For The Love Of Hatred
Social media is just a place to express ideological polarization or contradiction, alongside other “traditional” activities such as violent protests or clashes between oppositions.
In June 2020, many brands, including giants like Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Unilever, announced to suspend or cut the cost of advertising on Facebook, causing the tech giant to lose billion-dollar profit. This act of “boycott” is in response to the movement “Stop Hate for Profit” launched by many human rights organizations, in order to demand the largest social network on our planet to control more strictly the extreme contents aimed at specific social groups (based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, …) [1] .
“Mark Zuckerberg is the biggest oligarch in the history of mankind” — Professor Scott Galloway of New York University bluntly criticized the Facebook owner’s “rotten” way of making money. The toleration of attacking or offensive statements has sparked online rages, which attracts a large number of user interactions, and thus increased advertising profits. With the proliferation of articles exposing the foolishness of the anti-vaccine movement, the most profitable side turned out to be shareholders [2] .
I don’t mean to justify, but Mark or Facebook is not the original cause of this. Even if Mark’s business ethics is really as bad as Professor Scott criticizes, it’s just a matter of controlling the content on the platform. But the platform doesn’t create content, or program how users react to the content.
Also in 2020, the report shows that there are more than 800 hate groups [3] active in the US alone. They are assemblies of people who openly express racist views, oppose immigrants, LGBT, anti-Islam, promote extreme nationalism / white supremacism, or even follow the neo-Nazi ideology… [4] .
Social media is just a place to express ideological polarization or contradiction, alongside other “traditional” activities such as violent protests or clashes between oppositions.
In other words, while it is undeniable that platforms need to take some responsibility, it is important to reiterate that the online platform is just a means of spreading negative messages, with the real motive behind hatred — something that had existed long before platforms were created, and will probably still exist even if Facebook or the Internet has been replaced.
1. The mechanism of hatred
Confusion between engine and vehicle is not uncommon. In the past, we also had a post analyzing that social media filtering algorithms have a negligible impact when compared to the psychological mechanisms and cognitive biases that are in place to turn make people more extreme and prejudiced when faced with conflicting information [5] . But in the case of hatred, things get even more complicated, even considered on a personal level.
In a Psychology study in 2008, 40 Israelis were interviewed to collect data to build a preliminary qualitative concept of hatred [6] . They came up with a few descriptions that were quite similar to both popular perception and academic stance, basically saying it was an extreme emotion, causing strong feelings. Most people also consider it an immoral or irrational feeling. But when asked to describe things that caused them to hate; subjects stated that they had never experienced this feeling, regardless of whether they could describe it thoroughly, and regardless of whether they were in the midst of a prolonged conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Ironically, during the later stages of the experiment, a few subjects who admitted “having no hatred in their life”, when recounting developments in the persistent confrontation between the two countries, stated that they wanted to bomb a large Palestinian city, or even wanted to do everything to destroy everyone on the opponent side [7] . Can hatred make people so irrational?
The answer is no, at least from a neuroscience perspective. Using fMRI to track brain activity of subjects while viewing faces of people they admit to hate, researchers have identified a “hate circuit” that includes different brain regions. Among them are the putamen involved in the onset of aggressive behavior, and the insular region involved in predicting the actions of another individual; all are important functions when dealing with someone we hate. But surprisingly, these 2 brain regions are inherently involved in romantic feelings [8] . That is, the two feelings of love — hatred, though thought to be opposed, apparently have certain similarities in terms of neural connections.
But the difference between them is even more bizarre. While feelings of love inhibit the activity of most of the brain regions involved in rational thinking and judgment, hatred affects only a small part of the brain region that performs this function. In other words, although love and hatred are both powerful emotions capable of affecting and influencing individuals, in love, reason is easily overshadowed, making us ignore judgments and criticisms towards the other person. As for hatred, rational thinking is maintained, perhaps to ensure criticisms and to attempt to harm or retaliate against those you hate [9] .
In psychology, the relationship between love and hate on a personal level is quite intricate and they are not really two emotions at the opposite extremes. Research has shown that they can coexist and target the same object [10] , as well as can influence, interact with each other in terms of intensity [11] . Even two people sharing negative emotions towards a third party (ie, hating the same person) can also give rise to or promote closeness and intimacy between them. Ironically, despite the popularity and clarity of this effect, the participants in the study seemed unaware of it. Instead, they insisted that sharing a positive attitude about others is especially effective in promoting intimacy [12] .
Another strange feature of hatred is that it can exist in either a short term emotional form or a long term sentiment [13] . According to psychoanalysis, hatred of others can come from the hater attaching a feature they wish to deny onto the hated as a protective measure (psychological projection [14] ), or has a specific cause of the offensive, insulting or betraying behavior committed by the hated. The result of these behaviors is a mixture of other negative emotions such as anger, estrangement, or disgust. And in most cases, it also leads to the desire that the annoying person must disappear, suffer, or even die [15] .
2. Us and Them.
While the events/behaviors that spark hatred in interpersonal relationships are only temporary, this negative emotion, once formed, can be sustained over a long period of time without any external stimulation. Researches have shown that it is not easy to forgive, and that bad impressions/negative feelings about others can last quite a while [16] . Therefore, sometimes we can hate someone for a long time even if they’ve changed a lot since the last negative event happened.
However, what is interesting is that the transition of hatred from one individual to the group represented by that individual takes place in a much easier and faster manner [17] .
Going back to the causation and the formation of hatred, a single inappropriate behavior of one individual is easily generalized as the characteristic/trait that causes the individual to be hated. This generalization then again constitutes a vague and one-sided excuse invoked to rationalize the hatred; at the same time, it also makes the attitude easier to spread within a group. The most obvious example is the events where celebrities are hated for their own personal life stories.
Some other factors that fuel this transition are the tendency to share emotions with a member of the same group is proportional to the intensity of the emotions experienced: the stronger the emotion, the easier it is spread. Some of the examples are the excitement of the audience during the concert, the atmosphere of joy when the national team won the championship, people during the days of total mobilization or in a period of crisis… As mentioned in part one, hate is a strong emotion; especially among individuals who are, mutually, victims/ hated by another group, and sharing the same situations will reinforce and intensify the hatred towards the other group.
These characteristics also partly explain why hatred is significantly influenced by social factors. The hasty generalization to assign others bad traits, holding onto those negative views for a long time and spreading them across the group seem to be quite consistent with the reality, when contradiction and conflict has always existed in many societies and persisted throughout history; in spite of the fact that hatred has always been underestimated at the level of personal awareness, religious doctrine, common norms, to the level of law.
As a species with high sociality; hatred seems to be an evolutionary paradox. The existence of conflicting views or conflicts of interest is unavoidable; but how can they lead to tit-for-tat behaviors that cause both of them more damage? Hatred can be seen as an emotion acquired from social learning; but how did the psychological/ neurological mechanisms involved exist in the first place and did not disappear during evolution; when cooperation is the essential factor for survival?
Cooperation is the most important factor for survival; but this is only true within small groups — which were the first primitive forms of society when humans appeared. The theory is that, evolutionarily speaking, hatred in particular or our discriminative attitude of Us — Them is actually an important adaptive trait. Team members always need to work together to efficiently exploit the meager resources needed for survival, and at the same time keep an eye out for strangers that can threaten the small amount of resources. It motivates fierce competition for resources between groups, as well as provides an easy excuse to justify deprivation of resources from another group [18] .
Evidence of the long evolutionary origins of our hatred and the Us — Them attitude are pre-programmed that can easily be found in our relative primates; or through human experiments [20] .
In one experiment, for example, subjects were shown pictures of people of another race for a very limited time with an awareness threshold of 50 milliseconds. Observations through fMRI showed that the mere instant exposure stimulates the amygdala — which is associated with feelings of fear, anxiety and aggression — to become more active. At the same time, faces of other races are also less stimulating to the brain area responsible for facial memory than pictures of people of the same race. Even isomorphic reflex, for example, when the observer reacts to pull his hand back when watching a movie showing a needle stabbing the hand on the screen; is also less common when the hand is of a different race.
The sophistication of the Implicit Association Test can also reveal our distinguishing mindset — they are so deeply rooted that it becomes an automatic response. For example, if you are in group A and have a negative prejudice towards group B, the bias will cause us to equate group A with good traits and group B with bad traits. When shown pairs of picture-description, subjects spend more time processing pairs that contradict their prejudice (for example, group A member image coupled with “evil” or photo of group B member with the word “honest”) compared to pairs supporting their bias perspective (for example, photo of group A member with the word “gentle” or photo of group B members with the word “fake”). Seeing a stereotypical contradiction makes the subconscious pause for just a fraction of a second — it pauses to explain the “eyesore” when linking the image with the “paradoxical” description.
The extremely short interval and the automatic arising of this subconscious “re-evaluation” show that discrimination mindset, which has existed for a long time, is a primitive mechanism hidden deep in the human brain. Experiments with similar results on primates also show that hatred and discrimination are of biological origin and are quite common in nature; is a legacy that our hunter-gatherer ancestors left us from the early days in the wild.
Analyzing more deeply from an evolutionary perspective, these mechanisms also make sense when the solution to not being harmed by another group, in addition to avoiding contact by building a wall of hate, is returning the harm (revenge) so that the other person does not affect us anymore. In addition, the hatred of individuals in the same group was also shown to be more gentle, and also a way for the community to discourage and punish with the expectation that the disobedient will change in the positive direction. [20].
Of course, it is impossible to use “instinct” as an excuse for everything, when the right — wrong position or the guarantee of mutual benefits through mediation is increasingly being perfected by both social mechanisms and scientific research. Not to mention, what is instinctive is not necessarily fully responsible for existing social problems. Because even when competition and hostility exist in many animals, it does not mean that some interest groups taking advantage of it to create social conflict is a “naturally favorable” behavior. Because even though the emotion of hatred is a natural mechanism, the manipulation of these emotions by propaganda groups is something to be wary about, identified, and eliminated.
Until society is at its best, perhaps hatred could only be suppressed by hatred, like the way brands and users reacted to Facebook.
It will be difficult to conclude whether hatred is necessary for civilizations, since history has told a relatively complex story, and the future is uncertain.
But one thing is quite certain, hatred will create more hatred only.
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References:
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