Hate

Abstract

Hate is a type of emotion: an intense, enduring negative response to a person or group appraised as having a stable, malevolent character, with the goal of harming, excluding or eliminating its target. This article covers the evidence that hate is distinct from anger, contempt and disgust, the duplex theory of its structure, hate in close relationships, group-based hatred in intractable conflict and its political effects, dehumanisation and moral exclusion, the desensitisation route from hate speech to prejudice, hate crime offender types, and the neural correlates of hate. The central dispute is whether hate is a discrete emotion, a motive to diminish another's well-being, or a structure generated by stories about its target. Three interactive demos show how the duplex theory's components combine, how anger acts differently when hatred is low or high, and how hate speech desensitises.

Keywords: hate, hatred, intergroup emotions, hate speech, dehumanization

Hate was for a long time written about more than it was studied. Countless theoretical texts have been written regarding the centrality of hatred as a force that motivates intergroup conflicts, yet until recently almost no empirical study had been conducted either on the nature and character of group-based hatred or on its implications for conflicts (Halperin, 2008). The same gap held for the emotion itself: despite a fair amount of theorizing about hate, there was little empirical evidence to answer the basic question of whether hate is fundamentally different from other negative emotions (Martínez et al., 2022). That has changed. A functional account now specifies hate's appraisals and action tendencies, preregistered studies have compared it directly with dislike, anger, contempt and disgust, survey experiments in conflict zones have separated it from anger, and the processes by which derogatory language spreads it have been modelled.

What Hate Is

Everyday emotion knowledge places hate inside a hierarchy. On the prototype approach, categories of emotion are formed as a result of repeated experiences and become organized around prototypes, and the interrelated set of emotion categories becomes organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy whose basic level holds a handful of concepts, love, joy, anger, sadness, fear and perhaps surprise, most useful for making everyday distinctions among emotions (Shaver et al., 1987). Hate is not among the basic-level terms on that account; it is a subordinate concept. When the method was applied to marriage, 160 participants recalled and wrote about a partner-related love, hate, anger, or jealousy incident, and distinct prototypes and appraisal patterns were obtained for the four emotions (Fitness & Fletcher, 1993).

The functional account gives hate a profile of its own. Hate has a unique pattern of appraisals and action tendencies: it is based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition of persons or groups, people hate persons and groups more because of who they are than because of what they do, and hate has the goal to eliminate its target (Fischer et al., 2018). On the same account hate can be reassuring and self-protective, because its message is simple and helps confirm people's belief in a just world (Fischer et al., 2018). The most direct test of distinctness asked adult participants in the United States, 1,074 in total across five preregistered studies, to describe examples of their interpersonal and intergroup targets of hate, dislike, anger, contempt and disgust, and assessed the intensity, duration, arousal, valence, perceived threats and action tendencies of each (Martínez et al., 2022). Across studies, participants felt consistently more emotionally aroused, personally threatened and inclined toward attack-oriented behaviours when experiencing hate as compared with dislike, anger, contempt and disgust toward interpersonal targets; at the intergroup level, hate was more arousing than the three moral emotions, more intense than dislike, anger and contempt, and more attack-oriented than dislike and contempt (Martínez et al., 2022). The results fit a general pattern of increasing differentiation suggesting that hate is conceptually closer to disgust and contempt than to anger and dislike (Martínez et al., 2022). Disgust and contempt, not anger, are therefore hate's nearest neighbours.

Theories of Hate

Three accounts organise the theoretical literature. The duplex theory presents a triangular theory of the structure of hate and a story-based theory of the development of triangles of hate, and proposes hate to be one contributing cause of many, although certainly not all, massacres and genocides (Sternberg, 2003). According to the first part of the theory, hate has three components, negation of intimacy, passion and commitment; according to the second part, this structure originates from stories people create about the target, that, say, a group comprises enemies of God, or monsters, or vermin, or power-crazy tyrants (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008). The role of propaganda and other instigating factors, the benefits and limitations of the theory, and possible remedies for hate are set out alongside it (Sternberg, 2003).

Figure 1

The Duplex Theory of Hate

The second account recasts hate as a motive. An integrative theory of love and hate suggests that love is a motive based on the valuing of the other and is associated with the goal of preserving or promoting the other's well-being, and likewise that hate is a motive based on devaluing the other and is associated with the goal of diminishing or destroying the other's well-being (Rempel & Burris, 2005). On this view intense, powerful emotions may serve as eliciting experiences for different types of love and hate, and benefiting or harming the other can be either an instrumental or an ultimate goal for the various forms of each (Rempel & Burris, 2005). The third account, the functional perspective described above, gives hate a unique pattern of appraisals and action tendencies of its own, with the goal to eliminate its target (Fischer et al., 2018). The three are not fully exclusive: a motive to diminish another's well-being, a structure generated by stories and a pattern of appraisals with elimination as its goal describe the same state at different grains. The plurality is itself a finding: a review of the concept's history distinguished four ways to think about hate, from Plato to Putnam (Royzman et al., 2005), and the three accounts cited here map onto that plurality rather than exhausting it.

Hate, Anger, Contempt and Disgust

Hate is routinely confused with its neighbours, so the neighbours need describing. Whether distinctions should be drawn among specific moral emotions was itself disputed: some argued for differences among anger, disgust and contempt while others suggested that these terms may describe a single undifferentiated emotional response to morally offensive behavior (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011). A social-functionalist perspective predicted that these emotions should be differentiable both in antecedent appraisals and in consequent actions and judgments, and five studies supported it, finding a more general role for disgust than had previously been described, an effect of self-relevance on anger but not other emotions, and a role for contempt in judging incompetent actions (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011). Contempt is similar to anger in that it may occur after repeated social or moral transgressions, but it differs from anger in its appraisals, actions and emotivational goals: unlike anger, contempt arises when a person's or group's character is appraised as bad and unresponsive to change, leading to attempts to socially exclude the target (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016).

Hate shares contempt's character appraisal and adds a harsher goal. Where contempt leads to attempts to socially exclude the target (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016), hate has the goal to eliminate its target (Fischer et al., 2018). The sharpest behavioural separation of hate from anger comes from conflict. Anger is often viewed as a destructive force in intergroup conflicts because of its links to aggressive behavior, but it was hypothesised that anger should have constructive effects in those with low levels of hatred toward the out-group (Halperin et al., 2011). In two experiments embedded in nationwide representative surveys during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, inducing anger toward Palestinians several weeks before the Annapolis summit increased support for making compromises in upcoming negotiations among those with low levels of hatred but decreased support for compromise among those with high levels of hatred, and even a strong anger induction just days before the summit led to increased support for compromise among those low in hatred, but not among those high in hatred (Halperin et al., 2011). Anger, on this evidence, is a demand that the other change; hatred is the belief that the other cannot.

Table 1. Appraisals and action tendencies of hate and its neighbours, as reported in the cited abstracts.

Note. Each row lists only what the cited abstract reports for that emotion (Fischer et al., 2018; Hutcherson & Gross, 2011; Mackie et al., 2000; Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016). The studies differ in method and target, so the rows are not a single comparison.

Hate in Close Relationships

Hate is not reserved for enemies. Current research has focused primarily on how hate works in groups or its theoretical nature, but a replication of earlier findings showed that hate is primarily felt towards intimate others or people one spends considerable time with: 98 participants filled out a survey concerning themselves, the people they love and the people they hate, and saw the people they hate considerably differently than those they love, and themselves (Aumer et al., 2015). The same study provided empirical evidence that hate can be used as a predictor of motivation, with disgust and devaluation important predictors in negative and positive motivation (Aumer et al., 2015). Devaluation is also the core of the motive account, on which hate is a motive based on devaluing the other (Rempel & Burris, 2005). In marriage, accounts of recalled and of hypothetical love, hate, anger and jealousy events were derived from the same knowledge structures, and adding prototypical and appraisal information to an event description significantly increased emotion-matching accuracy over the event-description-only condition (Fitness & Fletcher, 1993). Close relationships thus supply both the targets of everyday hate and the scripts by which people recognise it.

Group-Based Hatred

The empirical study of hatred between groups began in a conflict zone. Three studies conducted within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a qualitative study followed by scenario and survey methods, indicated the appraisal and the behavioral aspects of group-based hatred and distilled them from those of other negative emotions such as anger or fear, and in general the results showed that hatred is a distinct emotion that includes a unique cognitive-appraisal component and specific emotional goals (Halperin, 2008). A nationwide panel study conducted during the 2006 election campaign in Israel then argued that collective hatred is composed of two distinct emotional aspects, chronic and immediate, and found that both were crucial for the understanding of political outcomes, particularly political learning, alongside party identification stability and partisan support (Halperin et al., 2012). Hate is especially significant at the intergroup level, where it turns already devalued groups into victims of hate, and when shared among group members it can spread fast in conflict zones where people are exposed to hate-based violence, which further feeds their hate (Fischer et al., 2018).

Group-based hatred rests on the wider machinery of prejudice. Intergroup emotions theory holds that when social identity is salient, group-based appraisals elicit specific emotions and action tendencies toward out-groups: intergroup anger was distinct from intergroup fear, the inclination to act against the out-group was distinct from the tendency to move away from it, and participants who perceived the in-group as strong were more likely to experience anger toward the out-group and to desire to take action against it (Mackie et al., 2000). In the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes map, warmth stereotypes determine active behavioral tendencies and competence stereotypes determine passive ones, so that admired groups, warm and competent, elicit both facilitation tendencies while hated groups, cold and incompetent, elicit both harm tendencies, and emotions predict behavioral tendencies more strongly than stereotypes do (Cuddy et al., 2007). Dehumanization supplies the stories: two forms are proposed, involving the denial to others of two distinct senses of humanness, so that denying uniquely human attributes to others represents them as animal-like and denying human nature to others represents them as objects or automata, and the phenomenon is not restricted to the intergroup context and does not occur only under conditions of conflict or extreme negative evaluation (Haslam, 2006). Moral exclusion occurs when individuals or groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply; those who are morally excluded are perceived as nonentities, expendable, or undeserving, so that harming or exploiting them appears to be appropriate, acceptable, or just, in forms from genocide to discrimination (Opotow, 1990). A phenomenological analysis has since addressed the collectivization and habitualization of hatred, the process by which hatred becomes shared and habitual (Szanto, 2020).

Hate Speech and Hate Crime

Derogatory language is the medium through which group-based hatred travels. Following the General Aggression Model, it was proposed that frequent and repetitive exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization to this form of verbal violence and subsequently to lower evaluations of the victims and greater distancing, thus increasing outgroup prejudice; in two representative nationwide surveys, with 1,007 and 682 respondents, and one experiment with 76 participants, lower sensitivity to hate speech was a positive mediator of the relationship between frequent exposure to hate speech and outgroup prejudice, after desensitization training individuals were less sensitive to hate speech and more prejudiced toward hate speech victims than their counterparts in the control condition, and the effects were mediated by a lower sensitivity to hate speech, and not by lower sensitivity to social norms (Soral et al., 2018). The wider model holds that exposure to hate speech results in empathy being replaced by intergroup contempt as a dominant response to others, that the increased presence of hate speech in one's environment creates a sense of a descriptive norm that allows outgroup derogation, which leads to the erosion of existing antidiscriminatory norms, and that, through a process of desensitization, hate speech reduces people's ability to recognize the offensive character of such language (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020). Traced with an agent-based modeling approach, the mechanisms potentially effective in constraining hate-speech proliferation, empathy and norms, are eroded by hate speech itself (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020). The online case has been reviewed systematically under the heading of internet, social media and online hate speech (Castaño-Pulgarín et al., 2021).

Hate crime adds the question of motive. Little research had been conducted to determine the motivations of hate crime offenders when a reanalysis of 169 Boston police case files examined the characteristics of the three original motives, thrill, defensive, and mission, in relation to a new category, retaliatory motivation, and addressed levels of culpability in explaining the most appropriate sanctions for certain kinds of hate offenders (McDevitt et al., 2002). The typology is a classification of offenders, not a measure of hate; it belongs to criminology as much as to the psychology of aggression.

The Brain

One imaging study has addressed hate directly. In a block-design fMRI study, 17 normal human subjects were scanned while they viewed the face of a person they hated and also faces of acquaintances for whom they had neutral feelings, and a hate score for the object of hate was used as a covariate (Zeki & Romaya, 2008). Viewing a hated face resulted in increased activity in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in premotor cortex, in the frontal pole and bilaterally in the medial insula, with three areas, the right insula, right premotor cortex and the right fronto-medial gyrus, where activation correlated linearly with the declared level of hatred, and one area of deactivation in the right superior frontal gyrus (Zeki & Romaya, 2008). The study thus shows that there is a unique pattern of activity in the brain in the context of hate which, though distinct from the pattern of activity that correlates with romantic love, nevertheless shares two areas with the latter, namely the putamen and the insula (Zeki & Romaya, 2008). A single study of 17 people is a first map rather than a settled one, and the premotor involvement sits comfortably with the attack-oriented action tendencies reported behaviourally.

Worked Example

The samples behind the main claims differ by two orders of magnitude, and the arithmetic shows where the weight lies. The distinctness evidence rests on 1,074 participants across five preregistered studies (Martínez et al., 2022), the hate speech evidence on 1,007 and 682 survey respondents plus 76 experimental participants (Soral et al., 2018), a total of 1,765, and the imaging evidence on 17 subjects (Zeki & Romaya, 2008). The hate speech programme therefore sampled about 104 people for every one scanned (1,765 / 17 = 103.8), and the distinctness studies about 63 (1,074 / 17 = 63.2). The close-relationship work is intermediate: 160 participants in the first prototype study and 80 in the second (Fitness & Fletcher, 1993) make 240, and the replication added 98 (Aumer et al., 2015), so the interpersonal evidence totals 338 people, under a third of the Martínez sample. The hate crime typology rests on 169 case files (McDevitt et al., 2002), about ten times the imaging sample (169 / 17 = 9.9). The lesson is not that the small studies are wrong but that the neural claim is the least replicated of the article's findings.

Discussion

Three answers to the question of what hate is have been given, and the evidence favours treating them as levels rather than rivals. Hate is a distinct emotion that includes a unique cognitive-appraisal component and specific emotional goals (Halperin, 2008); it is a motive based on devaluing the other and associated with the goal of diminishing or destroying the other's well-being (Rempel & Burris, 2005); and its structure originates from stories people create about the target (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008). The appraisal that unites them is of a stable, negative disposition, so that people are hated for who they are rather than for what they do (Fischer et al., 2018). Whether that appraisal is better described as the content of an emotion, the premise of a motive or the moral of a story is a question about theoretical vocabulary that the data so far do not decide; the conceptual review that counted four ways to think about hate (Royzman et al., 2005) is the reminder that the vocabulary predates the measurement.

Second, the distinctness question has an empirical answer with a qualification. Hate is experienced as more arousing, more threatening and more attack-oriented than dislike, anger, contempt and disgust towards interpersonal targets, but the pattern suggests it is conceptually closer to disgust and contempt than to anger and dislike (Martínez et al., 2022), and the contempt it resembles arises when a person's or group's character is appraised as bad and unresponsive to change (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016). The practical consequence is documented in conflict: anger increased support for compromise among those low in hatred and decreased it among those high in hatred (Halperin et al., 2011). Interventions that treat hatred as anger, to be vented or soothed, address the wrong appraisal.

Third, hate is social at every scale. It is primarily felt towards intimate others or people one spends considerable time with (Aumer et al., 2015); when shared among group members it can spread fast in conflict zones (Fischer et al., 2018); and frequent exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization and thereby to greater outgroup prejudice (Soral et al., 2018). The brain evidence is a single study of 17 participants (Zeki & Romaya, 2008) and should be read as such.

Current Directions

The field's recent turn is from theory to measurement. Preregistered within-subjects designs have given hate a measured profile against four neighbouring emotions across interpersonal and intergroup targets (Martínez et al., 2022), and the authors discuss the specific differences and similarities between hate and these emotions across targets and their implications for future research on hate and negative emotions (Martínez et al., 2022). On the societal side, a model of hate-speech proliferation has been built from evidence in social psychology and the psychology of emotion and aggression and its dynamics traced with an agent-based modeling approach, with the argument that through basic psychological dynamics, societies become more accepting of derogatory language and less accepting of immigrants, as well as religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020). The online environment has received its own systematic review (Castaño-Pulgarín et al., 2021), and the collectivization and habitualization of hatred, how hatred becomes shared and habitual, has been taken up in the phenomenology of emotion (Szanto, 2020). The functional account states the processes that remain to be measured: hate turns already devalued groups into victims of hate, and exposure to hate-based violence further feeds the hate of those who share it (Fischer et al., 2018). Additional studies examining interpersonal hate can help better understand how hate operates and inform current theoretical literature (Aumer et al., 2015).

Common Misconceptions

“Hate is just very strong anger.”

Hate has a unique pattern of appraisals and action tendencies, based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition rather than on what the person does (Fischer et al., 2018); measured directly, it is more arousing, more threatening and more attack-oriented than anger towards interpersonal targets and conceptually closer to disgust and contempt (Martínez et al., 2022); and in conflict, anger increased support for compromise among those low in hatred but decreased it among those high in hatred (Halperin et al., 2011).

“Hate is the opposite of love, so the two share nothing.”

The integrative theory makes them mirror-image motives, love based on valuing the other and hate on devaluing the other (Rempel & Burris, 2005), and the neural pattern of hate, though distinct from the pattern of activity that correlates with romantic love, shares two areas with it, the putamen and the insula (Zeki & Romaya, 2008).

“Hate is a problem of groups, not of ordinary relationships.”

Hate is primarily felt towards intimate others or people one spends considerable time with (Aumer et al., 2015), and distinct prototypes and appraisal patterns for hate were obtained from accounts of incidents within marriage (Fitness & Fletcher, 1993).

“Hate speech is only words; it changes nothing.”

After desensitization training individuals were less sensitive to hate speech and more prejudiced toward hate speech victims than their counterparts in the control condition (Soral et al., 2018), and the presence of hate speech creates a sense of a descriptive norm that allows outgroup derogation, leading to the erosion of existing antidiscriminatory norms (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020).

Glossary

Animalistic dehumanisation.

Denying uniquely human attributes to others, which represents them as animal-like; one of the two forms of dehumanisation in the integrative model.

BIAS map.

The behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes framework, on which warmth stereotypes determine active and competence stereotypes passive behavioural tendencies; hated groups, cold and incompetent, elicit both harm tendencies.

Chronic and immediate hatred.

The two emotional aspects of collective hatred distinguished in the Israeli election panel study, both crucial to political learning.

Contempt.

An emotion arising when a person's or group's character is appraised as bad and unresponsive to change, leading to attempts to socially exclude the target; hate's nearest neighbour with disgust.

Desensitisation.

The reduced sensitivity to hate speech that follows frequent exposure and mediates its effect on outgroup prejudice.

Duplex theory of hate.

The two-part theory on which hate has a triangular structure of negation of intimacy, passion and commitment, and develops from stories people create about the target.

Functional account of hate.

The account on which hate is based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition of persons or groups and has the goal to eliminate its target.

Group-based hatred.

Hatred felt as a member of a group towards an out-group; a distinct emotion with a unique cognitive-appraisal component and specific emotional goals.

Hate crime typology.

The classification of hate crime offenders by motive into thrill, defensive, mission and retaliatory types, grounded in Boston police case files.

Hate speech.

Derogatory language about immigrants and minority groups; exposure to it leads to political radicalisation, deteriorates intergroup relations and increases prejudice through desensitisation.

Integrative theory of love and hate.

The theory on which love is a motive based on valuing the other and hate a motive based on devaluing the other, with the goal of diminishing or destroying the other's well-being.

Intergroup emotions theory.

The theory on which, when social identity is salient, group-based appraisals elicit specific emotions and action tendencies toward out-groups.

Mechanistic dehumanisation.

Denying human nature to others, which represents them as objects or automata; the second form of dehumanisation.

Moral exclusion.

Perceiving individuals or groups as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules and considerations of fairness apply, so that harming them appears appropriate; ranges from discrimination to genocide.

Negation of intimacy.

The first component of the triangle of hate in the duplex theory, alongside passion and commitment.

Prototype approach.

The account on which emotion categories are organised around prototypes within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy whose basic level includes anger but not hate.

Putamen.

A basal ganglia structure more active while viewing a hated face; one of the two regions the pattern of hate shares with that of romantic love.

Social-functionalist account.

The account on which anger, disgust and contempt are differentiable in antecedent appraisals and in consequent actions and judgements.

Key Researchers

Michał Bilewicz

. Social psychologist at the University of Warsaw and founder of its Center for Research on Prejudice; showed that exposure to hate speech increases prejudice through desensitisation and modelled the hate speech epidemic. ORCID - Faculty Page

Agneta H. Fischer

. Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam; set out the functional account of hate as an emotion with its own appraisals and action tendencies, and distinguished contempt from anger. ORCID - Faculty Page

James J. Gross

. Professor of Psychology at Stanford University; co-authored the social-functionalist account of anger, disgust and contempt and the conflict experiments showing that anger is constructive only when hatred is low. ORCID - Faculty Page - Wikipedia

Eran Halperin

. Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; established group-based hatred as a distinct emotion in intractable conflict and traced its effects on political behaviour. ORCID - Faculty Page

Jan-Willem van Prooijen

. Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; co-authored the preregistered studies that measured hate against dislike, anger, contempt and disgust across interpersonal and intergroup targets. ORCID - Faculty Page

Phillip R. Shaver

. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Davis; led the prototype analysis of emotion knowledge that organised everyday emotion concepts, hate among them, into a hierarchy. Faculty Page - Wikipedia

Robert J. Sternberg

. Professor of Human Development at Cornell University; proposed the duplex theory of hate, with its triangle of components and the stories that generate them, and applied it to terrorism, massacres and genocide. ORCID - Faculty Page - Wikipedia

Semir Zeki

. Professor of Neuroesthetics at University College London; imaged the neural correlates of hate and found a pattern distinct from, but partly shared with, that of romantic love. ORCID - Faculty Page - Wikipedia - Google Scholar

Frequently Asked Questions

What is hate in psychology?

On the functional account hate has a unique pattern of appraisals and action tendencies: it is based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition of persons or groups, people are hated more because of who they are than because of what they do, and hate has the goal to eliminate its target (Fischer et al., 2018).

How is hate different from anger?

Measured directly, hate is more arousing, more personally threatening and more attack-oriented than anger towards interpersonal targets, and conceptually closer to disgust and contempt than to anger and dislike (Martínez et al., 2022); in conflict, inducing anger increased support for compromise among those with low levels of hatred but decreased it among those with high levels of hatred (Halperin et al., 2011).

What is the duplex theory of hate?

A two-part theory on which hate has three components, negation of intimacy, passion and commitment, and on which this structure originates from stories people create about the target, such as that a group comprises enemies of God, monsters, vermin or power-crazy tyrants (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008); it proposes hate to be one contributing cause of many, although not all, massacres and genocides (Sternberg, 2003).

Is hate an emotion or a motive?

Both descriptions are in use: one theory treats hate as a motive based on devaluing the other, associated with the goal of diminishing or destroying the other's well-being (Rempel & Burris, 2005), while conflict research finds that hatred is a distinct emotion that includes a unique cognitive-appraisal component and specific emotional goals (Halperin, 2008).

Whom do people hate most?

Hate is primarily felt towards intimate others or people one spends considerable time with, and participants saw the people they hate considerably differently than those they love, and themselves (Aumer et al., 2015).

How does hate speech affect people?

Frequent and repetitive exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization to this form of verbal violence and subsequently to lower evaluations of the victims and greater distancing, thus increasing outgroup prejudice (Soral et al., 2018); it also replaces empathy with intergroup contempt and erodes existing antidiscriminatory norms (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020).

What happens in the brain during hate?

Viewing a hated face resulted in increased activity in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in premotor cortex, in the frontal pole and bilaterally in the medial insula, with the right insula, right premotor cortex and right fronto-medial gyrus correlating linearly with the declared level of hatred (Zeki & Romaya, 2008).

What makes a group a target of hate?

In the BIAS map, hated groups, stereotyped as cold and incompetent, elicit both active and passive harm tendencies (Cuddy et al., 2007); moral exclusion places groups outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply, so that harming them appears appropriate (Opotow, 1990); and hate turns already devalued groups into victims of hate (Fischer et al., 2018).

References