Neuroscience of Hatred
Hate and distrust feel like opposites of love and trust—but they aren’t.
At their core, they’re about fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of being hurt. Fear of death itself.
But how does the brain decide who to trust and who to fear?
Why do we hold onto hatred even when it harms us?
And most importantly, how do we break the cycle?
Let’s dive in.
(And enjoy a special open-door ending!)
If you have any topic suggestions for future episodes, don't hesitate to reach out! Send us an email at info@brainblownpodcast.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
References
The Anatomy of Hatred: Multiple Pathways to the Construction of Human Hatred Randall E. Osborne, Ph.D., Christopher J. Frost, Ph.D. Texas State University-San Marcos
A Brain Mechanism for Hate Mario F. Mendez, M.D., Ph.D.
Neuropolitics in the age of extremism: Brain regions involved in hatred Henry A. Nasrallah, MD
Trust is heritable, whereas distrust is not Martin Reimann, Oliver Schilkeb, and Karen S. Cook
Medical education and distrust modulate the response of insular-cingulate network and ventral striatum in pain diagnosis Giada Dirupo, Sabrina Totaro, Jeanne Richard, Corrado Corradi-Dell’Acqua
Understanding Emotions: Origins and Roles of the Amygdala Goran Šimić Mladenka Tkalčić Vana Vukić Damir Mulc Ena Španić Marina Šagud Francisco E Olucha-Bordonau Mario Vukšić Patrick R Hof
General Outline of Episode
1. Intro & Overview
What’s the core idea behind this episode’s theme?
Example: "We’re exploring how trust (or communication, etc.) impacts your professional or personal relationships."
What key areas will you touch on (theory, brain science, real-life applications)?
Example: "We’ll cover the science behind trust, why it breaks down, and how to rebuild it with actionable strategies."
2. Theoretical Foundation
LAINE: Hatred and distrust are not easy things to talk about. As a society we feel them, we know they exist, but people will often have an intense response when they are brought up. So why are we covering them? This season, to fully flush out a topic, it felt important to talk about ‘both sides’ of what humans experience. Hatred is identified as “a strong feeling of dislike, distrust, abhor”. Distrust is defined as the absence of trust. But as discussed in January’s episode, distrust is not the opposite of trust in the brain - because essentially if that were true the areas of the brain that fire in trust would just not fire for distrust, but instead different areas of the brain are firing. So what is going on?
What scientific theories or frameworks explain this issue?
What happens in the brain during this process?
LAINE: -Some of the areas we will still be covering, but focusing on a lot more. Your amygdala is, no surprise, active in this, but in addition, so is your insula. We also find a lot in the parahippocampal gyrus, because we process fear and emotional memories and try to predict other’s reactions.
What real-world applications or case studies exist that show these theories in action?
What practical strategies have worked in addressing this problem?
Tease for what we’ll cover at the end of the episode?
Example: Feedback loops, emotional regulation techniques, active listening.
Laine: Honestly the heart of hatred and distrust, is fear. To live in a world without hatred, without a lack of trust, means you have come face to face with your fears.
3. Brain Mapping (Deep Dive)
Laine: Before we get into the details of the brain - I also want to get into why this exists. Why do humans hate and why do they distrust? Distrust, it turns out, is partially taught to us, our earliest experiences are what makes us not trust and teach us to distrust others, largely stemming from parents, but moving even past that. We weigh the reward to risk outcome and experiences teach us to fear trusting. According to Osborne and Frost, the heart of hatred is fear. They state hatred is is “ 1) biological predispositions; (2) psychodynamic (unconscious) factors; (3) modes of cognitive reasoning; (4) social influence and social identity; and (5) integrative processes by which humans bring together multiple dimensions of the self.”.
Areas of the brain involved in both distrust and hatred are very similar - because both stem from fear. As mentioned in the main episode, we thought distrust would be the opposite of trust but that is not the case. The need for these to be separate is to remember that both can exist independently of each other. A key piece of trust, as we mentioned in the earlier episode, is oxytocin. As we have discussed earlier in the session, the amount of natural oxytocin is derived from earlier experiences and from genetics. A highly nurturing low-stress environment will increase the amount of oxytocin the body can produce. Distrust is not the same. Distrust is found to be heavily in nurture and less in nature. Reimanna, Schilkep, and Cookc state “Distrust is not only rooted in an individual’s early-life experiences, in which family and immediate peers play a crucial role in socializing distrust, but is further embossed during unique experiences later in life, as shown by the high proportion of the unshared environment in the total variation. This latter finding suggests that people are vulnerable to negative experiences not only in childhood and adolescence but also during adulthood.”
Parents are at the heart of this according to a lot of research. Do they teach you that it's better to trust or distrust? The research found that the environment we grew up in explained 70% of the amount of distrust. And argue that “ earliest infantile experiences are actually indicators of a genetic grounding of trust.”’
Distrust is largely argued to be in the evaluation of people’s behaviors which is found in the “dorsal-posterior portion of the medial prefrontal cortex (dpMPFC), often implicated in prediction error”. This is connected to the reward system which is part of your ventral striatum.” It involves the amygdala, because of fear, as well as the prefrontal cortex to help with decision making, the insula to help with social cuties and body sensations, and the AAC or Anterior Cingulate Cortex to help balance between our body’s response and our conscious thought. Essentially distrust is about cost versus reward, and how much we have had success surviving if we are wrong, and how fearful we are of being wrong.
As we mentioned, the heart of hatred is actually fear. Osborn and Frost state that this is crucial and very rudimentary. They state we change like a switching being tripped any moment we recognize “any general feature that even remotely resembles that which we fear.”. We have covered on this podcast that regulating this is harder, uses a more advanced part of your brain and it is the younger part of our brain. And because of that, it can by ‘bypassed” or taken over by our limbic system. They argue that hatred becomes greater. In our first episode, we talked about how quickly the brain responds, how we can be walking in a forest and jump when we see a stick, because our brain will react as though it is a snake before we even realize we’ve seen something. Hatred becomes bigger than that. They state “We may not only experience the initial surge of fear and anger, but may even extend the emotional arousal by recalling consciously and continually the original stimulus object. In so doing, we may choose to fear and to respond with anger to all snakes, to anything that crawls on the ground like a snake, and to human beings that we label "snakes." We do not like being afraid. We get angry, and when that anger festers we get angry at the things that make us afraid, all things, things that briefly resemble that, even if they are not the same. Because we do not want to be afraid.
Hatred specifically involves your neocortex. That is the outermost part of your brain - the top of your hand in your hand model of the brain. It pulls this in to scan for any object that resembles our object of fear and leaps into action when it’s determined it saw what it does not like
A huge part of hatred is fear deeper than what we think. As Osborn and Frost hatred is actually linked to humans' fear of death. They state “The very capacity that has provided humans with a much more rich, elastic way of responding to "survival" situations has unveiled the one phenomenon for which there exists no avenue of conquest or avoidance: death.”. They state we avoid death by connecting to shared beliefs and world views to shield away from this. We come up with ways to be immortal. To live on. These become sacred icons. It will and can connect to our feelings of worth and our self-esteem. But as they state “If shared beliefs are to protect against death awareness, they must be protected against all threats—particularly those represented by divergent beliefs. Where we adhere to beliefs that, unconsciously, are rooted in intense levels of unintegrated fear, then any affront to those beliefs inevitably triggers the most intense pattern of emotional response.”. This will also connect to tribalism and what is the in-group or out-group. As they state “ At what point does the "God bless my university, people of my faith, and my country" begin to shift in the "make everyone else eat shit" direction?”. They argue that while anger is an emotion hatred is a sentiment. An aggression or series of aggressive impulses towards a certain type of people. It allows us to harm without conciseness. But they argue the heart of it is fear.
However, we are still wired for empathy. So an important part of this is to hate we have to start breaking our empathy or have already damaged empathy. We reduce our fellow humans to animals or bugs. Mendex states this comes from the ventrolateral prefrontal region or the IFC, where we dehumanize a human. He states “This form of “mechanistic dehumanization,” which denies the existence of a mental life (“mentalization”) with thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and agency in others, sees those who are hated as nonliving machines or objects, resulting in feelings of indifference toward them (7). Mechanistic dehumanization is associated with decreased mesial prefrontal activity involving the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (12) and decreased parietal and default mode network function (1).”. He states this frontolimbic area is connected also with the mesial frontal, anterior insula and anterior temporal lobes.
Nasrallah will state also that “ Interestingly, hate and romantic love shared activation in 2 areas: the putamen and insula. This suggests that passionate love and passionate hate are 2 sides of the same neural coin!
Saplosky will also argue this. We talked a great deal about oxytocin and trust in our last episode. However, Saplosky will state this ‘feel good’ hormone has a darker side. Specifically that it makes us “prosocial to us and worse to everyone else”. Oxytocin will exaggerate biases against out groups. Sapolosy reminds us that oxytocin will be connected to love, sure, but also love someone enough to kill for them. Oxytocin is what binds mother and baby together, and what sends a mother bear into a rage if her cubs are threatened.
4. Practical Application (Strategies & Takeaways)
Alok Valid-Menom in an interview was asked about their statement regarding transphobia. They stated Transphobia is merely a distraction from our shared humanity and that we are all going to die. They state “Death is real”. “I’m going to die, you’re going to die. And we’ve created an entire society that pretends that that is not the case and which is just ridiculous.” And talks about how we get invested in ideas and ideologies to pretend otherwise, that what we invest in will somehow protect us from death. The real biological truth in our society is our mortality and so when people say we are erasing biology I’m like..ok maybe but just so you know you are pointing at the wrong thing”. They argue when we are present with the fact that we are going to die and we waste so much of our time with absurd antics of hating other people and judging people, when at the end of the day we’re all human which means we are all going to die. And if we remember that then we have the potential for profound empathy because we are all in this together.
Nasrallah will state also that in the world we live in “Ideally, politics is supposed to be an elegant cerebral process, a debate of ideas across disparate ideologies, the product of which is expected to be the advancement of the welfare of the nation and its citizens. But what we are currently witnessing is a distressing degeneration of politics into personal hatred and ad hominem attacks, with partisans frothing at the mouth as they describe the utter stupidity and dangerousness of their despised political opponents-cum-bitter enemies. They even declare each other “mentally ill,” which is an absurd explanation of why other people do not agree with their belief system.”
We are a people who have been harmed. We are harmed. We were all harmed five years ago, going through the shared trauma that is the pandemic. As you and I talked about four years ago, when this podcast started, it damaged our empathy, which has been damaged both prior to and after from the acceptance of hating people. We feel threatened and scared, so we hate. We distract ourselves from death.
5. Closing & Recap
In this episode, we explored how trust operates in your brain - from the oxytocin that helps you connect, to the stress that makes trust impossible, to the deep evolutionary wiring that drives your trust decisions. We learned that trust isn't just a feeling or choice - it's a biological process shaped by every relationship and experience you've ever had.
As we stated last episode, we have evolutionary responses to keep us safe - as discussed in our very first episode when you are walking in the woods and you see a stick, you often jump - because if you jump and it's just a stick - you stay alive but if you don’t jump and it's a snake that might not be true. But this is different from connection to other humans. Because that fear, that dislike of fear, that risk of death - will cause us to burn down the entire forest because sticks look just a little too much like snakes.
At its heart, hate and distrust are fear, which makes them amygdala-based. A key thing about your amygdala, to understand it, is anxiety and anger. It's the fear that you might get hurt and the anger at anyone who would hurt you. Why both - both are protective. The amygdala is protective. However, it's not intelligently protective. Anxiety will make you run through a hundred scenarios, possible conversations, and what could be. Anxiety makes us spin, keeping us up at night, trying to prepare for the worst.
But unless you have the power to see the future, you have no way to know what will happen. And those scenarios, that time that energy, can’t protect you at all. Your brain will lie to you and will tell you it can. But it remembers the 1 time in 1 billion that it got it right. Our brains love conversion bias.
It does not protect us. You will still die. I will still die. That has not changed. But along the way we can hate and we can hurt and we can cause a lot of harm. Along the way, we can choose misery. We can choose the fallacy that we can protect ourselves, and forget to love and forget to live.
