Spite is powerful, and everywhere

There are four basic social behaviors: co-operation, selfishness, altruism and spite. Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College, Dublin has zeroed in on the last one in his book, Spite. It is wider and deeper than you might think.

Humans, and pretty much only humans, have a pronounced tendency to spite others. That is, they are willing to take a beating (financially, socially) just so someone else might not get ahead. He says they “do it to inflict harm on the unfair, the dominant, the elite. We may also do it to widen the gap between us and others and to stay off the bottom rung of society. The failure of elites to understand that the populace is driven by more than its narrow economic self-interest opens the doors to spite and to manipulative counterelites, with potentially disastrous results.” It is, he says, a gut response and not a reasoned, intellectual decision.

The book examines numerous situations and a large number of psychological studies that have sought to filter spite, examine, refine and dissect it, and mainly, understand what makes people do it at all.

It’s only used against other humans, even when the spiter doesn’t know the other person involved. An identical test given by a computer instead of a human results in essentially no spite attempts. So spite is purely vengeance, meant to cause pain for others, even while the…