"They Hate Me"

False (Meta-)Perceptions Drive Political Conflict

Everyone has enemies. Unless you’re a saint, chances are there is someone you hate. Maybe a co-worker who you trash-talk, or maybe your friend’s romantic partner who you smile at with dead eyes, or maybe a parent at daycare who you can’t stand. But why do you hate them? Perhaps their personality rubs you the wrong way. Maybe they’re mean to people you care about. Often, it’s something else. It’s because of negative meta-perceptions: you hate them because you think they hate you.

Meta-perceptions are perceptions about perceptions. A perception is what you think about someone (e.g., Wyatt is nice; Janelle is mean), and a meta-perception is what you think someone else thinks about you (e.g., Wyatt thinks that I'm nice; Janelle thinks that I am mean). Just like perceptions, meta-perceptions can be positive or negative, and what we think others think of us has a huge impact on how we treat them.

Meta-perceptions matter because of the powerful human urge for reciprocity. When someone is generous to us, we are generous back to them, and when someone is cruel to us, we are cruel back to them. What is true of actions, is also true of perceptions. When we think someone likes us, we want to like them, and when we think someone dislikes us, we want to dislike them. This general rule about social behavior should come as no surprise to most of us. It is easier to make new friends with compliments than with insults.

Although it’s obvious that positive meta-perceptions help social interactions better than negative meta-perceptions, what people actually think about us is less than obvious. Getting inside the minds of others is difficult, and so we are often left guessing about whether someone likes us or not. When someone smiles at you, is that because they genuinely like you, or do they want to trick you into a false sense of security before they betray you?

In high school, a girl in my class had a big crush on me (Kurt)—and I had one on her—but she was a total jerk to me. Based on her behavior, I guessed that she hated me, but she actually liked me (a lot). Why was she so mean? Because she thought that I didn’t like her in return. But I did! I liked her a lot too. And once we figured that all out, we both expressed our undying high school love and dated. ❤️

Political Poison

While it can be easy to misrepresent the feelings of a crush, it is even easier to distort how political opponents feel about you. When two groups are locked together in a struggle for power and resources, it’s hard not to think that they hate you. Republican and Democrat elites block each other’s bills, and trash talk each other’s initiatives, and everyday partisans are often disgusted at political opponents and see them as less than human. In this context of competition and animosity, it seems obvious that the other side hates your side.

It is no surprise then that we have intensely negative meta-perceptions about the other side. What is surprising is that — even with constant struggles for power, and a media cycle fueled by hate — people actually hate the other side less than we think. Our negative meta-perceptions are largely exaggerated.

It’s true that the other side might not want to spend the rest of their life with you —cross-partisan marriage is at an all-time low — but they hate you way less than you may think. Some researchers measured how much Republicans and Democrats think that the other group dislikes and dehumanizes them, and people of both sides overestimated the prevalence of these feelings by 50-300% (see figure below from Moore-Berg et al., 2020).

These faulty assumptions of mutual hatred further inflame animosity. In the Israel-Palestine conflict, support for both aggression and torture is tied to negative meta-perceptions about dehumanization. If you think the other side dehumanizes you, then you think it’s justified to hurt them.  In the US, negative meta-perceptions predict less support for democracy. Insurrection is driven by hate, and by thinking that you are hated.

Who’s Making Everyone Feel Hated?

Negative meta-perceptions are a natural consequence of political polarization, but there are also people committed to increasing meta-perceptions of hate. Amanda Ripley, in her book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, sounds the alarm about “conflict entrepreneurs,” people who profit from escalating conflicts, like newsroom anchors, social media influencers, and politicians. Modern society encourages conflict entrepreneurs by rewarding those who sow discord with fame and money, and conflict entrepreneurs—in turn—encourage the most divisive elements of modern society. Conflict entrepreneurs deserve some of the blame for overly negative meta-perceptions, but we all need to accept responsibility for their rise. It is possible to identify the conflict entrepreneur in your life and question what they say. Just because someone famous tells us bad things about the other side doesn’t mean we have to believe them.

We embrace assumptions of hate because it makes us feel righteous. In conflict, no one likes thinking of themselves as the aggressor. If you are cruel or dismissive towards a political opponent who actually isn’t cruel or dismissive to you, then it means you’re a cruel and dismissive person. You are the instigator of the conflict, and not merely reacting to it. It’s easier to think of ourselves as a victim of political animosity than as perpetrators who spread hate in our conversations and social media accounts. Believing in negative meta-perceptions makes us feel victimized and defensive while allowing us to deflect blame.

Just because it is easy to make assumptions of hate does not mean it’s inevitable. Jeffery Lees (one of the scholars at the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding) and Mina Cikara have experiments revealing how we can fix inaccurate meta-perceptions. Participants were asked to say how they felt (i.e., their perceptions) about the other party if it did something questionable like gerrymandering. They were also asked how much someone from the other party might feel (i.e., their meta-perceptions) if the participant’s own party did something questionable. As expected, meta-perceptions were negatively biased—people assumed the other party hated their own party more than they actually did. Importantly, once people were given information revealing the truth about meta-perception (i.e., the other side doesn’t hate you), people changed their own perceptions, hating the other side less.

These findings are really encouraging! Just providing correct information about negative meta-perceptions is enough to reduce political animosity. Perhaps permanently correcting inaccurate meta-perceptions could be a long-term antidote to poisonous partisanship. Unfortunately, the long-term impact of correcting meta-perceptions is unclear. In the Lees & Cikara study, the positive impact of correcting inaccurate meta perceptions (“I hate the other side less than I thought!”) faded when the researchers checked in a week later. The authors noted that this could have been due to measurement error, but it also wouldn’t be surprising if conflict entrepreneurs—and the safety of perceived victimhood—re-instilled a sense of persecution in the partisans over the week.

Regardless of what caused the relapse, this intervention did make people more tolerant in the moment. This suggests that if we could find a practice for consistently cultivating accurate meta-perceptions, we might be able to short-circuit the cycle of misunderstanding and hatred.

What can we do?

What can we do to avoid overly negative meta-perceptions in our own lives? We covered three themes:

1.     Identify the conflict entrepreneurs in our life and skeptically evaluate their claims that “they hate us.”

2.     Recognize that making assumptions of hate is comfortable because it allows us to feel blameless.

3.     Remember the data: the other side doesn’t actually hate your side.

There are organizations dedicated to helping people have more accurate beliefs about the other group. One is “The Flip-Side,” which presents thoughtful presentations of political positions from both the left and the right. It’s an easy 5-minute daily read that can help you develop a more accurate perspective of what the broad scope of each side believes.

Summary

We think the other side hates us much more than they actually do. These inaccurate meta-perceptions are driven by conflict-inflaming elites, but also by ourselves: believing that the other side hates us licenses us to hate people back. Importantly, negative meta-perceptions can be changed—simply correcting people’s misconceptions reduces political animosity. Each of us can do our part (with help from organizations) to counteract this pervasive misunderstanding.