests that the killers enjoy what

they are doing. Participants in some hate crimes have told investigators

directly that they enjoy the violence (Blee, 2002; Levin & McDevitt, 1993).

The men who killed Michael Donald had previously beaten a gay man at

the same spot (Smith, 1997). Like the prolongation, the repetition suggests

that the young men found the activity enjoyable in itself. The two motiva-

tions of hatred and enjoyment of violence may add to each other; certainly,

they are not mutually exclusive.

The chimpanzee and human killings are similar in form: A group of

young males go out together, find an individual they do not know, and kill

him or her. We do not know if they are homologous, that is, derived from

the same ancestral trait. If they are homologous, then violent conflict

between groups would have been the norm from the time of our common

ancestors with the chimpanzees, five to seven million years ago, until the

present day, as Wrangham and Peterson (1996) have argued. It would mean

that conflict is humankind’s baseline condition. In fact, the historical

record, the ethnographic record of nonliterate peoples, and the archeological

record all indicate that raiding has been all but universal (Keeley, 1996).

It may be the case that human raiding behaviors are an evolutionary

holdover. Where the relevant communities are not small, male kinship

groups, antiforeign violence may no longer confer a significant evolution-

ary advantage in and of itself. Since small patrilineal clans persisted well

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 29

into historical times, it may be that there simply has not been enough time

for the behavior to be selected out in response to the change. Or, it may be

that raids produce some other benefits often enough so that the trait is not

disadvantageous to the individual even now. Such benefits might include

incidental opportunities for rape and robbery that the sought-after violence

produces (see McDonald et al., 2012).

There is an obvious and significant difference between chimpanzee

raids and third-party revenge. There is no known provocation for the chim-

panzee raids, while third-party revenge is precisely a response to provoca-

tion. It is worthwhile to distinguish two points in this connection: (1)

Human males may still retain a chimpanzee-like disposition towards unpro-

voked raiding; and (2) Third-party revenge could result from a refinement

or redirection of the raiding genes. Evolution does not have the option of

starting fresh and most often achieves its results by reworking existing

traits. It may have done that here. We will return below to the questions of

how and why evolution might have redirected the raiding genes.

There is nothing in evolution that makes group-on-group violence

inevitable, even for species that live in groups. Such violence is actually

rare among vertebrates. The bonobo (

pan paniscus

) is more closely related

to the chimpanzee (

pan troglodytes

) than the human is. The hominid line

diverged from the chimpanzee line about five million years ago, while the

bonobo line diverged just three million years ago (de Waal & Lanting,

1997). Bonobos live in communities, much as chimpanzees do. Neither

sex goes to raid foreign communities, so far as we know (Wilson & Wrang-

ham, 2003). This may be because bonobo females do not forage alone,

unlike chimpanzee females, and therefore do not present an easy target

(males do not forage alone in either species) (de Waal & Lanting, 1997).

Perhaps human evolution would have taken a different path if human

ancestors had resembled present-day bonobos. But once evolution starts

down a given path, the steps it takes constrain the steps it can take later.

Once a behavior has evolved, the individual must adapt to the presence of

that behavior in its conspecifics, whether or not the original reason for the

behavior still exists. Once group-on-group conflict evolved and became

widespread, individual human beings faced selection pressure to adapt to it.

If conflict was the norm in the environment of evolutionary adaptation,

individuals would have been selected for their ability to flourish during con-

flicts. Starting or ending enmity between groups would be important, but

unusual. Most of the time the primary task for the individual would be to

find his place in an ongoing conflict. He would need to know his ingroup

and his outgroup, and he would need to have appropriate feelings for each.

If the enemy is going to treat him as part of a group regardless of what he

does, then he will bear the cost of group-on-group conflict no matter what

30 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

he does. If he is to bear the cost anyway, then he might as well reap the

benefits of group defense, and offense.

Among chimpanzees, just being unfamiliar is enough to draw hostility.

Kohler found that a stranger female he attempted to introduce to his captive

group at Tenerife was attacked viciously (Goodall, 1986). Other primatolo-

gists were forced to abandon an attempt to release captive chimpanzees into

the wild in Senegal, because the rehabilitants were attacked and almost

killed by native chimpanzees (Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson,

1996). In the wild, young females usually change communities while they

are in estrus. This earns them a reprieve from the males. The resident

females are unfriendly, but they do not inflict serious injury.

Humans have a natural mistrust of the foreign and strange, but unfa-

miliarity by itself is not enough to label an individual an enemy alien. Peo-

ple didn’t anticipate the strength of the reaction of the chimpanzees to a

stranger, as they should have done if they had similar feelings. Evidently

this is a point in which humans and chimpanzees differ. The chimpanzee

knows every individual member of his group, which usually numbers fewer

than 60 (Nishida & Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, 1987; Goodall, 1986). The human

doesn’t know every member of his group, which can number in the hun-

dreds of millions. Lacking familiar/unfamiliar as the rule, humans must

employ other means of distinguishing ingroup from outgroup.

Familiarity is a necessary condition for a chimpanzee to be identified

as “one of us” by other chimpanzees, but it is not sufficient. Chimpanzee

communities can split into factions that travel about separately. In such a

case, one faction can attack the other, killing known and familiar individu-

als (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). In this humans are similar to chimpan-

zees. During the genocide in Rwanda, teachers killed their students,

doctors their patients (Gourevitch, 1998), and pastors their parishioners

(Lacey, 2001). In Bosnia, friends killed friends (Hewstone & Cairns,

2001). Familiarity is not a sufficient condition for belonging in humans,

either.

Human groups can form alliances with foreign groups. Chimpanzees

never do. While it is true that among humans, the allied “others” may not

be fully trusted, they are not necessarily hated either. For male chimpan-

zees, a foreign group, like a foreign individual, is always the enemy. For

humans, a group can be “other” without being “enemy.” This suggests that

“one did it/they all did it” might serve to indicate when an “other” group is

“enemy.” In humans, the identity of the outgroup is learned. It is possible

that “the ones who attack us” is a defining characteristic of “enemy group”

in the human mind, at the level of emotion. That is, an attack by a member

of a recognizable group may cause people to consider that entire group

“enemy,” even if they did not before. Or, if the group was already felt to be

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 31

“enemy,” the attack may intensify the feeling (see Bar-Tal & Labin, 2001,

for an example). The definitional limits, “who is in the other group,” must

be handled separately—maybe by explicit cultural belief, maybe by behav-

ior, maybe by place of residence, or maybe just by association. Dentan

(1992) suggests that attacks from other groups can also affect how one

defines one’s ingroup; peoples who are threatened en masse may begin to

see themselves as a unit even if they did not do so previously.

For the most part, the problem of how groups are defined is outside the

scope of this essay. However, it is worth noting that humans seem to have a

remarkably free hand in making up the definition of groups. Once a group

is defined it may come to be seen as a possible faction that could act in

unity against other factions (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Tajfel, 1981;

Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001). Humans readily favor the group that

includes the self, even when they are aware that an assignment to groups

has been made randomly (Tajfel, 1981). Nations are not the only communi-

ties that may be imagined (Anderson, 1983; Chirot, 1997).

Not all outgroups (groups to which one does not belong oneself) are

enemies, but once an outgroup is recognized, it can potentially be placed

into the emotional category “enemy.”

This general approach is not new. Barkow, among others, has sug-

gested that we inherit a predisposition for learning the hatred of other peo-

ples with ease (Barkow, 1989; McDonald et al., 2012). The hypothesis of

particular triggers for feelings of enmity is simply a more specific form of a

general hypothesis that has formed a part of the ethnocentrism literature for

some time. The underlying idea is that there is a constellation of emotions

for the “enemy.” These include hate and fear, as well as a kind of coldness

or shutting down of the empathy that might otherwise be available (Bar-Tal,

1989). Subjectively, the enemy is experienced as the source and cause of

the hatred and fear (Allport, 1954; Blee, 2002). Most people do not intro-

spect enough to consider that the first cause of the hatred might ever lie in

themselves; it is specifically located in the others in their imagination (Bar-

Tal, 1989). As the inhibition of empathy is preconscious, it would not ordi-

narily be the subject of reflection either.

The feeling for the category “enemy” is inherited, and the set of emo-

tions that accompany it is inherited, while the specific content of the cate-

gory is learned. An attack may be enough to bring up the entire set of

emotions, hate, fear, and coldness, or at least to lower the threshold for

them such that a cause for hate that would not be sufficient before the attack

would become sufficient afterwards. The emotional category could have

come down to us, with changes, from some antecedent feeling for outsiders

held by our common ancestor with the chimpanzees.

“The ones who attack us” is not usually enough to settle who is in the

32 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

other group and who is not. But if the other group is already defined as a

group of some sort, with some kind of boundary, then it may get the emo-

tional label “enemy,” and the emotions of enmity may extend out all the

way to the cultural boundary of the group, with or without cultural permis-

sion. The suppression of empathy towards the outgroup may share an

ancestral origin with chimpanzees’ refusal to relent in the face of submis-

sion gestures from an enemy. In Blair’s terms, the “violence inhibition

mechanism” would be suppressed (Blair, 1995).

We may distinguish between the defensive and the offensive aspects of

“one did it/they all did it.” The function of the defensive reaction, fear, is

clear. If another group is likely to be seeking to harm your entire group

including you, then it is to your advantage to fear them all at the first sign of

hostility, without waiting for experience with each individual. It may even

be to your advantage to anticipate the same type of harm that was inflicted

before, if whole groups do have customary methods of attacking.

The evolutionary advantage of the offensive reaction, the revenge

attack, is less clear. There are two benefits: the physical destruction of

competitors and the intimidation of the surviving outgroup members. These

benefits are spread over the avengers’ entire ingroup, while the risk is con-

centrated on the avengers themselves. How can the trait persist? Why

aren’t the individuals who don’t go on revenge raids favored over the ones

who do?

There is also a potential cost to the ingroup in that the outgroup may

be provoked to attack back, beyond whatever its baseline level of attacking

had been. It may seem contradictory to claim that the revenge attack both

intimidates the other group and provokes it to attack again. However, the

theory specifies only that the placement of a particular outgroup into the

category “enemy” produces hate, fear, and coldness. It does not specify the

ratio among them. Fear may be adjusted according to the perceived

strength of the enemy. People who want to strike back may decide not to,

either because of conscious deliberate thought or because of fear.

In the case of the unprovoked chimpanzee raids, the risk is small and

males do not go unless other males go with them, thus both diminishing and

spreading the risk. The preferred targets for raids are babies and isolated

females (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996). Perhaps in human third-party

revenge helpless third parties are also preferred targets, and group attacks

the preferred mode (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996; Des Forges, 1999).

The group that is assisted by a chimpanzee raid is a small group of the

males’ close kin. The attacker’s genes are benefited not only in his self, but

also in his kin. In the environment of evolutionary adaptation, humans

probably also lived in small kin groups, so this factor may have been strong

at the time revenge raiding may have evolved. Still, the behavior has per-

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 33

sisted into the present, when the relevant group is often not a small kin

group. It may be possible to explain the persistence of genes for the behav-

ior by appealing to cultural selection. To this day, many cultures reward

people, or just men, who take revenge, and punish those who refuse to do

so. This would be true, for example, in the Southern U.S. culture (Nisbett

& Cohen, 1966), in the revenge culture of Albania (Blumenfeld, 2002) and

Montenegro (Djilas, 1958), in traditional Melanesian cultures (Trompf,

1994), and among the Yanomamo of Brazil (Chagnon, 1992). These

rewards and punishments could make it more profitable for an individual to

take part in a revenge raid than not to, even where the profit is measured in

terms of the number of children a man is likely to have. Cultures that were

known to strike back may have survived better than cultures that were

known not to. Selection among cultures may have acted on the evolution of

genes.

To be clear, this is only an argument that revenge raiding may still be

adaptive, not that unprovoked raiding is. The idea is that a liking for raid-

ing might have been conserved because it is functional when it is combined

with the desire for group revenge. Sexual lust and love can occur together

or separately. Perhaps bloodlust and hatred can also occur together or sepa-

rately, and the separate trait of bloodlust may be conserved in part because

the combination was adaptive.

The eagerness to strike back against a group that has harmed the

ingroup is suggestive of the conflict between factions within a group.

Chimpanzees strike out against any alien group. It is not a question of

revenge. But, like humans, chimpanzees engage in extensive reciprocity

within their own communities. They tend to pay back help with help and

harm with harm. It is like revenge. Behaviors that our ancestors employed

towards intracommunity factions might gradually have come to be applied

across communities. If there was such a transformation, that would explain

why humans can ally with foreign groups; they have come to be treated like

factions, which can become allies even after they have been enemies.

One could ask how the transition could ever have been made, if our

common ancestor was like the chimpanzees of today. For a chimpanzee,

any lone outsider is subject to attack. How could a species have made the

jump from that position, to a position of accepting outsiders as allies? It

would be a surprising development, but not an inexplicable one. Chimpan-

zees already show that they do not keep intra-community fighting and inter-

community fighting perfectly distinct. If a subgroup of males withdraws

and moves out, it is subject to being treated as “enemy” later on. Perhaps

ancestral hominids could treat a former faction as “enemy,” yet later accept

it back in as an ally in factional strife. If domestic factions pass the border

of the group in both directions, if a “new” enemy can become an ally, then

34 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

it may not be so great a step to let in “old” enemies as allies, particularly if

language permits explicit bargains to be struck. There is an implication in

this for peacemaking: However intense the status of “enemy” while it lasts,

the status itself is not immutable. In theory, a given group that was once an

enemy could become an ally, as many do in fact.

If factional fighting played a role in the evolution of third-party

revenge, that would help to explain why women feel the emotions of third-

party revenge. Both female chimpanzees and female humans engage in fac-

tional fighting (Goodall, 1986; Pusey, Williams, & Goodall, 1997).

With this analysis in hand, we are in a better position to explain third-

party revenge. The explanation requires two steps. The first is that the

initial offense by members of another group causes ingroup members to see

the entire alien group as “enemy.” Respect and empathy are inhibited or

withdrawn towards individual enemies. The second step is that the emo-

tions of reciprocity are engaged: hurt and fury and vindictiveness. These

are emotions that had their evolutionary origin in encounters between indi-

viduals and small factions (de Waal, 1982). Oddly, the attack on innocent

and helpless members of another group is accompanied by an emotion of

moral self-righteousness (Lickel et al., 2006). The oddness consists in the

conflict with ordinary moral codes that are applied within the group. Some

cultures have noticed the oddness and proscribed third-party revenge, or

directed that it cannot be used against children, or against women, or

against unarmed persons caught unaware. Nevertheless, the impulse

towards it, righteousness and all, can often be detected in people from these

cultures (de Zayas, 1986; Ignatieff, 1997). Thus, third-party revenge raids

could have evolved from the combination in humans of two behavior pat-

terns that are separate in chimpanzees and may have been separate in our

common ancestors, as seen in deadly unprovoked raids on foreign commu-

nities, where revenge is not an apparent motive, and fighting between fac-

tions in the home community, where it is (see McDonald et al., 2012). The

intrusion of factional feeling into enemy relations would account for the

subjective moral indignation that accompanies these attacks on the

innocent.

If we intuitively feel as if all of another group is “enemy” when any of

them attack us, it seems logical to ask whether we also feel as if all of

another group is “enemy” if any of us attack them.

III. T

NES

TTACK

NEMIES

A second defining characteristic of

enemy

in the human mind might be

“the people we attack.” That is, seeing members of one’s own group

attacking members of another might lead one to identify the other group as

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 35

“enemy.” Of course, if the other group also feels that if “one did it/they all

did it,” then they will be made into enemies by the attack itself even if they

were not enemies beforehand. In that case, it is quite accurate to see “the

people we attack” as enemies. Note that the reason for the attack is irrele-

vant. All that is necessary to invoke the response is the violent attack itself.

It might have been ordered by leaders to secure some advantage in power or

resources, without the leaders’ experiencing any particular animus towards

the victims at first, but if the hypothesis is correct, then the leaders and the

fighters would begin to hate after the fact.

The Semai-Senoi people of Malaysia are one of the most peaceful cul-

tures known. They deal with conflict with other peoples by retreating.

They have extremely low levels of individual violence within the culture.

Nevertheless, in the 1950s the British recruited some Semai men into the

army. The anthropologist Robert Knox Dentan wrote about the result:

Many people who knew the Semai insisted that such an unwarlike people

could never make good soldiers. Interestingly enough, they were wrong.

Communist terrorists had killed the kinsmen of some of the Semai

counterinsurgency troops. Taken out of their nonviolent society and

ordered to kill, they seem to have been swept up in a sort of insanity

which they call “blood drunkenness.” A typical veteran’s story runs like

this, “We killed, killed, killed. The Malays would stop and go through

people’s pockets and take their watches and money. We did not think of

watches or money. We thought only of killing. Wah, truly we were

drunk with blood.” One man even told how he had drunk the blood of a

man he had killed. (1968, pp. 58-59)

It is not clear whether the men had begun to hate the communists, or

whether they were simply swept up in the violence. Since communists had

killed their kinsmen, there could have been an element of third-party

revenge. In addition, if it is true that “the people we attack” are experienced

emotionally as enemies, then the fighting itself would have tended to make

them hate. This example is ambiguous since it is not clear whether the

Semai-Senoi began to hate the communists or whether they came to like the

violence; certainly they reached the point of coldness towards those they

killed.

The hypothesis implies that an attack by a few ought to stir the emo-

tion of hatred in the many. Osama bin Laden’s 2001 attack on the United

States should have increased hatred of the United States among people who

considered bin Laden a member of their ingroup. The effect might not

show in averaged results from questionnaires since it might have been

counteracted by increases in sympathy for Americans on the part of some,

but it should be detectable. There should be at least a segment of the popu-

36 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

lation(s) among whom hatred of Americans began or intensified. That is,

either the average should show increased hostility, or the population should

diverge, with some moving towards sympathy from their prior position, and

some towards antipathy. Of course, for a test of the hypothesis it would be

necessary to have given questionnaires immediately after 9/11/01, before

the United States’ attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq could provoke a Roque

effect.

The attacks against German Jews on

Kristallnacht

may have inflamed

German antisemitism by their very occurrence. For this reason the effect

may be called the “Kristallnacht effect.” The reaction can be summarized

as “we did it/they deserved it/hit them again.”

Similarly, in the communist revolution in China, the peasants’ attacks

on landlords may have increased hatred of the landlord class (Hinton,

1967).

This analysis would suggest a double danger in hate crimes. Hate

crimes might create new hate in the criminal’s group as well as in the vic-

tim’s. The injustice is complete: We are to hate people because

have

attacked

them

. As far as evolution is concerned, the injustice is beside the

point. Evolution is concerned with survival, not justice. To act as if the

group that has been attacked is “the enemy” would contribute to individual

and group survival.

This approach can explain the otherwise surprising fact that members

of powerful majorities sometimes feel fear of the very minorities that they

have been victimizing. It is not just that they have a realistic fear of repri-

sals. They have unrealistic fears too. Blee found members of antisemitic

hate groups who had little or no contact with actual Jews, but who believed

nevertheless that powerful Jews were doing them harm by damaging their

health, undermining their marriages, and preventing them from getting jobs.

They seemed sincere (Blee, 2002). It is not possible to imagine that these

antisemites derived these fears from evidence, and then derived their

hatreds from the fears. It is more likely that they felt hatred and fear and

produced these “reasons” for them after the fact.

Hatred serves to motivate attacks, and possibly to motivate a more

ferocious defense. Since it is safer to attack weak groups, there may be

more hatred against weak groups than against strong ones. Numerically

weak groups with economic resources have historically been subjected to

violence by stronger groups (Chua, 2003; van den Berghe, 1981). Even a

weak group without resources offers an opportunity for control of labor and

sex, so weakness rather than wealth may be the critical point (Human

Rights Watch, 1999; Varshney, 2002). The fear is there for two reasons:

First, outgroups are in fact often powerful and hostile; second, even a weak

outgroup that is not yet hostile may fight back if it is attacked. Once it is

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 37

attacked, it will act like an enemy. Fear should accompany the wish to

attack, so that the attackers can be prepared for retaliation. This anticipa-

tion of payback may be an effect of our having evolved to expect reciproc-

ity between factions in a society. The evolutionary incentives in dealing

with another faction are either to treat it well, so that the reciprocity will be

beneficial, or else to damage it so badly that it does not have the strength to

repay in kind. This may perhaps account for the extraordinary viciousness

with which lower-caste people are punished when they step out of line, as

well as for the energy that upper castes put into drawing the lines so as to

confine the lower castes as tightly as possible (Dray, 2002; Human Rights

Watch, 1999; Totten & Wagatsuma, 1966).

The idea is that the algorithms for hatred normally operate below the

level of consciousness, just as the neural mechanisms for constructing a

mental image of space do. It is not a question of repressing knowledge of

the triggers for hatred out of guilt. Since the mechanism operates outside of

consciousness anyway, there is no knowledge to repress.

The conscious explanations for the fear are extra. The mind assembles

acceptable conscious reasons to explain why a hated group should be hated,

regardless of the causative, unconscious reasons (see Gazzaniga, 1992). A

cleverer hater might come up with more convincing conscious reasons for

the fear than Blee’s informants did, but the reasons would still be secondary

to the emotion. Of course, when there is actual retaliation, then the retalia-

tion can be given as the reason for the fear, correctly enough.

In short, the mechanisms for producing hatred in the individual mind

may be exquisitely sensitive to the presence or threat of violent conflict.

That would explain the observation that “essentialist” concepts of the

enemy surface at times of violence, making negotiation and reconciliation

ever more difficult (Rothchild, 1997). The “essentialist” concept of evil in

an enemy group is the idea that the enemy is hostile in its very essence and

thus not susceptible to ordinary incentives for peace or compromise.

Cognitive dissonance could be appealed to as a supplementary or alter-

native explanation of “we did it/they deserved it/hit them again.” If one of

our (good) group attacks one of the outgroup, then we feel the victim must

have deserved it. A good person wouldn’t attack an innocent. It isn’t clear

that the

entire

outgroup should be hated and feared from cognitive disso-

nance alone, however. They might or might not be. The cognitive disso-

nance could be resolved by any of a number of thought patterns, including

blaming only the individual victim or victims. In contrast, the adaptationist

theory predicts group-wide hate and fear specifically. Nazi Germans would

be expected to hate and fear Jews more after

Kristallnacht

than before, and

European Americans to hate and fear African Americans more after a

lynching than before, because hate and fear are appropriate to the category

38 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

“enemy.” The difference in prediction in the two theories is that the adapta-

tionist theory predicts regularity in the emotional response to an attack

across times and places, while cognitive dissonance theory predicts varia-

bility. In practice, the test will be difficult to make because both theories

allow for some variability. Both theories admit that reality occasionally

intrudes into thought and feeling. In reality, Jews were less powerful after

Kristallnacht

than before, and African Americans probably less powerful

after a lynching than before, and therefore less to be feared. Both theories

admit that human reactions can be modified by culture. The adaptationist

theory predicts a stronger regularity than the dissonance theory does, but it

doesn’t predict perfect regularity.

IV. T

NES

ATE

NEMIES

It may not be necessary to participate in or even to observe an actual

attack on the enemy to induce new hate. The enemy may be “the people

that we hate” or “the people that we want to attack.” Fears can be learned

by observing fear in others. Perhaps hatred can be learned in the same way.

Researchers have demonstrated that monkeys can learn fears from

other monkeys. Most laboratory-reared rhesus monkeys are not afraid of

snakes, although wild-caught rhesus are terrified of them. Cook and

Mineka (1989) found that eight minutes of viewing a videotape of a rhesus

monkey screaming in the presence of a snake would leave a previously

naive laboratory monkey with a permanent fear of snakes. In another

experiment (Ohman & Mineka, 2001), the researchers edited out the image

of the real snake from the videotape and edited in a toy snake, a toy croco-

dile, a toy rabbit, or artificial flowers. The monkeys in the audience learned

fear of the toy snake and crocodile, but not of the rabbit or the flowers. It

seems that what the rhesus inherit is not a fear of snakes as such, but an

algorithm for learning the fear of snake-like things (perhaps long and scaly

things) from other rhesus.

Barkow (1989) has suggested that we inherit a special capacity for

learning the hatred of other groups. Perhaps humans have an inherited ten-

dency to acquire an attitude of hatred by imitating others’ hatreds. Obvi-

ously we do imitate others’ hatreds, especially in the case of children

imitating parents (Allport, 1954; Blee, 2002). Both innate and acquired

fears depend on activity in the amygdala nucleus of the temporal lobe of the

brain (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005). Activity in the amygdala during viewing

of an outgroup face correlates with implicit measures of fear or tension

towards an outgroup (Phelps et al., 2000).

Pathological fears, or phobias, develop towards threats that existed in

the environment of evolutionary adaptation, such as snakes and spiders, but

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 39

not to threats that came into existence more recently, like guns and knives.

Consequently phobias are thought to stem from evolved fears (Seligman,

1971; Seligman & Hager, 1972). Our inherited tendency to hate groups

may also be overexpressed in some cases (Poussaint, 2002; Dunbar, 2004;

Sullaway, 2004). An uncontrollable hatred could be called a

misia

, from

the Greek word for hatred,

misos.

The uncontrollable hatred of a group

could be called

genomisia.

As with fear, the level of hatred could be either

normal or pathological. People who suffer from pathological hatreds could

be termed

misics

. The study of

misias

may help us to understand normal

hatreds, much as the study of phobias has helped us to understand normal

fears.

Presumably there were originally simple markers that indicated who

the other group were. If our ancestors were like the chimpanzees, then the

first marker would have been unfamiliarity. Later it might have been some-

thing else, possibly physical strangeness or difference. Visual markers

could have become less and less important and cultural learning about “who

is the enemy” more and more important. Even if there is, or was, an inher-

ited tendency to learn the appearance of one’s own group, it would not

necessarily apply only to faces or bodies. A general tendency to look for

familiar appearance would also apply to clothing, body markings, and the

like (C. Surowiec, personal communication, 2001). This could be one

means by which a cultural group could be substituted for a biological one.

Language would be another (Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001), and cul-

tural moral systems yet another (van der Dennen, 1999). “The ones my

people hate” may also be a defining characteristic of “enemy”; this may

also apply as people choose up sides to form factions. In humans, the con-

cept of the “loyal opposition” may be obtainable only with a diligent cul-

tural effort.

If our evolution has prepared us to learn group hatreds with ease, then

the “free marketplace of ideas,” as Americans like to call it, is not a fair

market. Prejudice may have its thumb on the scales in that market, and

prejudice may be backed by adaptations for enmity.

The intensity of group hatred is sometimes attributed to the effects of

centuries of conflict, but this view is suspect. No person has more than a

single lifetime in which to learn to hate. The question is how the lesson

takes place. If we have a special propensity for learning hatreds from

others, then hatred could spread quickly through a population. This idea

could help to explain the paradox of German history. At the time of the

First World War, Germany was not more antisemitic than Russia or France

(Bauer, 2001), yet it was Germany that created the Holocaust of 1941-1945.

An antisemitic minority party came to power in 1933 and used the weapons

of totalitarian propaganda and political control to teach an extreme, nonsen-

40 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

sical antisemitism (Bauer, 2001; Dawidowicz, 1975). Hitler may have been

such an effective purveyor of hatred not because of his eloquence, which

was average, but because of the vividness of his emotional displays, which

was unsurpassed. His teaching could take hold in less than a generation

partly because a more moderate cultural antisemitism had prepared people

for the message, partly because the removal of Jews from social contact

with Gentiles removed the most obvious reality check, and partly—on this

hypothesis—because hatred is an easy lesson. If people feel as if hatred

makes sense, they may fail to notice when it doesn’t.

V. D

EED TO

IND AN

NEMY

If we do have a prepared emotional category for “the enemy,” then the

very existence of that category may predispose us towards conflict.

Adapted emotions permit us to anticipate. The hungry child looks anx-

iously to see whether her brother has more food than she does, though her

mother has given them both the same amount. The jealous husband is sus-

picious of his wife’s sexual opportunities, though she doesn’t have any.

Perhaps we also look to find enemies.

If we have an innate tendency to identify an enemy group, we might

also have a psychological need to identify one. As George W. Bush put it

in the year 2000:

When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and we knew exactly

who the “they” were. It was us versus them. And it was clear who

“them” was. Today, we’re not so sure who the “they” are. But we know

they’re there. (Kornblut, 2000)

Van der Dennen (1999) remarks on the seeming affinity that people

have for the idea of an enemy. He raises the possibility that people enjoy

their “red-blooded” hatreds. Another possibility is that people already have

a sense of apprehension towards others, and feel more oriented when they

know who their enemy is. People seem slower to take on new enemies

when they already have old ones. Varshney found that when Shias and

Sunnis in India hated each other, they were slow to anger against Hindus;

and where lower-caste Hindus hated upper-caste Hindus they were slow to

anger against Muslims (Varshney, 2002). Perhaps the psychological need

for an enemy had already been satisfied.

It is generally true across species, that if the appropriate object for a

given evolved behavior is not available when an animal is primed for it, the

animal will treat the next-closest object as if it were the real thing

(Tinbergen, 1969; Lorenz, 1970). A pregnant mouse that is ready to build a

2012] INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GROUP HATE 41

nest will carry soft wood shavings to one corner of her cage. If nothing soft

is available, she will carry whatever is there and deposit it, and if nothing at

all is available, she will carry her tail to the corner of the cage, and drop it,

and do it again. A cat that has no mouse to chase will pounce on a piece of

string. It isn’t going to eat the string, it just needs to hunt.

The English kept up a vigorous literary tradition of antisemitism for

400 years after the Jews were expelled from England (Goldhagen, 1996). A

story that is repeated for 400 years has to be a “good story” in the sense of

being emotionally satisfying. Apparently it is satisfying to have an enemy

to hate.

If we need to locate an enemy, then there is a danger that people lack-

ing obvious enemies will begin to treat any group other than their own as if

it were the enemy. When no one else is available to be the enemy, co-

resident groups might be cast in the role no matter what they do. The trag-

edy of the Jews and the Roma in Europe may be explained in some part by

this dynamic.

VI. C

ONCLUSION

From prehistory onwards, most humans have been born into a setting

of violent conflict between groups. Consequently, humans may be

expected to be adapted to group conflict. One of the adaptations may be

anticipation of an enemy group. The mind may be prepared to treat ene-

mies with hate, fear, and the preconscious inhibition of empathy, or cold-

ness. Chimpanzees likewise have raiding against other groups. For male

chimpanzees, all groups except the natal group are enemies. Unlike the

male chimpanzees, humans must learn which outgroups are enemies. It is

proposed that we utilize three simple algorithms for this learning: (1) If any

members of an outgroup attack us, then that outgroup is enemy. All the

members of that group are suspected of being inclined to repeat the same

pernicious behavior. At the level of emotion, they are considered already to

have done it. Since the boundaries of the group are defined socially, they

vary by culture. Whatever the boundaries are, hate, fear, coldness, and the

specific accusation extend out to them, encompassing everyone within.

This explains the desire for third-party revenge. (2) If any member of the

ingroup attacks any member of an outgroup, then that outgroup is enemy.

If the first algorithm is correct, then the second one must be adaptive. We

would hate those we attack without being aware that the attack itself is a

cause of the hatred. (3) If other members of our ingroup hate an outgroup,

then that outgroup is enemy. These hypotheses describe only the psychol-

ogy of individuals, but they can account for considerable unity of action in

groups. The proposed algorithms would allow the individual to identify

42 JOURNAL OF HATE STUDIES [Vol. 10:15

likely sources of attack against himself and his group. At the level of the

individual, they facilitate the anticipation of danger. At the level of groups,

they sustain the cycle of violence.

If human feelings of enmity are innate and spontaneous, they are not

infinitely strong. It is possible to overcome them, but people need a reason

to do it. Conscience may provide a reason; but it must be admitted that

there are moral systems that require hatred as well as moral systems that

condemn it (Djilas, 1958; Lifton, 1986). Compassion may provide a rea-

son, especially in cases of personal acquaintance (Des Forges, 1999). Occa-

sionally the conflict between feeling and reality that the evolved

mechanisms set up provokes people into noticing the absurdity of human

feelings towards other groups (Lee, 1983; Levi, 1986; Oz, 2000; Twain,

1981). The psychological mechanisms behind hatred are not usually evalu-

ated at all, because people have no conscious awareness of them. One may

hope that an understanding of these mechanisms will foster compassion and

reason, or, at the least, an appreciation for the absurd in human behavior, in

opposition to the serious and unquestioning hatreds that are so common in

human affairs.

CKNOWLEDGMENT

I thank Christina Surowiec for helpful commentary.

UTHOR

’

OTE

Communications can be addressed to the author at:

Willa Michener Center for International Studies,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, E40-400,

1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Email: michener@mit.edu

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Transforming Hate into Compassion as an Islamic Nonviolent Thought of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2021

The study of hatred that emerges as human nature can provide an analytical picture of how hatred arises, develops, and turns into humanitarian incidents. With an in-depth, systematic, and genealogical study, it can come up with a panacea for this hatred. The elixir can turn hatred into compassion, violence into nonviolence, and find creative ways to turn conflict into peace; thus, creating a new, better reality. This qualitative research uses a literature study from Risale-i Nur by Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (1877-1960). In this study, Nursi's religious and psychological explanations are compared with religious theories and studies of peace and conflict that are already popular in the Western world. The data in Risale-i Nur were analysed using the Mimesis theoretical framework of the philosophical approach. With this analysis there is the prefiguration stage (Mimesis I) about the background of Said Nursi's life, the configuration stage (Mimesis II) about the story of Said Nursi's traumatic experience, and the transfiguration stage about the emergence of the capacity to handle conflict independently with others using nonviolent ideas creatively, thus creating a new reality (Mimesis III). This new reality is "nonviolent Islam," which transforms conflict nonviolently, overcoming hatred with compassion and forgiveness. This statement is based on the argument that hatred is the root of violence, and Said Nursi can escape the trap of hatred through compassion and forgiveness. This study can contribute ideas to the study of moral philosophy and can also be used as a reference for training modules and sharing experiences to reduce conflict in society or between communities.

Psychological Security of Two Generations in Latvia

Article

Dec 2014

Gershons Moisejevich Breslavs

Hate Studies: The Urgency and Its Developments in the Perspective of Religious Studies

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Mochamad Ziaul Haq

This article is a descriptive study of hate. The phenomenon of hatred has prompted many researchers to find out more about hatred, the effects of hatred, and hate management. This research revealed that hatred had become a separate field of study, called the Hate Study, initiated and organized by the Gonzaga University Institute for Hate Studies, in 1997. Hate Studies became an international interdisciplinary field that united scholars, academic researchers, practitioners, human rights activists, policy makers, NGO leaders, and others. This study collects research results from various academic fields, both in the fields of humanities, social sciences, education, politics, economics, and the like so as to produce scientific discussions and practical applications in the academic, legal and policy settings, and counter-hate practices in community organizations civil. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the urgency of multidisciplinary religious studies disciplinary participation in hate studies, to analyze the evolution of hatred, and to find ways in dealing with the spread of hatred and violence that is needed by the plural world today. Therefore, the academic approach to religious studies will provide theoretical guidance and practice that can enrich understanding of hatred as well as dealing with the effects of hatred.

Is “Vicarious Retribution Model” Sufficient to Analyse Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes?

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2020

This study aims to scrutinise the implementation of a “vicarious retribution model” on anti-Muslim hate crimes and suggests that despite its advantages, the model is not sufficient to provide a clear picture of hate crimes alone and needs a supporting model such as “the domination hate model of intercultural relations” (DHMIR) to give it a historical and socio-political context. Whilst a rigorous model of analysis, the “vicarious retribution model,” has been co-opted by institutions to explain the rise in hate crimes based on the assumption that the U.K. (and other countries investigated) have only experienced Islamophobia in the post 9–11 context. The IHRC surveys in the U.K. in 2010 and 2014, the occurrence of Brexit, and the post-referendum spike in hate crimes belie some of the foundations of the applicability of this model. Therefore, the study is an effort to understand anti-Muslim hate crimes through the use of the “vicarious retribution model” and the DHMIR.

Chapter 1 -The Evolution of Warfare

Preprint

Full-text available

Jul 2019

Anthony C. Lopez

Introduction: The evolution and history of warfare has been investigated by philosophers, historians, practitioners, social scientists and life scientists. Common questions in this endeavour are: How far back into human evolution and history do we find evidence of warfare? How frequent was warfare in any given historical period? How lethal was warfare? In short, scholarship on the evolution and history of warfare has focused on questions of origins, frequency, and intensity. Despite the fact that scientific interest in these questions is perhaps broader and more methodologically sophisticated than ever, consensus on these questions remains elusive for at least two reasons. First, the archaeological record of warfare is incomplete. Second, we do not agree on what warfare is or how to unambiguously distinguish it from other forms of violence. Beyond an agreement that warfare is something more than violence between two individuals, there is little consensus on the proper scope of our main unit of analysis. Given these hurdles, it would seem that an investigation into the evolutionary origins of human warfare is destined merely to perpetuate academic stalemates, in which old arguments are continuously repackaged with each new discovery of a mass grave or 'peaceful' society. Although this is a rather pessimistic view, I establish it at the forefront of this chapter since my argument will be that these hurdles (e.g. knowledge of ancestral phenomena and consensus on definitions) are not insurmountable. Entire disciplines thrive on their ability to successfully infer and model the unobserved past based on imperfect historical, geological and archaeological evidence. And the question of definitions must be placed in its proper scope-as a methodological, rather than ontological, consideration. One of the core dynamics of the evolutionary process is natural selection, which is the only force known to organise biological design-that is; natural selection builds adaptations. Given that biological adaptations are solutions to recurrent and reproductively significant problems in an organism's environment, these adaptations themselves convey some information about the environment in which they evolved. In other words, the form and function of adaptations contains information about the (socio)ecology in which they were built. Therefore, if there is an argument to be made about the ancestral frequency and intensity of warfare, we should expect that the form and function of our evolved psychology should reflect the ancestral existence of such challenges. This is a way of saying that if warfare was evolutionarily recurrent and reproductively significant for our ancestors, evidence of this fact lies in our very brains.

Deontological Preparedness of the Teacher as a Guarantee of Psychological Comfort in the Classroom

Article

Dec 2013

Galiyabanu Kertayeva

The evolution of war: theory and controversy

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2015

Anthony C. Lopez

The use of evolutionary theory for explaining human warfare is an expanding area of inquiry, but it remains obstructed by two important hurdles. One is that there is ambiguity about how to build an evolutionary theory of human warfare. The second is that there is ambiguity about how to interpret existing evidence relating to the evolution of warfare. This paper addresses these problems, first by outlining an evolutionary theory of human warfare, and second by investigating the veracity of four common claims made against the use of evolutionary theory for explaining warfare. These claims are: (1) ancestral warfare was not frequent or intense enough to have selected for psychological adaptations in humans for warfare; (2) the existence of peaceful societies falsifies the claim that humans possess adaptations for fighting; (3) if psychological adaptations for warfare exist, then war is an inevitable and universal component of the human condition; (4) modern warfare and international politics is so qualitatively different from ancestral politics that any adaptations for the latter are inoperative or irrelevant today. By outlining an evolutionary theory of war and clarifying key misunderstandings regarding this approach, international relations scholars are better positioned to understand, engage, and contribute to emerging scholarship on human warfare across the social and evolutionary sciences.

Is Peacemaking Unpatriotic?: The Function of Homophobia in the Discursive World

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2013

Mari J. Matsuda

Self-doubt is not the custom in public debate. In adversarial speech performance, the voice of certainty carries weight. Probing, intersubjective, self-reflective conversation is odd. Yet if speech is a cornerstone of democracy, if developing better ways to live on this planet without destroying it is a prerequisite to our survival, we need to bring all the necessary ideas to the table. The First Amendment can save your life; the wrong idea can kill you. This is why I am concerned about the mechanisms by which speech is suppressed in daily life, and am searching to understand the ways in which Hate Studies tells us something about conversation ending.

Psychological aspects of personal safety

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Jan 2018

Desiring Diversity and Backlash: White Property Rights in Higher Education

Article

Nov 2015

Leigh Patel

In this theoretical essay, I argue that the current incidences of backlash to diversity are best understood as a dynamic of complicated, historic and intertwined desires for racial diversity and white entitlement to property. I frame this argument in the theories of critical race theory and settler colonialism, each of which provide necessary but incomplete analytic tools for understanding systemic racism and property rights. Situating universities and colleges as white settler property established on seizure contextualizes both the ways in which the desire for diversity is connected to white supremacy and leads to subsequent backlash to the presence of people of color, particularly those in positions of authority. I close with a discussion of the tension between property rights and potential cultural transformation.

Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2001

An evolved module for fear elicitation and fear learning with 4 characteristics is proposed. (a) The fear module is preferentially activated in aversive contexts by stimuli that are fear relevant in an evolutionary perspective. (b) Its activation to such stimuli is automatic. (c) It is relatively impenetrable to cognitive control. (d) It originates in a dedicated neural circuitry, centered on the amygdala. Evidence supporting these propositions is reviewed from conditioning studies, both in humans and in monkeys; illusory correlation studies; studies using unreportable stimuli; and studies from animal neuroscience. The fear module is assumed to mediate an emotional level of fear learning that is relatively independent and dissociable from cognitive learning of stimulus relationships.

The effect of a major event on stereotyping: terrorist attacks in Israel and Israeli adolescents' perceptions of Palestinians, Jordanians and Arabs

Article

Full-text available

May 2001

The Rise, Maintenance, and Destruction of Peaceable Polity: A Preliminary Essay in Political Ecology

Chapter

Mar 1992

Robert Knox Dentan

This book explores the role of aggression in primate social systems and its implications for human behavior. Many people look to primate studies to see if and how we might be able to predict violent behavior in humans, or ultimately to control war. Of particular interest in the study of primate aggression are questions such as: how do primates use aggression to maintain social organization; what are the costs of aggression; why do some primates avoid aggressive behavior altogether. Students and researchers in primatology, behavioral biology, anthropology, and psychology will read with interest as the editors and contributors to this book address these and other basic questions about aggression. They bring new information to the topic as well as an integrated view of aggression that combines important evolutionary considerations with developmental, sociological, and cultural perspectives.

Us and the Others:: The Familial Roots of Ethnonationalism

Chapter

Oct 1998

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

CHAPTER 2. Emancipation: Growth and Transformation of a Political Movement

Chapter

Dec 1966

Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement

Article

May 2003

Social psychology and intergroup conflict.

Chapter

Jan 2001

Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions

Article

Jul 1996

I Shall Not Hate. A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity

Article

Jul 2015

Izzeldin Abuelaish

This story is a necessary lesson against hatred and revenge, says Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Laurate, about a Palestinian who has lived through half a century of horror and destruction in Gaza. After losing his three daughters in January 2009 during an Israeli incursion into Gaza Strip, Dr. Abuelaish said: "If I could know that my daughters were the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, then I would accept their loss".

Darwin, Sex and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture

Article

Jan 1992

The Individual Psychology of Group Hate

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