Why People Hate: The Science Behind Why We Love to Hate

We aren't born hating anyone. So where does it come from, and how do you loosen its grip? Here's what the science says about why people hate.

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two couples spend a very hectic night falling in and out of love thanks to a little fairy mischief. During the climax, one of the lovers blurts out that he hates Hermia.

Her answer has stuck around for four hundred years:

“What, can you do me greater harm than hate?”

Folks, maybe she’s onto something. Few words in the language do as much damage as that one, and we hand it out constantly. We HATE Mondays! We HATE the driver who cut us off! And we HATE a coworker’s habit of one-upping us!

But we aren’t born hating everyone… So where does hate come from? And once it takes hold, how do you loosen its grip, in the world and in yourself? That’s what this article is for, and as always, we’re going to do it using science!

We are so honored to help you understand where hate comes from! If you are struggling to find the help you need, please note that all content found on this website is not to be considered professional medical advice. It is always best to consult a doctor or licensed therapist with any questions or concerns in regards to your physical or mental health. For a good resource for therapists, you can check out Mental Health America’s helpful list.

What Hate Actually Is

Hate is an intense, lasting hostility toward someone or something, usually paired with a wish to harm, devalue, or shut out whatever you’ve aimed it at.

Psychologists treat it as a secondary emotion. A learned response, built out of experience, what you were taught and the stories you tell yourself.

That makes it different from primary emotions¹ like fear and disgust, which are recognized across wildly different cultures.

Nobody has to teach you disgust. Hate takes work.

To see what makes hate its own thing, put it next to a few relatives:

• Anger is a flare-up. Something provokes you, you feel the heat, and once the situation resolves it usually cools. Hate settles in and stays.
• Dislike is milder. You’d rather not sit next to this person, but there’s no hostility behind it, just a lack of warmth.
• Love looks like hate’s opposite, and in a way it is, but they’re closer to two sides of one coin. Both are intense, both latch on hard. One pulls you toward, the other shoves away.
• Apathy is the real opposite of both. No pull, no push, no charge at all.

The true opposite of love is indifference.

Hating a friend? Watch our video below on why fake friends drain you and how to end a friendship for good:

Why We Learn to Hate

Ready for the hopeful part? Hatred is taught. Babies arrive with anger and frustration, sure, but the sustained, targeted contempt we call hate needs years of experience and a set of ideas to attach itself to.

Watch a young child at a playground and you’ll see it. They’ll happily build a sandcastle with a stranger, without a care in the world. But us? Nope, a lot of us hate strangers and don’t want them getting near us… especially to play sandcastles with.

It Starts With “Us” and “Them”

Humans crave structure and belonging. To get it, we sort ourselves into in-groups (the circles where we feel we belong) and out-groups (everyone on the outside). It’s totally natural.

The trouble starts when belonging to “us” comes to depend on rejecting “them.”

Announcing what you’re against draws a fast, bright line around your circle². It can bond a group as tightly as anything they actually love.

And it scratches a real itch. We all want to feel connected to others.

So where does the sorting instinct come from?

Newborns show no preference between faces of their own race and others. None.

But by around nine months, infants recognize faces from the group they see every day far more easily than faces they rarely encounter³.

They’re getting fluent in the faces they see most, the same way they tune into the sounds of their home language.

The tendency to sort is built in. Who ends up in your out-group is learned. And anything learned can be unlearned.

Give that us-versus-them habit enough time, though, and it turns into bias you can’t spot in yourself⁴, the kind that has divided people over religion, ethnicity and nationality throughout history.

Action Tip: Spend 10 minutes on Harvard’s Project Implicit test. It’s a free, research-backed way to spot the associations working in the background of your own mind (the ones that are almost impossible to see from the inside).

The Personal Roots: Scapegoats and Insecurity

Group forces explain a lot. But hatred is also deeply personal, and it usually grows in less flattering soil than we’d like to admit.

Often it’s about pain. When your identity or your beliefs feel attacked, the anger and fear left behind can curdle into something lasting.

Other times it’s about relief. When work is going badly, a relationship is fraying, or you don’t like what you see in the mirror, aiming your frustration at someone else feels a lot better than facing your own part in it. That’s the scapegoat at work.

And a surprising amount of it is insecurity wearing a disguise. When you suspect someone is smarter, kinder or more put-together than you, tearing them down is an easy way to quiet the discomfort. You’re not really talking about them at all, you’re managing a feeling about yourself.

Try this: Next time someone cuts you off in traffic and your first thought is what a reckless jerk, try a second story. Maybe they’re rushing to a hospital. Maybe they simply didn’t see you. Is the kinder version true? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s no more of a guess than the first one, and it feels a whole lot better to live with.

The Faces Hate Wears

Hate rarely announces itself with a villain’s cackle. Most of the time it arrives in smaller, more common forms. Knowing them by name makes it far easier to catch, in others and in yourself.

Microaggressions

Microaggressions are the subtle, often unintentional comments and actions that demean people based on who they are. They’re common enough to leave marks: in one study, up to one in four Black and Latinx students⁵ reported experiencing racial microaggressions over a single year.

The tricky thing is that they’re usually louder to the person on the receiving end than to the person who said them. Which means naming them, gently, is often the only way the speaker learns.

Here’s a way to do that without lighting a fuse:

“I know you probably didn’t mean anything by it, but when you said [specific thing] in the meeting, it hurt, because [why]. I wanted to flag it.”

Watch this conversation where a group of Black men talk through the microaggressions they field every day:

Hate Speech

Hate speech is language meant to spread contempt or prejudice against people for their race, religion, gender, or other core parts of who they are. It’s usually more deliberate than a microaggression, which makes it harder to hear.

Two instincts take over when you hear it. Ignore it and dodge the confrontation. Or come out swinging.

Neither works!

Silence tells the speaker they’re on safe ground. Swinging hands them a reason to write you off as “too sensitive” and dig in harder.

There’s a steadier middle path, especially at work, where everyone deserves to feel safe. Name the behavior and keep your own temperature down:

“That comment isn’t something we’re okay with here. It plays on a harmful stereotype, and I need it not to happen again.”

Calm and firm beats loud and furious almost every time.

Cyberbullying

The internet handed hate a megaphone and a mask.

Nearly half of US teens ages 13 to 17 say they’ve been cyberbullied⁶. Forty-six percent.

Half of them. Yikes.

Distance and anonymity are what make it so ugly. It’s easy to type something at a screen that you’d never say to a face… and even easier to forget there’s a real person absorbing it.

Action Tip: Take five minutes to audit your own corner of the internet: the tone of what you post, the accounts you amplify, and how you talk in the comments. The gut check: Would you say it across a dinner table?

Hate Crimes

At the far end are hate crimes: criminal acts, from vandalism and threats to assault, aimed at people for their race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or gender identity. They hurt the person targeted, and they frighten everyone else who shares that identity.

The scale is not shrinking. The FBI logged 11,862 hate crime incidents in 2023⁷, the highest count on record, though part of that rise reflects more police departments reporting their numbers than in past years.

If you witness something that could escalate, write down what you saw while it’s fresh, before the details start to blur. Then loop in whoever can actually help, whether that’s a manager or law enforcement.

Action Tip: Learn a few basic de-escalation techniques. Knowing how to lower the temperature in a tense moment protects you and everyone else in the room.

When the Hatred Points Inward

Yes, hate can be aimed at yourself.

Self-hate is sneaky because it hides in behavior that looks almost admirable from the outside. It can look like:

• Perfectionism that never lets you rest
• Chronic people-pleasing
• Self-deprecating jokes that aren’t really jokes
• A running inner commentary that would horrify you if a friend said it out loud

That harsh inner voice chips away at your confidence and poisons your relationships, because it’s hard to believe anyone else values you when you don’t.

The way out is slow. It works, though.

It starts with catching the voice in the act. When you notice the you always ruin everything narration, name it for what it is. A story your mind is spinning.

Then ask whether you’d ever say it out loud to someone you love.

From there, hand yourself a fraction of the patience you’d give a struggling friend. You’d never grade them this harshly, would you?

Lean on the people who see you clearly and can reflect a truer picture back.

And if the voice feels too loud to manage alone, talking it through with someone you trust takes real strength. A mentor, a coach, a counselor. Any of them.

Try this: For one week, when you catch a harsh thought about yourself, jot it down. Then rewrite it the way a good friend would say it. “I’m so stupid” becomes “I made a mistake, and I can fix it.” Seeing the two side by side is often enough to loosen the old script’s hold.

The Surprising Pull of Shared Hate

Why does bonding over a shared enemy feel so good? Because it works.

In one study, mutual dislike bonded people faster than mutual liking did².

Discovering that you and a new acquaintance both can’t stand the same person creates an instant, conspiratorial closeness.

It’s why ideological groups gain steam by hammering the other side. Nothing unites a room like a common enemy.

So should you use it to make friends? Please don’t. The costs are brutal, and mostly invisible until it’s too late.

When you badmouth someone, your listener’s brain does something strange. It pins the very traits you’re describing onto you⁸. Call someone petty and self-absorbed, and part of your listener’s mind now files you under petty and self-absorbed. Ouch.

Picture two friends after a dinner party:

Charlotte: “What did you make of Mr. Collins?”

Elizabeth: “Ugh. So pompous and self-righteous. Did you see him staring at us all night?”

If Charlotte also found him insufferable, they bond. But if she thought he was perfectly pleasant, her brain tags Elizabeth as the pompous, self-righteous one, and Elizabeth walks away with no idea she just made herself look worse. (Austen fans, you saw that one coming.)

Pro Tip: The rare time shared dislike does you a favor is when it’s honest and earned. Telling a close friend you’re wary of someone who really hurt you is a moment of real vulnerability, and vulnerability is what builds lasting friendships. The difference is motive: are you protecting a bond, or trash-talking your way into one?

How to Loosen Hate’s Grip

You can’t take hate out of the human heart. But you can shrink it, one interaction at a time.

Trade judgment for curiosity. The fastest antidote to “them” is a real story about one of “them.” When someone makes a sweeping generalization about a group, you can offer a real human counter-example from your own life.

Listen before you rebut. You don’t have to agree. Just actually listen, all the way to the end of their sentence, while your rebuttal waits its turn.

Go looking for other worlds. It’s easy to write off what you’ve never been near, so feed your brain the unfamiliar on purpose. Read a novel from a culture you know nothing about. Attend a service outside your own tradition. Say yes to dinner with someone whose life looks nothing like yours. Worst case? You eat something new.

I went to a festival recently and stopped at a booth with Polynesian carved necklaces. I started leafing through a binder with the lore and significance of the symbol. Learning the stories behind these necklaces made them even more beautiful to me and left far less room to dismiss them as unimportant.

Action Tip: This week, have one curious conversation with someone whose views or background differ from yours. Ask questions with no agenda beyond understanding how they got here. You don’t have to change your mind. Just practice closing the distance.

Why People Hate: The Takeaway

Nobody is born with hate, which means every piece of this can be unlearned. Here’s where to start:

1. Give strangers a second story. When the driver cuts you off or the coworker replies-all again, try a kinder guess before the harsh one. It’s no less accurate, and it’s a lot easier to live with.
2. Meet your own sorting instinct. Spend 10 minutes on Harvard’s Project Implicit test and meet the associations you didn’t know you had.
3. Name microaggressions gently. A script like “I know you probably didn’t mean anything by it…” opens the conversation without lighting a fuse.
4. Skip the gossip shortcut. Listeners pin the traits you describe onto you, so bond over what you both love.
5. Rewrite the inner critic. For one week, jot down each harsh thought about yourself and reword it the way a good friend would say it.
6. Close one gap this week. Have a single curious conversation with someone whose life looks nothing like yours, with no agenda beyond understanding.

You won’t fix the whole world from your kitchen table… but one conversation? That’s plenty of a start.

Ready for something a little lighter? Head over to How to Be Happy: 15 Science-Backed Ways To Be Happier Today.

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