ChapterPDF Available

Abstract

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotions and psychological disorders. Experts from a number of different disciplines—psychology, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, and more—tackle a variety of “how” (proximate) and “why” (ultimate) questions about the function of emotions in humans and nonhuman animals, how emotions work, and their place in human life. This volume documents the explosion of knowledge in emotion science over the last few decades, outlines important areas of future research, and highlights key questions that have yet to be answered.
The Oxford Handbook of Evolution and the Emotions
Laith Al-Shawaf (ed.), Todd K. Shackelford (ed.)
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197544754.001.0001
Published: 2024 Online ISBN: 9780197544785 Print ISBN: 9780197544754
Search in this book
CH AP TE R
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197544754.013.7 Pages 163–180
Published: 22 May 2024
Abstract
Keywords: hatred, anger, neutralization theory, recalibrational theory, evolutionary psychology,
association value
Subject: Clinical Psychology, Psychology
Series: Oxford Library of Psychology
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
8 The Neutralization Theory of Hatred
Aaron Sell,Coltan Scrivner,Mitchell Landers,Anthony C. Lopez
This chapter argues that, while often conceptualized as an extreme form of anger, hatred is a distinct
emotion, with unique triggers, conceptual orientations, and terminating conditions. This is because
hatred evolved to address its own distinct adaptive problem: the existence of individuals who were—
on balance—costly to the hater. Because a well-designed system for solving this problem would have
been tailored toward neutralizing those costs, the authors call this hypothesis “the neutralization
theory of hatred.” This theory claims that hatred is triggered by cues that an individual’s existence
causes tness decrements for the hater. Cognitively, hatred orients the mind to view costs heaped onto
the hated person as benets to the hater—thus motivating spiteful behavior—and can be
characterized as maintaining a negative intrinsic welfare trade-o parameter toward the hated
person. Behaviorally, hatred can motivate either avoidance or a predatory cost-iniction strategy that
is designed to weaken, incapacitate, or terminate the target.
Introduction
On March 16, 1984, Leon Gary Plauché ambushed and killed Je Doucet at the Baton Rouge Metropolitan
Airport while Doucet was being transported to jail by the police. Leon spoke on a pay phone in the airport
while waiting, and when the handcued Doucet was led by, Leon turned and red one shot into Doucet’s
head. Local news captured the event on videotape.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Doucet had been taken into custody for kidnapping and molesting Plauché’s son. But, strange as it is to say,
Plauché did not seem to be angry with Doucet. Notably, Plauché shows no evidence of rage. His face—as best
it can be made out from the recording—is calm, his mouth closed. His body is still before he res. He utters
no vocalizations, no yells, no insults, no cries, even after shooting. He does not pace back and forth; indeed,
he surrenders calmly and even places the phone receiver he had been talking into back on the hook within a
second of having red a bullet into Doucet’s skull. None of these behaviors is consistent with the empirical
evidence of anger displays. Rather, we believe Leon Plauché was motivated by hatred—and that his
seemingly odd behavior starkly illustrates the functional distinctiveness of hatred and anger.
In this chapter, we describe the neutralization theory of hatred. We propose that this theory can explain the
major features of hatred, including its triggering conditions, its eect on internal regulatory variables,
and the behavioral strategies it produces as output. The theory holds that hatred evolved via natural
selection in order to address a specic selection pressure: the existence of individuals whose well-being
imposed a net tness cost on you. In simple parlance, some people are bad for you. In most species, the
evolved solution to this adaptive problem is to heap costs upon the target in an economical way so as to
diminish their ability to harm you. This is often done by killing the target (e.g., siblicide in various bird
species; see Mock et al., 1990). In humans, however, this lethal response occurs only in a minority of cases.
Rather, human hatred appears to make use of a mixed bag of strategies to minimize the costs emanating
from the hated target, including: (1) information warfare to diminish the target’s social power, (2) low-level
surreptitious cost iniction to diminish the target’s health, well-being, power, and to incentivize social
distance, (3) potentially lethal predatory-style aggression to diminish their power, and (4) avoidance of the
target to minimize the costs emanating from them.
p. 164
It is important to note that this chapter serves as a philosophical examination of the evolution of hatred at
the start of a new theory. Very few of the posited design features of this hypothesized adaptation have been
subjected to rigorous empirical testing. Enterprising researchers will nd many hypotheses worth
exploring.
Theoretical Approach: How Can We Know the Function of an Emotion?
This chapter takes an adaptationist approach (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Williams,
1966) that argues that natural selection generates phenotypic design that is geared toward solving problems
of reproduction. According to this framework, the function of an adaptation is proven to the extent that
researchers show a close alignment between the nature of a selection pressure and the design of the
hypothesized adaptation. In particular, adaptations must be shown to be ecient, economical, and well-
designed to have solved the problems of reproduction faced by our ancestors. Thus, to prove the function of
a given emotion, one not only must clearly state the hypothesized selection pressure that gave rise to it (i.e.,
how did this emotion eectively replicate the genes that gave rise to it in past environments?), but also
must demonstrate how each design feature of the adaptation functionally addresses that selection pressure.
Thus, the adaptationist program requires a rigorous exploration of the basic features of any putative
adaptation. Unfortunately, basic features are often invisible because of a phenomenon called “instinct
blindness” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994) that leads humans to underestimate their own complicated nature
because it is so intuitive to them. This was illustrated most eloquently by the oft-quoted William James in
his Principles of Psychology (1890):
To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not
scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular
maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful
soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and agrantly made from all eternity to be loved!”
And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in presence of
particular objects. They, too, are a priori syntheses. To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be
loved; to the bear, the shebear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that
there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating
and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her. Thus we may be sure
that, however mysterious some animals’ instincts may appear to us, our instincts will appear no
less mysterious to them.
(p. 387)
He goes on to say, “A priori, there is no reason to suppose that any sensation might not in some animal
cause any emotion and any impulse. To us it seems unnatural that an odor should directly excite anger or
fear; or a color, lust” (p. 387). We linger on this point only to establish the importance of explaining what
seems obvious about our emotions. If a man were to abuse your child, it seems most obvious that you would
feel hatred. But a scientic explanation of this fact is not obvious! In the case of Leon Gary Plauché, such
hatred brought no obvious benet to his son; furthermore, Plauché himself only narrowly avoided spending
the rest of his life in prison. If there were—ancestrally—a reproductive benet to the hatred program that
existed in Plauché’s brain, it is not obviously evidenced by his shooting Doucet. One is tempted to posit that
the “function” of the emotion is the justice it created, but this is exactly the kind of faulty reasoning that
William James warned us about. Evolution does not select a gene because of “justice”; nature is simple
mathematics—a gene spreads if, on balance, it increases its proportional frequency in the next generation
and for no other reason.
p. 165
One way to avoid instinct blindness is to reason as an engineer: given a problem, what would a well-
designed solution look like? For instance, suppose you were a software engineer tasked with designing a
robot to avoid physical danger. Would that program look like human fear? By focusing on the selection
pressure rather than the adaptation, one can avoid some of the pitfalls of instinct blindness.
Here, we focus on the selection pressure we believe resulted in the emotion of hatred: individuals whose
future existence is a net tness cost to you.
Engineering a Solution to the Existence of Toxic Individuals
The existence of others aects your tness (Aktipis et al., 2018; Hamilton, 1964; Tooby & Cosmides, 1996;
Trivers, 1971). This selection pressure can be illustrated with a simple thought experiment. A given
individual—let us call him Leon—will leave a certain nite, quantiable number of his genes in 100 years. If
Leon were to use magic powers to “vanish” another individual from his social group, that number of future
genes either increases, decreases, or stays the same. Following others (Petersen et al., 2010; Tooby &
Cosmides, 1996), we refer to this delta value measuring the actual change in reproductive success as the
“association value” (AV) of the individual such that AVxy represents the impact of x’s existence on y’s
reproductive success. In this formulation, association value is an objective indicator (like Hamilton’s r) that
refers to the actual eect of another’s existence on one’s tness. We do not presuppose that individual
organisms will have perfect knowledge of association value, just as they do not have perfect knowledge of r
(Lieberman et al., 2007).
Thus, there exists at any time and for every individual a subset of others whose existence aects their
tness negatively (i.e., individuals with negative association value; for convenience, we refer to such people
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Identifying Toxic Individuals
as “toxic”). Such individuals impose net tness costs and thus serve as a selection pressure. To the extent
that one can mitigate this damage, remove those individuals, or otherwise shape the environment to
decrease the tness costs of the toxic person, one will reproduce more, passing on to future generations the
genes that gave rise to mechanisms producing those tness-enhancing behaviors. Given this logic, we
hypothesize that humans possess an adaptation that functions to (1) identify toxic individuals (i.e., those
with negative AV to oneself) and (2) act in ways that minimize the tness costs coming from these
individuals.
How could one know who these toxic individuals are? In the thought experiment above, we eliminated a
person and waited 100 years to see the impact. Such an experiment would be impossible, of course.
Rather, animals and humans presumably evolved to detect cues that an individual’s future AV will be
negative and respond to those—admittedly imperfect—cues.
p. 166
In swallow-tailed kites (a bird native to northern Guatemala), mothers typically lay two eggs. The rst
hatchling, however, needs to share food and space with their clutch-mate sibling. Therefore, the existence
of this second sibling is, presumably, a tness cost to the rst. The solution that evolved was simple—the
rst hatchling pecks at the skull of its sibling until it cracks and ejects it from the nest (Gerhardt et al.,
1997). In this way, the rst hatchling secures a monopoly on parental investment and typically proceeds to
reproduce more—and this dierence was, on average, enough to make up for the copies of its genes in its
siblings that can no longer reproduce.
In the swallow-tailed kite, the cue of this toxic individual is relatively straightforward: it is the presence of
the other chick in the nest. But for complicated social species such as our own, with debt, mutual
dependence, status competition, intergroup conict, shifting alliances, large-scale group cooperation, mate
poaching, and so on, an accurate cue detector will be more dicult to instantiate, and will need to process a
greater variety of cues.
The future is dicult to predict in most cases, but we can store evidence from the past. Because the best
predictor of future behavior is past behavior (Epstein, 1979; 1980; Ouellette & Wood, 1998), one can
reasonably conclude that a person who has imposed very large tness costs on you will be more likely to
impose similar costs in the future. Therefore, if we were to engineer an adaptation that functions to identify
toxic individuals, it should at a minimum respond to individuals who have already imposed substantial
costs on the individual (without corresponding benets). Because association value is about the net eect of
the person’s future existence, small repeated costs would also predict low AV—possibly even more so than
one large cost.
Furthermore, humans have—presumably for this sort of reason—evolved the ability to run metacognitive
counterfactuals as a form of articial time travel (Epstude & Roese, 2008). We are capable of estimating
what would have happened if we were to change one aspect of a person or situation and predict the future
based on that dierence. This is key to our ability to blame and credit individuals for outcomes (Martin &
Cushman, 2016). This same ability allows us to estimate what our circumstances would be like if a given
person did not exist. Such a hypothetical enables us to identify individuals whose existence is bad for us
(e.g., if Jessie weren’t here, maybe Rick Springeld would have his girl; if Bin Laden hadn’t existed, many of
our friends and family would still be alive). Note, however, that in the second example, removing a person
after they have imposed massive tness costs would not necessarily be selected for (e.g., killing Bin Laden
didn’t raise the dead, nor did killing Doucet un-molest Leon’s son), unless those past behaviors predicted
future costs as well. From the point of view of a well-engineered hatred system, toxic individuals should
ideally be identied early, before massive tness consequences occur.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Minimize the Fitness Consequences Coming from the Toxic Individual
One way to identify toxic individuals before their existence imposes costs is to learn who the toxic
individuals are from others—a process akin to mate copying (Gouda-Vossos et al., 2018). Only instead of
learning who is a desirable mate, we learn who has negative association value (AV). This strategy relies upon
our fellow humans to relay aspects of the toxic individual to us with high delity and comes with an
additional inaccuracy—a person’s association value will dier from one person to the next (e.g., Jessie’s girl
presumably benets from Jessie’s continued existence even if Rick does not). Therefore, this method of
negative AV detection is probably less valid than personal experience unless the person you are learning
from is similar to you in ways that predict the target would have similar association values for both of you
(e.g., an enemy of my child is usually an enemy of mine as well).
Finally, this AV detection mechanism may make use of other specialized systems that identify targets with
negative AV. For example, envy may identify individuals whose continued existence deprives you of a share
of resources or stands in the way of your optimal mate choice (DelPriore et al., 2012). Anger identies
individuals who treat your welfare with insucient respect in ways that will lead to future cost iniction
(Sell et al., 2017; Sell & Szyncer, Chapter 4 in this volume). And so forth.
p. 167
Once individuals with negative association value have been identied, the system must implement
strategies to reduce the costs imposed by that individual’s existence.
The most theoretically clear solution is to cease their existence by killing them. This is a solution readily
seen in the animal kingdom. For example, ground squirrels compete for food with prairie dogs, so the
prairie dogs kill the ground squirrel’s infants and leave them for scavenger birds (Hoogland & Brown, 2016).
Prairie dogs have a size and strength advantage over the infants they kill, making this behavior relatively
low cost. By contrast, killing conspecics can be more dangerous because of the costs of ghting, the
possibility of retaliation by friends and family of the deceased, and the—often negative—social and
reputational consequences that arise by demonstrating a willingness to kill individuals when it is in one’s
own interest. Furthermore, due to its permanent nature, the killing of toxic individuals makes it impossible
to recoup cooperative benets if one has miscalculated the association value of the person one has killed.
Nonetheless, the fact that killing the target is a permanent and often complete solution to the problem of a
negative association value, and that it has been repeatedly selected for in other animals, suggests that
killing a toxic individual should be part of human nature’s toolkit of evolved responses, even if
circumstances frequently make this option injudicious or too costly.
Alternative strategies for dealing with toxic individuals are dicult to predict a priori without an
understanding of how that individual depresses one’s tness interests. However, generally speaking, if a
person’s existence is costly to your tness, the situation would usually have improved to the extent that this
person’s inuence over the social world was diminished. Lessening this person’s inuence would be a
particularly good solution if the negative tness consequences stemmed from this person actively pursuing
their own interests, e.g., in cases of resource competition, mate competition, status blocking, and so on. In
those circumstances, lowering the toxic person’s health, well-being, reputation, and status would result in
improved tness because the toxic individual would be less capable of pursuing their own interests
eectively. In short, toxic individuals should provoke in people a desire to harm them in cost-eective
ways. Finally, if the toxic individual is depressing your welfare via interactions with you, then avoiding the
toxic individual will be a potentially cost-eective means of reducing the damage done.
In sum, a simple information-processing analysis of the problem of negative association values in past
environments leads to the prediction that natural selection should have designed a mechanism that
functions to identify individuals whose existence in the future is costly to you, then enacts a suite of
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Triggers of Hatred
cognitive and behavioral procedures designed to minimize the negative tness consequences of the target’s
existence. It is our contention that these are the major features of the emotion of hatred. We call this the
neutralization theory of hatred (see also Sell & Lopez, 2020).
The Neutralization Theory of Hatred
According to the neutralization theory, hatred evolved in order to neutralize the eects of individuals with
negative association values, i.e., individuals whose existence is costly to you. In short, hatred responds to
cues that, ancestrally, predicted that a person’s continued existence and well-being were a net tness loss
to you. Once triggered by these varied cues, hatred calibrates the individual to treat the target dierently. In
particular, hatred leads to a negative intrinsic welfare trade-o ratio (iWTR; an internal index that
determines when a person will trade o on their own welfare to benet another; Delton & Robertson, 2016;
Sell, 2011; Sell et al., 2017; Tooby et al., 2008). A negative WTR means that a person experiencing hatred will
spitefully accept costs in order to impose costs (or avoid beneting) the target of hate. An intrinsic negative
WTR is experienced as a lack of empathy, a desire to see the individual suer (i.e., sadism when costs are
inicted by the hater, schadenfreude when they are inicted by other means), and a preoccupation with
thoughts of imposing costs on the target. Finally, hatred prudently enacts behavioral strategies that include
a predatory style of aggression, information warfare and ally recruitment, and avoidance of the target.
Hatred, unlike anger, does not have ready terminating conditions that shut it o (see Sell & Szyncer,
Chapter 4 in this volume). It is predicted to maintain itself as an orientation toward the target until they
cease to exist or their association value becomes positive, though the behavioral strategies of hatred are not
designed to bring about this latter endpoint.
p. 168
1
Our functional analysis suggests four predicted triggers of hatred:
(1) directly experiencing costs from that individual,
(2) hypothetical reasoning about how one’s life would be dierent if that person did not exist or was
diminished in power,
(3) socially learning whom others nd toxic—with increased certainty put on the opinions of individuals
who are similar to us or have shared interests, and
(4) the outputs of other specialized mechanisms that identify individuals with negative association
value (e.g., other emotion systems).
Key to each one, and our central prediction, is that hatred is triggered by cues of a negative association
value. In short, the existence of the target predicts future costs. Importantly—and as always—we refer to
ancestral conditions in which modern genes were selected (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992), not to rational
analyses of modern circumstances. For example, it was unlikely that Doucet was going to molest Plauché’s
child again: Doucet was in police custody and was being led to jail. But police and prison are modern
inventions.
Note that cost iniction itself is not a sucient trigger to know that a person’s net future impact will likely
be negative. Instead, hatred should be particularly activated by costs that predict large future costs. These
include:
(1) Extreme costs that demonstrate a low welfare trade-o ratio (WTR). Recall that WTRs are internal
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
regulatory variables that indicate the extent to which a person will sacrice their own welfare to
benet yours, or vice versa. They are typically calibrated to .4 to .7 for friends (Delton & Robertson,
2016). A person’s WTR is revealed by the kinds of costs they are willing to impose on another in order
to benet themselves (Sell et al., 2017). A low WTR is revealed by imposing large costs on another for
relatively trivial benets (e.g., a colleague using your hand-knit scarf to clean ketchup o his face;
burdening your child with painful sexual memories and trauma for a eeting sexual experience).
Extreme costs alone may be insucient if they do not reveal a low WTR. For example, if Ted is
inattentive and hits your child with his car, it may have devastating eects on your welfare, but this
may be insucient to provoke intense hatred. Now, compare this to Ted seeing your child playing in
the street and slamming the gas because he thinks that’s funny. This second scenario indicates a
much more serious future threat to your tness, because it reveals his stunningly low WTR toward
you and your child. The evolutionary mechanisms needed to distinguish intentional harm from
unintentional harm are beginning to be mapped (Martin & Cushman, 2016; Sell et al., 2017), but
more work here will be useful for understanding hatred as well. Because intentional harms reveal a
much lower WTR toward their target and are thus more predictive of future costs, we predict they
will generate more intense hatred. However, it is important to note that hatred does not require a low
WTR to be triggered. For example, if a woman’s husband is sexually attracted to a young autist, his
wife may hate her even if the young woman evinces perfectly acceptable levels of WTR. Indeed, the
autist could lavish respect and care upon the married woman and still be hated by her.
Finally, we should reiterate that repeated small costs can lead to hatred, even in the absence of a
low WTR. For example, as argued before (Sell, 2012), cases of elder abuse and child abuse appear to
result from the persistent negative eect of having to—at great expense of time, energy, and money
—care for another individual’s needs.
(2) The ability to reason hypothetically about a person’s nonexistence or diminished power should lead
to estimates of a negative association value and trigger hatred. Reverse-engineering our ability to
engage in counterfactual reasoning is beyond the scope of this chapter (though see Martin &
Cushman, 2016), but the fact that we can contemplate how our life would be without a person’s
existence or well-being is sucient to provide a cue of another’s association value. When we run
these hypotheticals and determine that we would be better o without the toxic person, hatred
should be triggered. This is particularly clear in cases of envy or jealousy, where the target of hatred
has not demonstrated a low WTR or in other ways evinced low moral character or a willingness to
harm others. The fact remains, however, that this individual has resources, or a mate, or territory,
that might be yours if they were gone.
(3) There would have been a selection pressure to identify toxic individuals as early as possible (e.g.,
Plauché probably wished he knew that Doucet was a pedophile much earlier than he did). One way of
discovering such individuals earlier is to copy the information from others who may have already
experienced the costs that emanate from the hated target. For this reason, we expect for hatred to
spread socially such that individuals will copy hatred toward targets under some circumstances.
Those circumstances likely include the following: (i) you are more likely to copy the hatred of your
loved ones and peers because if your loved one hates a person, this person’s existence is probably
toxic for you as well, given the relationship between love and shared tness interests; (ii) hatred is
more likely to be copied when it is more widespread because this gives some converging evidence
that the target is toxic to a large number of people; (iii) you are more likely to copy hatred when the
nature of the hated person’s toxicity is particularly threatening to you, e.g., parents may be
particularly likely to copy Plauché’s hatred of Doucet.
Unfortunately, the social learning of hatred suggests that it can become contagious. An error in
perception can lead one person to hate another, which is then copied, and can create a snowball
eect. Of particular concern is the fact that individuals who defend the hated person are—in
p. 169
2
p. 170
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Anger
Envy
perception—preventing the mob from neutralizing this toxic person, and thus are becoming costly
themselves. The mob then lowers their estimate of the defender’s association value and often hates
them as well.
(4) Finally, hatred is predicted to make use of calculations from other emotional systems (and possibly
other systems more widely) to identify individuals whose existence is tness-suppressing. We
highlight the following examples:
Anger is designed to identify people whose welfare trade-o ratios are below the appropriate negotiated
level as perceived by the angry individual (Sell & Szyncer, Chapter 6 in this volume). In short, anger
identies those who do not value you suciently. Such a calculation means that the target of the anger is
imposing more costs than they otherwise would. Note, however, that in most cases of anger the target is not
hated. On the contrary, they are often loved (Averill, 1983; see Sell, 2011). This is because a “lower than it
should be” WTR can still translate into an overall benecial relationship. Indeed, anger is most common
between family members or friends who maintain positive association values with each other, but still nd
room to negotiate over welfare trade-o ratios.
That said, a low WTR will lead someone to impose large costs for relatively trivial benets and does portend
future costs. In short, if someone is willing to knock your ice cream out of your hand for the laughs, what
else might they be willing to do? Such a person—if they do not possess other compensating traits—would
presumably be a net tness suppressor for you, and would trigger hatred.
Anger and hatred can both respond to targets who exhibit a low WTR. A full contrast of these emotions is
beyond the scope of this chapter, but we note that anger and hatred function distinctly in that anger
attempts to recalibrate and bargain with a target, while hatred attempts to neutralize them. These—and
other distinctions—are worth more empirical scrutiny.
We consider envy an underexplored emotion—at least from the perspective most able to produce clear
thinking about its function, namely evolutionary psychology (see Ramachandran & Jalal, 2017; Sznycer et
al., 2017). Like Sznycer et al., we take envy to be an adaptation that identies individuals who hold resources
or status that would further our reproductive interests. This gives an incentive to deprive them of that status
or power. In short, unless they possess osetting traits, their existence is a cost to us, and we would be
better o if they were to suer a deprivation of life, status, or resources. Hatred, thus, can be triggered from
envy. We consider the long-standing demonization of the wealthy and middle-man minorities to be, in
part, a consequence of this emotion (see Sowell, 2016). While this form of envy is generally not functional in
modern market economies, envy and hatred evolved in small-scale economies with limited resources
shared between small numbers of individuals.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Jealousy
Fear
Disgust
Shame
Hatred
Mate competition is arguably as strong a selection pressure as resource competition (Darwin, 1871; Buss,
2005), and because of its competitive nature an individual can benet by eliminating a toxic rival. Thus, the
preconditions are met for hating one’s romantic rival in a mate competition scenario—again, presuming
no compensating traits. Importantly, this explanation predicts hatred toward one’s rival, but not
necessarily toward one’s mate who may be thinking of straying. We consider Daly and Wilson’s arguments
that spousal killings are byproducts of a mate-guarding adaptation to be the best explanation of this
phenomenon (Daly & Wilson, 1988; Wilson & Daly, 1992). We will note—puzzling though it may be—that
spousal killers frequently describe both hatred and love for their victims (Chimbos, 1978). The coexistence
of seemingly opposite adaptations that are characterized by self-sacrice, care, high intrinsic WTR on one
hand, and spite, aggression, and negative intrinsic WTR on the other hand, remains to be explored.
p. 171
Individuals capable of imposing great costs on you are—of course—a danger. To the extent that this danger
becomes likely, and—importantly—that the source of this danger does not provide useful benets to you
that outweigh this risk, then the feared person or persons are predicted to be hated, i.e., one would be better
o without them. The rise in hate crimes toward Muslims after the 9/11 attacks may be an example of this
(Disha et al., 2011).
While disgust serves multiple purposes (see Lieberman et al., 2007; Cepon-Robins, Chapter 9 in this
volume), one feature of disgust is that it identies individuals who are potential disease vectors. Disgust
triggers avoidance, but it can also establish that the target’s existence is a net harm to you. As a result,
hatred may be triggered by those who are “disgusting.” While removing pathogen vectors could clearly be
selected for, we also note that there is a long history of attacks on people who engage in other behavior that
can trigger disgust, e.g., individuals engaging in deviant sexual practices, eating unusual foods, and so on.
We note, of course, that compensatory factors that upregulate one’s intrinsic WTR will counteract this, such
that hatred is not reliably activated toward one’s child when they get the snies. Indeed, introspection
suggests that love appears to deactivate disgust.
Shame is believed to have evolved in order to slow or stop the spread of negative information about oneself
(Sznycer et al., 2012; Landers et al., Chapter 7 in this volume). As such, one feature of shame is to identify
the vectors of that negative information—the person who has this information and may spread it to others.
Such a person’s existence is harmful and would lead to a lower association value as a result. Should that
value be negative, we predict that the shamed person should hate the bearer of negative information, even if
the person has done nothing with that information.3
One of the eects of hatred is to heap costs upon the target. If someone hates you, they will lie about you,
broadcast your inadequacies, look for costs to put on you, and fantasize about harming you. As a result, your
life is likely to be worse o for their existence. Thus, once hatred is revealed, it will likely be reciprocal. This
has important implications for how hatred should express itself; specically, it should be hidden from the
target if possible (see below).
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Computational Structure of Hatred
Interestingly, this creates a perverse—but empirically veried—prediction (Schopler & Compere, 1971),
which is that we should hate those that we have unjustly harmed. If you harm a person—you are
presumably triggering hatred in them—which means that they are now an enemy who will likely work
against you in the future. Thus, their continued existence is bad for you, triggering hatred.
p. 172
Finally, we should say that this list is likely not exhaustive. There may be cases where a target is hated
merely because they have an incentive to harm you; e.g., a non-oending pedophile is still a person who
potentially wants to molest your children.
According to the neutralization theory, the most signicant eect of hatred is to set a negative intrinsic
WTR toward the hated target. The more negative, the more “hated” the target is. Recall that welfare trade-
o ratios set the accepted discount rate on another’s welfare when making decisions that impact you both.
For example, a WTR of .7 toward my friend will cause me to impose costs of 10 on them if I benet 8 or
more, but not if I benet only 6 or less (i.e., the decision rule is “take the self-benecial action whenever the
benet to the self is more than the cost to the other times the WTR,” or Bx > Cy * WTRxy). A negative WTR
means that one will take any benet no matter how much it hurts the target (if Bx is a benet, it will always
be higher than a negative number). For example, an intrinsic WTR of –.5 calibrates the individual to exploit
the hated target for benets. She will accept costs in order to hurt the target, if the cost is half the damage to
the hated enemy or less. She will also deny herself certain benets because the target would benet as well,
if the hated target would benet twice as much or more, and so on. This is the essence of spite.
Herman Melville perfectly illustrated an extreme negative WTR at the conclusion of Moby Dick, when
Captain Ahab uses his last breath to spit at the whale. The WTR logic is as follows: Ahab willingly gave up his
last breath of air (presumably a weighty benet as it was all he had left; let’s say Bx = 100), in order to
impose a trivial cost on the whale (spitting on an ocean-soaked mammal with thick skin; let’s say Cy = 1).
Thus Ahab’s WTR toward the whale is revealed to be less than or equal to –100, an intense amount of hate
that licenses extraordinarily spiteful behavior on Ahab’s part.
If you have a negative WTR toward a target, you should be aware and searching for opportunities to impose
costs on the target. Such cost iniction is incentivized in the same way that we are incentivized to look for
opportunities to help people we value intrinsically. In this way, hatred causes a desire to see that individual
hurt whether or not we are causing their hurt (Rempel et al., 2019).
Welfare trade-o ratios are believed to be used in many downstream cognitive systems (see Sell et al., 2017).
For example, WTRs appear to govern memory such that higher WTRs lead us to pay more attention to the
target and remember more information about them. Forgetting about a person (or an aspect of that person)
is thus a trigger of anger because it reveals a low WTR (Sell, 2014). For hatred, the negative WTR presumably
causes a similar increase in memory delity and for the same reasons. We need to know information about
those that we value highly so that we can make choices that benet them (e.g., I need to remember that my
child has an allergy). Similarly, we need to know if our hated enemy has an allergy as well, so that we can
make choices that harm them. For this reason, we predict that it is the magnitude of the WTR rather than its
valence that increases memory.
Similarly, the recalibrational theory of anger predicts (see Sell & Sznycer, Chapter 6 in this volume) that
holding a high WTR toward someone implies that their interests must be considered frequently. For
example, when making a decision about whether to move, a woman presumably weighs the likely welfare
impact the move will have on those toward whom she has a high WTR (e.g., her husband, her friends, her
children, her family). But she will not likely consider the interests of those she has a low intrinsic WTR
toward, e.g., her mail carrier, her colleague from HR, her ex-boyfriend. The interests of these individuals
p. 173
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Behavioral Strategies of Hatred
Predatory Aggression
are not likely to be considered at all because the low WTR discounts those interests to the point where they
would not sway the decision. A highly negative WTR, however, should be considered, just like a highly
positive WTR, because it is important to calculate the impact of your decisions on toxic individuals who are
imposing costs on you. In this way, a hated person (e.g., WTR = –1.0) is as important as a loved one (e.g.,
WTR = 1.0) when making one’s decisions.
4
Other eects of high WTRs appear to reverse when the WTR is negative. For example, we enjoy spending
time with those that we have high intrinsic WTRs toward, while we tend to avoid those we hate (Aumer &
Bahn, 2016). With high intrinsic WTRs, we often experience vicarious enjoyment of happiness (e.g., my
wife’s smile when she looked at our daughter for the rst time still makes me happy) and pain at their pain
(e.g., the actual birthing process). With negative intrinsic WTRs, these eects appear reversed such that the
pain of our hated enemies is enjoyable (e.g., Thomas Aquinas suspected one of the pleasures of heaven is
that we can watch the torture of the damned), and the happiness of our enemies is experienced as suering.
Our functional analysis of the “toxic individual” selection pressure suggests three kinds of behavioral
strategies for neutralizing the target:
(1) killing the target
(2) weakening the target to limit their power and inuence
(3) avoiding the target.
Killing a target requires aggression, and aggression is one of the most reliable behavioral tendencies
triggered by hatred. However, aggression can be implemented in dierent ways with dierent functions
(Sell & Lopez, 2020; Wrangham, 2018). For example, anger triggers bargaining-style aggression (see Sell,
2011) designed to force compliance or recalibrate welfare trade-o ratios. According to the neutralization
theory, the function of hatred-based aggression is to impose costs eciently on the target in order to
weaken them, diminish their physical or social power, or potentially kill them (Rempel et al., 2019). Thus,
the style of aggression activated by hatred is predicted to be “predatory” in nature.
We dene predatory-style aggression as aggression used to inict damage in the most ecient way
possible—minimizing risk and maximizing impact, e.g., a lion stalking a gazelle, or a kite killing its sibling.
It is characterized mostly by the features that are notably absent: (1) no signaling, (2) no escalation, (3) no
monitoring for surrender or submission, (4) continued aggression upon the target’s submission, (5) no
interrogations of the target’s motive or reasoning, and willful violations of the implicit rules of combat
(Romero et al., 2014; Sell & Lopez, 2020). Instead, predatory aggression should be characterized by:
(1) Deception in order to minimize the chance for the victim to prepare. This is presumably why hatred
does not have a corresponding facial expression, e.g., the anger face exaggerates cues of physical
strength to bargain with the target (Marsh et al., 2005; Reed et al., 2014; Sell et al., 2014), but intense
hatred appears to have no discernible reliable facial expression for the same reason the lion does not
roar at the gazelle.
(2) Rapid deployment of most costly aggression. Predatory aggression is designed to inict costs,
not demonstrate ghting skill, and so the usual pattern of ritualized conspecic aggression wherein
two animals ght for dominance has no purpose in predatory aggression. Hatred should motivate
p. 174
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Information Warfare
the kinds of aggression that are most costly for the victim (constrained by the risks to the attacker,
of course). For this reason, hatred-based human aggression should not make use of the usual rituals
of threat display (e.g., pushing and shoving, staring contests, threats, and so on; see Sell, 2011).
(3) Aggression should be timed to victim vulnerability. Because hatred-based aggression is often
surreptitious, and because retaliation, ight, and self-defense will often inate the costs of a second
attack, a man feeling hatred should choose his rst attack judiciously—timed to when it would be
most eective. This style of aggression is again evident in the stalking behavior of predators who
time their aggression to when prey is most vulnerable.
(4) As a corollary to point (3) above, signs of submission or fear will serve as evidence that the victim is
not in a good position to ght back or defend themselves. As such, these responses should have an
excited eect on the predatory aggression, as it indicates that this is a judicious time to attack a
helpless victim.
(5) Temporary increases in formidability (such as that provided by being in a group of like-minded
people) should increase the probability that hatred will give rise to predatory aggression.
(6) Predatory aggression should be more likely than other kinds of aggression to be lethal. While hatred
rarely leads to homicide (at least in the modern world; Pinker, 2012), the hatred adaptation was
forged in an ancestral world with much more aggression. We cannot know the frequency with which
intense hatred led to homicide, but we do note that research on homicidal fantasies shows that they
are abundant and common in the modern world (Buss, 2006). The neutralization theory of hatred
predicts that most of these fantasies are test runs—i.e., hypotheticals computed to learn the
feasibility and practicality of terminating a hated other. Note that the function of the fantasy is to
gather information; it is not as a nal check before a behavioral strategy is immediately deployed.
Despite its utility, killing those you hate has several potent limitations, including: (1) it can be impractical to
carry out given the target’s ghting ability or social position; (2) it may invite retaliation; (3) it cannot be
undone—errors of judgment are permanent; and (4) it can have harmful reputational costs for the killer.
Presumably for these reasons, natural selection has equipped hatred with alternative strategies that can also
be eective at limiting the power and inuence of a toxic person: information warfare.
A person’s power is often determined by the status, prestige, and concern shown them by others. If such a
person uses that power in ways that go against your interests—to the extent that their association value is
negative for you—then diminishing their social power can help ameliorate the damage done by the person.
In short, one can “damage” a hated other and diminish their power and inuence by recalibrating the
status-seeking machinery in the minds of other humans in the social group.
We can predict how this is done by understanding the status-setting systems themselves. Borrowing from
research on welfare trade-o ratios and the recalibrational theory of anger (Sell, 2011; Sell et al., 2009;
Sell et al., 2017; Tooby et al., 2008) and from direct work on status itself (Durkee et al., 2020), one can
postulate that status-setting mechanisms should grant status to those who are capable of defending their
own interests (e.g., ghting ability, coalitional strength), producing benets for others (e.g., hunting skill,
holding useful knowledge), and being inclined to benet those in their group (e.g., loyalty, reciprocity). As
such, we can predict that an individual should attempt to spread information about the hated target that
minimizes that target’s value in the eyes of others: e.g., they are poor cooperators either from eort or
ability; they are weak; they are promiscuous backstabbing cowards; and so on. The functional goal of this
information warfare is to lower others’ WTR toward the target, preferably to the point of engendering
p. 175
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Attentional Direction and Information Gathering
hatred toward them. By doing this, a person who hates a target can mobilize other people’s hatred
mechanisms and deprive the target of allies, friends, social power, and—at times—their life.
Crucially, there is no particular need for this negative information to be truthful (see also Petersen et al.,
2020). Given that gossip and character assassination rarely allow for the victim to respond, great gains can
be had against a target provided there is no one to counter the negative information. Again, the contagious
nature of hatred makes this feature of the adaptation dangerous from a societal perspective. An innocent
person, tarred with hateful gossip, will become a bad investment for defenders because those defenders will
be seen as helping maintain a toxic individual. The mob will then lower their approximations of the
defender’s association value, and frequently hate them as well. This can create a perverse incentive for third
parties who are now incentivized to hate a target who has no genuine toxic eects, merely to avoid the
appearance of defending them.
Emotions frequently direct attention at certain aspects of the environment that predict which of the
multiple strategies available to the emotion will be most eective (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000). Of course,
hatred directs attention to the target, such that the appearance of a hated other will often distract from
other tasks and emotions.
Hatred appears to focus attention on the hated target (Aumer & Bahn, 2016). For example, it would be
dicult to concentrate on anything else if you were seated next to your sister’s rapist. The hated target is
important to attend to for the same reasons that a loved one is: one’s decisions need to mold to the welfare
of that other. It is therefore important to know what the person does and does not like, who their allies are,
what debts they have, what secrets they hold, which individuals they are attracted to, which individuals they
hate, and so on. While it is pleasurable to learn about someone you love, there is an odd tendency to feel
compelled to learn about someone you hate, despite the fact that doing so is not enjoyable. The phenomena
of “hate following” people on social media, for example, involves individuals paying attention to the words
and opinions of individuals they hate. Importantly, this phenomenon is not a well-intentioned desire to
understand another’s perspective, but rather is a hunt for information that can be weaponized against
them. Indeed, hatred shows an active aversion to understanding the perspective of the target. It suggests
not just a disinterest in the target’s defense, but a claim that no defense should be considered. For example,
after the 9/11 attacks on the United States by Al Qaeda, the actor Richard Gere spoke in public and suggested
that America attempt to “understand” why the terrorists did this, and he was roundly booed for his
suggestion. Tactically, understanding the motives of one’s enemies may be useful, but curiously hatred (at
least intense hatred) appears to negate this—at least over some facets of motivation. We consider the most
likely explanation of this phenomena to be that understanding the motives and desires of an enemy will lead
to negotiations over those conicts (see Halperin et al., 2011), and that negotiations are incompatible
with the function of hatred, which is to nullify an enemy rather than appease one.
p. 176
The selection pressure for this feature of hatred—specically the aversion to learning the motives and
explanations for a hated target’s behavior—is hypothesized to be this: if a hated target is allowed to oer
explanations, caveats, or apologies to the larger social group, this will diminish one’s ability to recruit allies
against that target. This is because association values will dier from person to person (e.g., Doucet’s
existence may be less negative to someone who does not have children). The ability to negotiate one’s
toxicity is one tool a hated person can use to diuse hatred; e.g., via upregulating WTRs to compensate, as is
typically done in apologies—“I know it can’t be easy to live with someone like me … I’ll be more
conscientious in the future”—or simply bestowing benets to countervail their negative eects. A person
whose hatred is based on an extremely potent negative association value may not want the target to be able
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Avoidance
Terminating Conditions for Hatred
A Misperception of Association Value Is Corrected
The Target Recalibrates Their WTR and This Results in a Positive Association Value
to bargain at all. This nal point may explain why when people hate a gure, they often attempt to silence
them.
In some cases, the tness costs of some individuals with negative association values can be blunted by
merely not being near them; e.g., a colleague who never lets you get back to work; an ex-boyfriend who tries
to shame you with questions. To the extent that avoiding these people reduced their tness-suppressing
eects, natural selection would have selected avoidance as an output of hatred. Indeed, hatred does appear
to motivate avoidance of a target, unless—of course—one is intent on aggression (see Aumer & Bahn, 2016).
What circumstances should lead hatred to deactivate? According to the selection pressure posited here,
hatred should deactivate when the target’s association value becomes zero or positive. This can occur for a
number of reasons. We speculate on common cases here.
Hatred is activated by internal estimates of a target’s association value. Those estimates are necessarily
imperfect. If hatred is activated via a misperceived negative association value that is later corrected, hatred
should deactivate and guilt should be activated to repair any damage done by hatred (Gilbert, Chapter 15 in
this volume). This will sometimes happen upon re-evaluation of a target’s actions, e.g., the police arrested
the wrong man for killing your mother; the guy who kept pulling your pigtails is actually irting with you,
not bullying you; the stranger who is stalking your Facebook page turns out to be your long-lost brother.
To reiterate, WTR is an internal regulatory variable that functions primarily to determine which self-
interested actions to take and which altruistic actions to take (Delton & Robertson, 2016; Sell et al., 2017;
Tooby et al., 2008). It stores (in colloquial terms) the degree of respect or regard one has for another.
Raising another’s low WTR is the primary function of anger (Sell, 2011; Sell et al., 2017; Sell & Sznycer,
Chapter 6 in this volume), which contains distinct behavioral strategies and triggers. However, a low WTR
will lead a person to impose costs on another—and deny them benets—and as such will (all else being
equal) lead to a lower association value. This is presumably why anger and hatred often activate together
(i.e., anger bargains for better treatment, while hatred neutralizes the target’s power).
If anger successfully bargains for better treatment and the target apologizes and raises their WTR, then it is
possible that the estimated association value for that target also becomes positive, and hatred deactivates as
well. Note, as mentioned earlier, that hatred can be activated even when the target has a high WTR toward
you (e.g., the obsessive ex who is still in love with you has a high WTR toward you; the man who married the
woman you were in love with could value you a lot).
p. 177
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Shiing Alliance Structures Turn a Hated Enemy into an Ally
New Avenues of Cooperation Turn an Enemy into a Potential Cooperator
The Costs of Hatred Outweigh the Benefits
Modern politics is replete with examples of enemies becoming allies and vice versa, often with a parallel
shift in the minds of the citizenry (e.g., the American movie Rambo 3 awkwardly ends with a tribute to the
Taliban). The nature of these shifts is beyond the scope of the current chapter, but given their regular
occurrence in our species, we can assume that association value estimators should recalibrate upon new
discoveries of alliance; e.g., the bully who teases you nonetheless defends you from a genuinely lethal
threat.
Hatred, particularly mutual hatred, is costly. If there exists an opportunity to rekindle a cooperative
relationship that would revert negative associations to positive, this would be a potent selection pressure
(McCullough, 2008). This will be particularly true when a change in circumstance or social patterns allows
for new cooperation. Having a stake in someone else’s welfare could be a potent tool for defusing hatred.
Hatred is costly. It can motivate spiteful behavior, trigger retaliation, squander attention and resources, and
lead others to return hatred on you. If the function of hatred is to neutralize a toxic individual, but hatred
fails at doing this because the target cannot be eliminated, cannot be diminished in power, cannot be warred
against by coalitions spurred on by information warfare, and cannot be avoided, then the spiteful actions
taken by the individual who hates the target will be net costs. Under these circumstances, nature would
select for hatred to deactivate, rather than waste the organism’s nite budget of energy and resources on
ineective strategies. This conclusion depends on there having been frequent cases (ancestrally) where a
hated person could not be cost-eectively neutralized. We are agnostic on this point, but it is a reasonable
assumption that the strategies deployed by hatred should self-evaluate their success such that if—for
example—an incident of predatory aggression worked eectively, then the aggressive person will be more
likely to continue that strategy. Or, if an avoidance strategy fails because the bully seeks out her victim, the
victim may be more likely to switch strategies to aggression. If all strategies fail, it is likely that hatred will
deactivate or remain dormant until circumstances change. This possibility leads to an interesting
prediction: a sudden resurgence of hatred should occur when a powerful hated target demonstrates a new
weakness.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Conclusion
In conclusion, the neutralization theory of hatred appears to explain many of the major features of human
hatred as the expression of an evolved adaptation that functions to neutralize individuals whose future
existence is likely to impose costs on the person experiencing hatred. This adaptation comes online in
response to triggers that ancestrally predicted these future costs. These triggers appear to include evidence
of a low WTR (a trigger shared with anger), the outcomes of hypotheticals that reveal how one’s life would
improve without the person, social learning and “hate copying,” and outputs from other evolved emotion
systems that ag individuals whose continued existence is detrimental. Once activated, hatred
coordinates a suite of cognitive responses including: (1) recalibrating one’s intrinsic WTR toward the target
to be negative, incentivizing spiteful behavior; (2) gathering information on the target, (3) disengaging
empathy for the target, and (4) frequent consideration of the target’s welfare when making decisions.
Hatred also activates a series of behavioral strategies designed to eliminate the target or minimize their
power to aect one’s welfare. Predatory aggression is the most serious of these strategies, typically
deployed after homicidal fantasies test the feasibility and practicality of the behavior. More commonly, a
kind of informational warfare is deployed to gather allies against the target and to diminish their social
power. Finally, a strategy of avoidance may be pursued.
p. 178
If correct, future research should be able to map out additional a priori predicted features of this complex
adaptation which will further distinguish it from the anger system and other emotional programs. Such
research should also be able to identify strategies for diminishing the negative eects of hatred at the
societal level.
Notes
1. “Intrinsic” in this context refers to oneʼs WTR in conditions when the target cannot eectively bargain for their own
interests. Thus, having a high intrinsic WTR means one cares about the targetʼs welfare even if they will never know about
the trade-o. For example, I have a high intrinsic WTR toward my family and care about them even in their absence, but I
have a high “monitored” WTR toward my boss, whose opinion and welfare is extremely important to me when he is in the
room.
2. We consider love to be the opposite of hatred. It identifies individuals whose existence causes positive fitness outcomes
for us. It responds to cues that are usually the opposite of those of hatred, and motivates a very high intrinsic WTR. It also
triggers fantasies of benefiting and sacrificing for the individual, rather than at their expense.
3. The journalist Christopher Hitchens relates an anecdote about Saddam Hussein killing his translator who was present
(and translating) when UN oicials spoke down to the dictator. Mr. Hitchensʼs explanation was that Saddam did not allow
anyone to live who had witnessed him feel shame.
4. This results in a delightful trigger of anger in which a person is angry that their interests were not consulted, even if the
decision was ultimately satisfactory. For example, a woman was angry at her husband for pulling into a restaurant that she
wanted to go to, because he didnʼt ask her where she wanted to go (Sell, 2014).
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
References
Aktipis, A., Cronk, L., Alcock, J., Ayers, J. D., Baciu, C., Balliet, D., Boddy, A. M., Curry, O. S., Krems, J. A., Muñoz, A. Sullivan, D.,
Sznycer, D., Wilkinson, G. S., & Winfrey, P. (2018). Understanding cooperation through fitness interdependence. Nature Human
Behaviour, 2(7), 429–431.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Aumer, K., & Bahn, A. C. K. (2016). Hate in intimate relationships as a self-protective emotion. In K. Aumer (Eds.), The psychology
of love and hate in intimate relationships (pp. 131–151). Springer, Cham.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Averill, J. R. (1983). Studies on anger and aggression: Implications for theories of emotion. American Psychologist, 38(11), 1145.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Buss, D. M. (2005). The dangerous passion: Why jealousy is a necessary as love and sex. Odile Jacob.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Buss, D. M. (2006). The murderer next door: Why the mind is designed to kill. Penguin.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Chimbos, P. D. (1978). Marital violence: A study of interspouse homicide. R & E Research Associates.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: Toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science.
Cognition, 50(1–3), 41–77.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2000). Evolutionary psychology and the emotions. In M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook
of emotions (2nd ed., pp. 91–115). Guilford Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Daly, M., & Wilson M. (1988). Homicide. Transaction Books.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. Murray.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
DelPriore, D. J., Hill, S. E., & Buss, D. M. (2012). Envy: Functional specificity and sex-dierentiated design features. Personality
and Individual Dierences, 53(3), 317–322.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Delton, A. W., & Robertson, T. E. (2016). How the mind makes welfare tradeos: Evolution, computation, and emotion. Current
Opinion in Psychology, 7, 12–16.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Disha, I., Cavendish, J. C., & King, R. D. (2011). Historical events and spaces of hate: Hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims in
post-9/11 America. Social problems, 58(1), 21–46.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Durkee, P. K., Lukaszewski, A. W., & Buss, D. M. (2020). Psychological foundations of human status allocation. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 117(35), 21235–21241.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Epstein, S. (1979). The stability of behavior: I. On predicting most of the people much of the time. Journal of Personality and
p. 179
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Social Psychology, 37(7), 1097. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.7.1097
Google Scholar WorldCat
Epstein, S. (1980). The stability of behavior: II. Implications for psychological research. American Psychologist, 35(9), 790.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.9.790
Google Scholar WorldCat
Epstude, K., & Roese, N. J. (2008). The functional theory of counterfactual thinking. Personality and Social Psychology Review,
12(2), 168–192.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Gerhardt, R. P., Gerhardt, D. M., & Vasquez, M. A. (1997). Siblicide in swallow-tailed kites. The Wilson Bulletin, 109(1), 112–120.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Gouda-Vossos, A., Nakagawa, S., Dixson, B. J., & Brooks, R. C. (2018). Mate choice copying in humans: A systematic review and
meta-analysis. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 4(4), 364–386.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Halperin, E., Russell, A. G., Dweck, C. S., & Gross, J. J. (2011). Anger, hatred, and the quest for peace: Anger can be constructive in
the absence of hatred. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 55(2), 274–291.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour. II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1), 17–52.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Hoogland, J. L., & Brown, C. R. (2016). Prairie dogs increase fitness by killing interspecific competitors. Proceedings of the Royal
Society B: Biological Sciences, 283(1827), 20160144.
Google Scholar WorldCat
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology, Vol. 1. H. Holt.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Lieberman, D., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2007). The architecture of human kin detection. Nature, 445(7129), 727–731.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Marsh, A. A., Adams, R. B., & Kleck, R. E. (2005) Why do fear and anger look the way they do? Form and social function in facial
expressions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(1), 73–86.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Martin, J. W., & Cushman, F. (2016). Why we forgive what canʼt be controlled. Cognition, 147, 133–143.
Google Scholar WorldCat
McCullough, M. (2008). Beyond revenge: The evolution of the forgiveness instinct. Wiley.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Mock, D. W., Drummond, H., & Stinson, C. H. (1990). Avian siblicide. American scientist, 78(5), 438–449.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Ouellette, J. A., & Wood, W. (1998). Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts
future behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 124(1), 54–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.1.54
Google Scholar WorldCat
Petersen, M. B., Osmundsen, M., & Tooby, J. (2020). The evolutionary psychology of conflict and the functions of falsehood. In D.
C. Barker & E. Suhay (Eds.), The politics of truth in polarized America (pp. 131–150). Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Petersen, M. B., Sell, A., Tooby, J., and Cosmides, L. (2010). Evolutionary psychology and criminal justice: A recalibrational theory
of punishment and reconciliation. In H. Høgh-Olesen (Ed.), Human morality and sociality (pp. 72–131). Palgrave Macmillan.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin Group USA.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Ramachandran, V. S., & Jalal, B. (2017). The evolutionary psychology of envy and jealousy. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1619.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Reed, L. I., DeScioli, P., & Pinker, S. A. (2014). The commitment function of angry facial expressions. Psychological Science, 25(8),
1511–1517.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Rempel, J. K., Burris, C. T., & Fathi, D. (2019). Hate: Evidence for a motivational conceptualization. Motivation and Emotion, 43(1),
179–190.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Romero, G. A., Pham, M. N., & Goetz, A. T. (2014). The implicit rules of combat. Human Nature, 25(4), 496–516.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Schopler, J., & Compere, J. S. (1971). Eects of being kind or harsh to another on liking. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 20(2), 155.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Sell, A. (2011). The recalibrational theory and violent anger. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16, 381–389.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Sell, A. (2012). Revenge can be more fully understood by making distinctions between anger and hatred: Commentary on
McCullough, Kurzan & Tabakʼs “Cognitive Systems for Revenge and Forgiveness.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(1), 36–37.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Sell, A. (2014). Twelve triggers of anger and how they invalidate all major theories of anger and aggression. International Society
for Research on Aggression, Georgia State University, July 19.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Sell, A., Cosmides L. & Tooby, J. (2014). The human anger face evolved to enhance cues of strength. Evolution and Human
Behavior, 35(5), 425–429.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Sell, A., & A. C. Lopez (2020). Emotional underpinnings of war: An evolutionary analysis of anger and hatred. In C. Ireland, J.
Ireland, M. Lewis, & A. C. Lopez (Eds.), The international handbook on collective violence: Current issues and perspectives (pp. 31–
46). Routledge.
Sell, A., Sznycer, D., Al-Shawaf, L., Lim, J., Krauss, A., Feldman, A., Rascanu, R., Sugiyama, L., Tooby, J. & L. Cosmides (2017). The
grammar of anger: Mapping the computational architecture of a recalibrational emotion. Cognition, 168, 110–128.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Sell, A., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2009). ʻFormidability and the logic of human angerʼ, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science, 106(35), 15073–78.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Sowell, T. (2016). Wealth, poverty and politics. Hachette UK.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
p. 180
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Sznycer, D., Seal, M. F. L., Sell, A., Lim, J., Porat, R., Shalvi, S., Halperin, R., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2017). Support for
redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, 114(31), 8420–8425.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Sznycer, D., Takemura, K., Delton, A. W., Sato, K., Robertson, T., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2012). Cross-cultural dierences and
similarities in proneness to shame: An adaptationist and ecological approach. Evolutionary Psychology, 10(2),
147470491201000213.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The
adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 19–136). Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Tooby, J., & L. Cosmides (1996). Friendship and the Bankerʼs Paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for
altruism. Proceedings of the British Academy, 88, 119–43.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., Sell, A., Lieberman, D., & Sznycer, D. (2008). Internal regulatory variables and the design of human
motivation: A computational and evolutionary approach. In A. J. Elliot (Ed.), Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation
(pp. 251–271). Psychology Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), 35–57.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and natural selection: A critique of some current evolutionary thought. Princeton University
Press.
Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC
Wilson, M. I., & Daly, M. (1992). Who kills whom in spouse killings? On the exceptional sex ratio of spousal homicides in the United
States. Criminology, 30(2), 189–216.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Wrangham, R. W. (2018). Two types of aggression in human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(2),
245–253.
Google Scholar WorldCat
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56886/chapter/455226777 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 29 May 2024
Article
Full-text available
Terrorism continues to be an enigmatic and contested concept, lacking a universally accepted definition despite extensive scholarly debate. Lay intuitions, however, demonstrate a notable convergence in identifying acts as “terrorism” when specific situational features are present, such as indiscriminate violence and out-group perpetration. These features elicit predictable and robust precautionary responses, raising the question: Is there a unified and parsimonious explanation for these phenomena? It is hypothesized that a situational template exists in the human mind, the coalitional predation template (CPT), which evolved not to detect modern-day terrorism, per se, but to identify and respond to situations of predatory coalitional conflict. The paper examines the potential cues and mechanisms that constitute the psychological systems activated by such threats, suggesting that matching the input cues of the CPT triggers well-documented precautionary responses to terrorism. However, this cue-based system may not align neatly with contemporary threats, leading to disproportionate responses to some threats while underestimating others. The model also posits that interpretations of violence can vary due to incomplete cues and the social position of the evaluator, leading to public disagreements and inconsistencies in defining terrorism. Consequently, arriving at an unambiguous and widely accepted definition of terrorism may not be possible. The model presented may account for a range of phenomena, including the inclination towards attributing mental illness to particular violent incidents and the uncanny surface similarities between terrorism and war crimes. The findings have significant implications for both the theoretical understanding of terrorism and practical policy responses.
Article
Full-text available
Four studies (three Canadian, one African) tested whether lay understandings of hate are congruent with conceptualizing hate as a motive with the goal of diminishing or destroying a target’s wellbeing (Rempel and Burris, Personal Relationships 12:297–313, 2005; Rempel and Sutherland, in: Aumer (ed) The psychology of love and hate in intimate relationships, Springer, Cham, 2016). A prototype approach showed that statements central to hate focused on the desire for a target to suffer harm (Study 1). Statements including the desire for target harm received higher hate ratings than those in which this desire was absent (Study 2). People were more likely to define an experience as hate when they spontaneously mentioned the intent to harm (Study 3). Hate attributions were higher when harm was a desired outcome rather than unwanted byproduct of goal pursuit (Study 4). Thus, lay attributions of hate consistently link with the perceived desire for a target to experience harm. The theoretical and practical implications of a motivational conceptualization of hate are discussed. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
Article
Full-text available
Some acts of human cooperation are not easily explained by traditional models of kinship or reciprocity. Fitness interdependence may provide a unifying conceptual framework, in which cooperation arises from the mutual dependence for survival or reproduction, as occurs among mates, risk-pooling partnerships and brothers-in-arms.
Article
Full-text available
The old dogma has always been that the most complex aspects of human emotions are driven by culture; Germans and English are thought to be straight-laced whereas Italians and Indians are effusive. Yet in the last two decades there has been a growing realization that even though culture plays a major role in the final expression of human nature, there must be a basic scaffolding specified by genes. While this is recognized to be true for simple emotions like anger, fear, and joy, the relevance of evolutionary arguments for more complex nuances of emotion have been inadequately explored. In this paper, we consider envy or jealousy as an example; the feeling evoked when someone is better off than you. Our approach is broadly consistent with traditional evolutionary psychology (EP) approaches, but takes it further by exploring the complexity and functional logic of the emotion – and the precise social triggers that elicit them – by using deliberately farfetched, and contrived “thought experiments” that the subject is asked to participate in. When common sense (e.g., we should be jealous of Bill Gates – not of our slightly richer neighbor) appears to contradict observed behavior (i.e., we are more envious of our neighbor) the paradox can often be resolved by evolutionary considerations which h predict the latter. Many – but not all – EP approaches fail because evolution and common sense do not make contradictory predictions. Finally, we briefly raise the possibility that gaining deeper insight into the evolutionary origins of certain undesirable emotions or behaviors can help shake them off, and may therefore have therapeutic utility. Such an approach would complement current therapies (such as cognitive behavior therapies, psychoanalysis, psychopharmacologies, and hypnotherapy), rather than negate them.
Article
Anthropologists have long recognized that cultural evolution critically depends on the transmission and generation of information. However, between the selection pressures of evolution and the actual behaviour of individuals, scientists have suspected that other processes are at work. With the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive revolution, psychologists are now exploring the evolved problem-solving and information-processing mechanisms that allow humans to absorb and generate culture. The purpose of this book is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology, which supplied the necessary connection between the underlying evolutionary biology and the complex and irreducible social phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.
Chapter
Anthropologists have long recognized that cultural evolution critically depends on the transmission and generation of information. However, between the selection pressures of evolution and the actual behaviour of individuals, scientists have suspected that other processes are at work. With the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive revolution, psychologists are now exploring the evolved problem-solving and information-processing mechanisms that allow humans to absorb and generate culture. The purpose of this book is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology, which supplied the necessary connection between the underlying evolutionary biology and the complex and irreducible social phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.
Chapter
In American politics, the truth is rapidly losing relevance. The public square is teeming with misinformation, conspiracy theories, cynicism and hubris. Why has this happened? What does it mean? What can we do about it? In this volume, leading scholars offer multiple perspectives on these questions, and others, to provide the first comprehensive empirical examination of the “politics of truth”—its context, causes, and potential correctives. Combining insights from the fields of political science, political theory, communication, and psychology and offering substantial new arguments and evidence, the experts in this volume draw compelling (if sometimes competing) conclusions regarding this rising democratic threat.
Article
Significance Social status is a universal and consequential dimension of variation within human groups. Multiple prominent theories have been proposed to explain how status is allocated, but extant evidence is insufficient to adjudicate between their conflicting predictions. Here we show that distinctions between each theory hinge on the relative importance of four key affordance dimensions: benefit-generation ability, benefit-generation willingness, cost-infliction ability, and cost-infliction willingness. Each theory makes a different prediction about the role of each affordance in status allocation. We test these competing predictions to explain status allocations across 14 nations. We found that benefit-generation affordances uniquely predicted status allocations across nations, whereas cost-infliction affordances were weak or null competing predictors.
Article
Two major types of aggression, proactive and reactive, are associated with contrasting expression, eliciting factors, neural pathways, development, and function. The distinction is useful for understanding the nature and evolution of human aggression. Compared with many primates, humans have a high propensity for proactive aggression, a trait shared with chimpanzees but not bonobos. By contrast, humans have a low propensity for reactive aggression compared with chimpanzees, and in this respect humans are more bonobo-like. The bimodal classification of human aggression helps solve two important puzzles. First, a long-standing debate about the significance of aggression in human nature is misconceived, because both positions are partly correct. The Hobbes-Huxley position rightly recognizes the high potential for proactive violence, while the Rousseau-Kropotkin position correctly notes the low frequency of reactive aggression. Second, the occurrence of two major types of human aggression solves the execution paradox, concerned with the hypothesized effects of capital punishment on self-domestication in the Pleistocene. The puzzle is that the propensity for aggressive behavior was supposedly reduced as a result of being selected against by capital punishment, but capital punishment is itself an aggressive behavior. Since the aggression used by executioners is proactive, the execution paradox is solved to the extent that the aggressive behavior of which victims were accused was frequently reactive, as has been reported. Both types of killing are important in humans, although proactive killing appears to be typically more frequent in war. The biology of proactive aggression is less well known and merits increased attention.