An Evolutionary Theory of Hatred

I spent the early part of my PhD researching violence. I was interested in how and why violence could sometimes be morally permissible, and why we sometimes found it entertaining, which eventually led to my work on morbid curiosity.

As part of this early research, I began to think more about the causes of violence. Naturally, this led me to look into hatred. At the time, there wasn’t too much work on hatred, and almost none from an evolutionary perspective. For example, it wasn’t even clear if hatred was its own emotion or simply a variant of anger.

I organized a small workshop and invited evolutionary scholars Aaron Sell and Anthony Lopez to UChicago to discuss the evolutionary foundations of conflict. Aaron has conducted pioneering work on the evolutionary account of anger and Anthony is an expert on the evolutionary psychology of warfare.

The outcome of this workshop was a collaborative project between myself, Aaron Sell, Anthony Lopez, and Mitchell Landers on hatred, where we developed the Neutralization Theory of Hatred.