The Upside and Downside of ‘Spite’ | EXTRACT

In his new book, Spite, Simon McCarthy-Jones draws on psychology, current affairs, literature and genetics to illuminate – whether we admit it or not – our spiteful side. There’s a hopeful message too – the upside of our dark side. Spite can drive us forward, and Simon provides a fresh perspective on the concept by showing the evolutionary benefits of spite as a social leveller, an enabler of defiance, a wellspring of freedom and a vital weapon in our everyday armoury.

Read this extract from this game-changing book to learn more about the different facets of spite and how it can be used to your advantage:

Spite runs deep. We find it in our oldest stories. It is there in the myths of Ancient Greece. Medea kills her children, just to spite her unfaithful husband, Jason. Achilles refuses to help his Greek comrades fight because one of them has stolen his slave. Folklore tells of spite. A magical being offers to grant a man one wish. Naturally, there is a catch. Whatever he gets, his hated neighbour will get double. The man wishes to be blind in one eye.

Such stories, although buried in time, still speak of an instantly recognisable behaviour. Today, we know that spite can be petty. A driver lingers in a parking space, just to make you wait. A neighbour puts up a fence, solely to block your view. We may also realise how damaging spite can be. A spouse seeks custody of a child, just to get back at their ex. A voter supports a candidate they hope will cause chaos. But are we prepared to recognise that spite may have a positive side? What exactly is spite? According to the American psychologist David Marcus, a spiteful act is one where you harm another person and yourself.

This is a ‘strong’ definition of spite. In weaker definitions, spite is harming another while merely risking harm to yourself or simply not personally benefitting.

Yet, as Marcus points out, requiring that spite involve a personal cost, helps differentiate it from other forms of behaviour such as selfishness, hostility and sadism. Indeed, a helpful way to understand spite is to say what it isn’t. When we consider the costs and benefits of our actions, there are four basic ways we can interact with another person.

Two ways involve direct perks for us. We can act in a way that benefits both ourselves and the other (co-operation) or in a way that benefits ourselves but not the other (selfishness). A third way involves a cost to us, but a benefit to the other. This is altruism. Researchers have dedicated lifetimes to the study of co-operation, selfishness and altruism. This brings us to our fourth behaviour, spite. Here we behave in a way that harms both ourselves and the other.

This behaviour has been left in the shadows. This is not a safe place for it to be. We need to shine a light on spite. Spite is challenging to explain. It seems to present an evolutionary puzzle. Why would natural selection not have weeded out a behaviour in which everybody loses? Spite should never have survived. If your spite benefits you in the long-term, then its continued existence becomes comprehensible. But what about spiteful acts that don’t give you long-term benefits? How can we explain those? Do such acts even exist? Spite also poses a problem for economists. What kind of person acts against their financial interests? For the longest time, economists didn’t think there was a problem to explain. The famous eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith claimed people were ‘not very frequently under the influence’ of spite and that even if it did occur we would be ‘restrained by prudential considerations’.

Much later, in the 1970s, the American economist Gordon Tullock claimed that the average human was about 95% selfish.

In the ‘greed is good’ era of the 1980s, many may have felt this estimate to be on the low side. Economists viewed humans as a creature called homo economicus; a being that acted rationally to maximise its self-interests. Self-interest was typically, though not always, understood in financial terms.

And yet, back in 1977, a ground-breaking study found people were often quite happy to turn down free money. Adam Smith had been over-optimistic. Something very real and very powerful lurked in Tullock’s residual percentage. If spite involves harm to both oneself and another, what constitutes harm? Who gets to decide whether an act is harmful and thereby has the power to define an act as spiteful? To take an extreme example, does a suicide bomber, who thinks that they will be rewarded in the next life and their families compensated in this life, harm themselves or not? Evolutionary biologists possess an objective measure of harm. This is a loss of fitness (reproductive success). We will look at spiteful acts involving a loss of personal fitness, so-called ‘evolutionary spite’, in Chapter 4. In contrast, economists and psychologists tend to focus on harm in the form of immediate financial costs. This ‘psychological spite’ can turn out to have unforeseen long-term personal benefits. Such spite ages well, maturing into selfishness. Once we are happy with what spite is, two questions remain. First, what is driving someone to act spitefully in the moment? That is, how does spite work? This is called spite’s proximate explanation. Second, what is the deeper reason we are spiteful? Why does spite exist? What is its evolutionary function? This is the ultimate explanation of spite.