In contrast to dislike, hate is rooted in seeing the hated target as morally deficient or as violating moral norms

The psychology of hate: Moral concerns differentiate hate from dislike. Clara Pretus, Jennifer L. Ray, Yael Granot, William A. Cunningham, Jay J. Van Bavel. European Journal of Social Psychology, November 3 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2906

Abstract: We investigated whether any differences in the psychological conceptualization of hate and dislike were simply a matter of degree of negativity (i.e., hate falls on the end of the continuum of dislike) or also morality (i.e., hate is imbued with distinct moral components that distinguish it from dislike). In three lab studies in Canada and the United States, participants reported disliked and hated attitude objects and rated each on dimensions including valence, attitude strength, morality, and emotional content. Quantitative and qualitative measures revealed that hated attitude objects were more negative than disliked attitude objects and associated  with moral beliefs and emotions, even after adjusting for differences in negativity. In Study 4, we analysed the rhetoric on real hate sites and complaint forums and found that the language used on prominent hate websites contained more words related to morality, but not negativity, relative to complaint forums.

6 GENERAL DISCUSSION

In a combination of laboratory studies and a content analysis of real online hate and complaint websites, we found initial evidence that differences in people's conceptualizations of hate and dislike are not only a matter of negativity but also morality. Morality—via both the expression of moral emotions and moral conviction—differentiates hated from disliked attitude objects. Individuals rated hated attitude objects in the lab as more closely connected to morality than disliked or even extremely disliked attitude objects. This distinction still held when adjusting for the relationship between morality and negativity. Further, real websites known by the United States government to be organized hate groups used significantly more moral language in expressing their beliefs as compared with users on complaint forums venting their dislike. Of note, we found an order effect in Study 1 such that differences between hate and dislike were less evident when participants were asked to generate disliked objects first. This suggests that people spontaneously think about objects that are closer to objects they extremely dislike or hate when asked about dislike without an explicit reference to hate.

Regarding the intensity hypothesis, we found mixed evidence for the role of negativity in distinguishing hate expressions from dislike. In Studies 1 and 2, hated attitude objects were rated as more negative than disliked attitude objects, even after controlling for morality, suggesting that both morality and negativity independently contribute to hate. These results are aligned with recent work by Martínez et al. (2022), who found increased ratings in 11 self-reported negative emotions in response to hated compared to disliked targets. However, these authors do not explore differences between hated and extremely disliked objects. We find this to be a relevant comparison in the light of Study 3, where we find that negativity differences between hated and extremely disliked objects vanished after controlling for morality, suggesting that differences in morality accounted for observed differences in negativity. Further, in Study 4, online expressions of hate did not use more negative language than online expressions of dislike. Thus, whereas hate and dislike seem to differ in both intensity and morality, it is possible that hate and extreme dislike differ mainly in the morality dimension. Future studies would benefit from employing scales and statistical techniques that allow researchers to obtain uncorrelated measures of negativity, attitude strength, and morality to better assess the independent contribution of each of these constructs in distinguishing hate from dislike.

Although it seems easy to recognize expressions of hatred when we see them—at Nazi rallies or ethno-cultural genocide—hate is still poorly understood from a scientific perspective. Our studies find that morality is a key ingredient that differentiates the conceptualization of hate from dislike in the minds of many people. These studies offer a springboard for empirical research into the psychology of hate. Centuries of philosophical theory have laid the groundwork for more rigorous empirical investigation. For example, our review of the literature raised the possibility that hate is motivational. Rempel and Burris (2005) suggested that we will ignore disliked objects but will wish to harm hated ones. In line with this, people feel more inclined to engage in attack-oriented behaviours when they experience hate versus dislike (Martínez et al., 2022). Further, while the present laboratory studies manipulated the type of attitude object generated to test differences between groups, further research could reverse the relationship between our independent and dependent variables. An important test of the connection between hate and morality would be to determine if experimentally inducing moral emotions could create hate in a laboratory setting. However, the ethics of doing so must be carefully considered.

One potential alternative explanation is that our instructions to generate hated versus disliked attitude objects elicited different classes of attitude objects (e.g., people and groups vs. concepts and beliefs). However, when we explicitly instructed people to generate different classes of attitude objects, we found that the difference between hate versus dislike was robust across these classes. It is also possible that hated versus disliked attitude objects differed systematically in level of abstraction. Some work has found that people more readily apply their moral principles to the psychologically distant (Eyal et al., 2008). Perhaps hated attitude objects are more psychologically distant or higher in abstraction? Another alternative explanation for our findings is that disliked versus hated objects do not need to have an actual antecedent: whereas people may not know why they dislike something, hatred may be more readily associated with a specific experience, making it easier to link to morality. Future research should address these possibilities.

An additional reason we believe the differences between hate and dislike extend beyond these issues is our study of online hate groups. The websites we explored did not require users to list attitudes objects they hated. In fact, many online hate groups actively disavow their categorization as “hate groups” and the content of their websites often focused on their core values (e.g., “…teaches lessons of morality and nobility, to walk as a proud White individual in a world where being White is now considered wrong”). Their websites were identified as hate groups by third parties. Our analyses nevertheless found much higher expressions of morality on these hate websites as compared to complaint forums, both about objects and about corporate groups. Together with our lab experiments, this gives us confidence that the difference between hate and dislike goes beyond simple semantics.

6.1 Hate as emotion

The current research relied on self-reports and content coding, which provides a modest scope for understanding the rich affective experience of hate. At present, it is impossible to determine if hate causes a feeling state or if labelling an experience as hate is a consequence of an emotional experience (or both). Importantly, our use of the term hate does not imply that it is a basic emotion. Our belief is that the psychological state we colloquially associate with hatred is actively constructed like other complex emotional states rather than a natural kind (see Barrett, 2006). While this is beyond the scope of the present work, these are important distinctions that should be examined in future research on the psychology of hate.

On a related note, while the conceptualization of anger, contempt, and disgust as distinctively moral emotions continues to receive empirical support (see for instance Steiger & Reyna, 2017), other scholars have challenged this view, arguing that disgust may have a broader role beyond morality or that anger can be triggered by other moral transgressions beyond autonomy (see Lomas, 2019). Thus, our results on the differences in moral emotions between hated and disliked attitude objects should be treated with caution: whereas these emotions may be necessary for hatred to arise, they may not be sufficient. Whereas higher ratings in anger, contempt, and disgust were to be expected in the hatred versus dislike condition, they should not be taken by themselves as unequivocal proof of the association between hatred and morality.

The results of the present research might, eventually, be fruitfully applied to psychological or behaviour interventions against hate. For instance, work on relations between Israelis and Palestinians suggests that hatred toward the out-group differs from anger in terms of profiling the out-group as evil and intentionally causing harm (Halperin, 2008; see also Parker & Janoff-Bulman, 2013). Yet such conflict may be ameliorated and peace proposals more likely to be adopted when the out-group is willing to compromise sacred values—rather than economic concessions (Ginges et al., 2007). Thus, acknowledging and leveraging the moral concerns associated with hatred may provide an important avenue for addressing intergroup (as well as interpersonal) conflict. We urge research in these areas to continue this line of inquiry in the hopes of designing and testing interventions to alleviate social conflict.

Finally, we note that the samples of our first three studies were undergraduate students from Canada and the US. This poses a limitation in terms of the generalizability of the findings of these studies, which have been drawn from western educated individuals from industrialized, rich, democratic societies (WEIRD, see Henrich et al., 2010). We attempted to overcome this limitation in Study 4, where we obtained samples from a more ecological environment (websites with English-speaking audiences). Because different cultures could have different conceptualizations of hate and dislike, future research should further address this constraint by including cross-national representative samples.