How Spite Might Not Be So Bad

Spite has generally be considered a negative emotion. It can be described as a need to punish another even if it means your are ultimately hurting yourself. My mom always used to say “Don’t cut of your nose to spite your face” when I was being stubborn.

Until recently however there has been very little work done on understanding spite and its origins as a human emotion. In general as the quote above would suggest spite has been viewed as a negative emotion in part because many people saw it as having ties to the fact humans are selfish and savage beings. However, recent studies by evolutionary scientists suggests that humans are not as brutish and selfish as once believed. In fact humans tend to desire cooperation and connection with others.

In February of this year, Dr. Marcus and his collegues presented preliminary results of a new scale to assess spitefulness to the journal Psychological Assessment. Dr. Marcus et al. tested 946 college students and 297 adults which seems to be a decent sample size. The test itself was in survey form with 17 items. Participants were asked to rate how they agreed with sentiments such as “I would be willing to take a punch if it meant someone I did not like would receive two punches” or “If my neighbor complained about the appearance of my front yard, I would be tempted to make it look worse just to annoy him or her”.

When the results were tabulated men were more likely to be spiteful then women. Younger people tended to be more spiteful than old people. Additionally, the emotion of spitefulness was more likely to be found in people who demonstrated other traits such as callousness and poor self-esteem. The survey also showed that even people who seemed pretty moderate and temperate could become spiteful in situations such as partisan politics and divorce.

However, when game theory is applied to the idea of spitefulness the results change slightly. Participants are placed in to 4 categories and told to act in 4 different ways each representing a range from cooperative to spiteful to stingy. When they ran the simulation those who were overly spiteful did not last long because they could not maintain such behavior. However those that were flexible(spiteful in some situations but not others) proved to be extremely successful. This idea is called altruistic punishment — the willingness to punish some individuals to punish rule breakers even the action itself does not effect the person. In many cases it can help cooperations. When selfish players punish other selfish players, overtime the selfish players either stop playing or are excluded from the group. This creates a net effect of less selfish people in the game.

For example, take organized crime. While organized crime itself can be seen as violent and spiteful. Overtime the areas in which the organized crime takes over and inserts itself into the government or societal structures, the overall chance of crime and violence decreases.

Thus while spitefulness in and of itself is not desirable it can in fact reduce the total number of spiteful people within the group which can be desirable for the population as a whole.