MORES Glossary

Hate

/heɪt/

On 29 July 2024, a 17-year-old man killed three girls and wounded 10 other people at a children’s dance class in Southport, in north-west England. The killer’s age prevented the public from lawfully knowing his name. But within hours, a clickbait website provided one: Ali al-Shakati, a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived by boat in 2023. The next day, a crowd attacked a mosque in Southport. Within a week, mosques and migrant-owned businesses came under attack in towns across the country. What the crowds went out to punish was a kind of person rather than a deed. That judgement is hate.

Hate is an extreme and lasting emotion towards a person or a group, condemning others wholly. It belongs among the moral emotions of condemnation, and anger is its close neighbour. According to appraisal theory, what sets the two apart is what they judge. Anger arises when people see an act as unjust and assume that the perpetrator could have behaved differently. Hate arises when they see the harm as intended, and as coming from a fixed, malevolent character.

That contrast has been tested. To find out what separates group-based hatred from other emotions, MORES co-investigator Eran Halperin gave Israeli participants scenarios drawn from their own conflict—among them a terror attack that injured a relative—each seen through a protagonist’s reading of what had happened. Those readings were varied, so that each could be tested independently. Blaming the other side and judging the event unfair produced anger and hate alike. Only two readings separated them, and both weighed far more on hatred: that the harm was meant, and that it came from the outgroup’s evil character.

No emotion in a conflict goes as far as hate. Fear, the sense that a threat is looming over one’s own future, wants safety. Anger wants the other side corrected. Contempt, the feeling of superiority that makes people dismiss others as unworthy, wants them excluded. Hate wants them gone: humiliated, shut out of social life, or destroyed. Asked what they wanted to happen to the group they liked least, respondents high in hatred wanted it harmed and removed, and those high in anger or fear did not; anger alone went with wanting to change the group or educate it. The most popular goal on the list, though, was simply to “live and let live”—apart and in safety. Fear will settle for that arrangement. Hate, the only emotion in the study that pulled against it, will not.

Because its appraisal concerns character rather than conduct, hate travels further than other emotions. Interviewees in conflict settings reported fear of terror, anger at individuals who carried out an attack, and hatred of an entire people. Because hate is a belief about what someone is rather than about what they have done, it does not take much for it to transfer from one person to everyone taken to share that character. People can hate for a long time, without ever having met the hated. They can also inherit it, having suffered nothing themselves.

That is why hate weighs heavier in politics than its sibling emotions. Across four national samples in an Israeli study, group-based hatred was the strongest emotional antecedent of political intolerance, the willingness to deny basic rights to a disliked group. Neither anger nor fear had this impact directly: anger reached intolerance by feeding hatred, and fear by raising the sense of threat, which swelled hatred in turn.

Hate asks for a great deal more than most people who feel it ever carry out. In another study, most people recalling an episode of group-based hatred said they had wanted something terrible to happen to the hated group. Half had supported killing its members, and one in six had acted violently. Most often, people pulled away, and where they acted, they did so at a distance: political action against the group, or open pleasure at its misfortune.

Hate also changes what other emotions do. In experiments conducted before the 2007 Annapolis peace summit, provoking anger in Israeli respondents raised support for compromise in the coming negotiations, but only among those low in hatred. Among those high in hatred, anger moved them the other way.

Southport showed how fast this happens. Police said within a day that the killer had been born in Cardiff, and a judge named him Axel Rudakubana three days later. The worst nights of violence came afterwards. The invented asylum seeker was just a permission slip for a conclusion many had already drawn.

If hate runs this deep and this far ahead of the facts, can it be softened at all? Not by argument about the group itself: attacking what people think of an adversary tends to backfire, so researchers tested a different idea. Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank read an article on whether aggressive groups have a fixed nature or can change. It named neither side. Those who read that groups can change came out warmer towards the other side and readier to compromise—including in Ramallah, where over half the participants belonged to political or militant organisations. Hate rests on a belief about fixity. The belief itself is not fixed.