I love the clarity of this 2021 paper:
We argue herein that, while often conceptualized as an extreme form of anger, hatred is a human emotion distinct from anger, with unique triggers, conceptual orientations, and terminating conditions. An examination of the social conditions of our species’ evolutionary history reveals that hatred evolved to address its own distinct adaptive problem: individuals whose existence was — on balance — costly to the hater. Because a well-designed system for solving this problem would have been tailored toward neutralizing those costs, we call this hypothesis ‘the neutralization theory of hatred.’ This theory places the features of hatred within a functional framework. Specifically, we argue that hatred is triggered by cues that an individual’s existence causes fitness decrements for the hater. Cognitively, hatred orients the mind so as to view costs heaped onto the hated person as benefits to the hater — thus motivating spiteful behavior — and can be characterized as maintaining a negative intrinsic welfare tradeoff parameter toward the hated person. Behaviorally, hatred can motivate either avoidance or a predatory style cost infliction strategy that is designed to weaken, incapacitate, or terminate the target…
One of the effects of hatred is to heap costs upon the target. This means that a hateful person will likely have a negative association value toward their victim. In other words, if someone hates you, they will lie about you, look for costs to put on you, and fantasize about harming you. As a result, your life is likely to be worse off for their existence. Thus, hatred should be reciprocal. This has important implications for how hatred should express itself (see below).
Interestingly, this creates a perverse – but empirically verified prediction (Schopler & Compere, 1971) – which is that we should hate those that we have unjustly harmed. If you harm a person – you are presumably triggering hatred in them – which means that they are now an enemy who will likely work against you in the future. Thus, their continued existence is bad for you, triggering hatred.
I hope Trump realizes he went too far.
The shift toward neutralization occurs when allies stop viewing a leader as a predictable partner in a shared system. They begin to treat specific outbursts or unusual demands as noise to ignore rather than signals to address. Many European leaders moved toward a strategy of containment. They maintained the structural alliance while limiting their exposure to the personal whims of the executive. They focused on building relationships with the Department of State or the Pentagon to bypass the volatility of the White House.
Greenland sits in a vital strategic position for Arctic security and resource management. The blunt nature of the offer forced other democratic nations to re-evaluate how they defend their sovereignty against an ally. It turned a matter of regional cooperation into a test of national pride. Leaders who once sought to bargain for favorable trade or military terms found themselves in a defensive crouch. They saw the move not as a serious real estate deal and not just as disregard for the established international order, but as an existential threat to their sovereignty. They were backed into a corner and became desperate.
The function of anger, for example, is to orchestrate bargaining tactics when others put too low a weight on the individual’s welfare; the function of gratitude is to consolidate a higher level of cooperation when the system detects that an unexpectedly high weight has been put on one’s welfare; the function of pride is to motivate the individual to publicize (and achieve) traits or acts that enhance valuation by others; the function of shame is to limit reductions in the weight placed on one’s welfare by an audience; the function of guilt is to prevent or remedy events where one put too low a weight on the welfare of another (often unintentionally), independent of whether the other will know it. Within this framework, one can distinguish guilt and shame while seeing why they are related. In guilt, the outcome to be avoided is imposing harm on valued others, something that remains even if they never discover it. In shame, the outcome to be avoided is being devalued by others. One can feel both shame and guilt about the same act, but the functions, internal recalibrations, and outputs are distinct. For example, someone who felt guilt and shame about infidelity might refrain from it, whereas someone who felt shame but not guilt about infidelity might practice it but conceal it. Future work may profitably assess similarities and differences between shame and other emotions, such as guilt and embarrassment.
Because shame (like pain) causes personal suffering and sometimes leads to hostile behavior, this emotion has been called “maladaptive” and “ugly”. However, an evolutionary–psychological analysis of the existing evidence suggests a different view: this ugly emotion may be the expression of a system that is elegantly designed to deter injurious choices and to make the best of a bad situation.
