A professor of psychology argues that spite, which is often viewed as a pretty human emotion, can actually help humans thrive and create institutions such as religions, governments, and moral codes. 20,000 first printing.
"Have you ever purposely slowed down while driving in order to punish the person tailgating you? Maybe it inconvenienced you, but didn't it feel good? This is spite: hurting ourselves so that we can hurt someone else. Spite seems perfectly needless, evolutionarily speaking. Scientists have long struggled to understand why it exists at all. Unlike cooperation, selfishness, or altruism, spite is a zero-sum game. When Warren Buffet invested in a failing textile company, the owners attempted to squeeze him for more money. He vindictively bought the whole outfit, fired upper management, and kept the mills running for years, during which time they continued to hemorrhage money. It ultimately cost Buffett $200 billion to make his point. The conventional way to understand spite like this is as a lapse of our better judgement. That conventional thinking is wrong. In Spite, neuropsychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones argues that spite is our primal impulse for fairness. Prioritizing the punishment of bad behavior over our own immediate self-interests is a fundamental way that we, and all animals, promote good behavior. Spite is nothing less than one of the natural seeds of morality. From the protest voters who swing elections, to the man who erected a giant sculpture of a middle finger next to the house he lost in his divorce, Spite offers an insightful and often delicious trip through how spite shapes our lives. When we think about what makes us human, we often look for things that make us seem noble: cooperation, foresight, creativity. But the evidence is clear: spite works. It is our innate drive for progress, the feeling that things can and ought to be be different than they are. Spite is a provocative exploration of how the origins of a good society lie in our most basic reflexes, even the ones we're not particularly proud of"--
Spite angers and enrages us, but it also keeps us honest. In this provocative account, a psychologist examines how petty vengeance explains human thriving.
Spite seems utterly useless. You don't gain anything by hurting yourself just so you can hurt someone else. So why hasn't evolution weeded out all the spiteful people?
As psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones argues, spite seems pointless because we're looking at it wrong. Spite isn't just what we feel when a car cuts us off or when a partner cheats. It's what we feel when we want to punish a bad act simply because it was bad. Spite is our fairness instinct, an innate resistance to exploitation, and it is one of the building blocks of human civilization. As McCarthy-Jones explains, some of history's most important developments&;the rise of religions, governments, and even moral codes&;were actually redirections of spiteful impulses.
A provocative, engaging read, Spite shows that if you really want to understand what makes us human, you can't just look at noble ideas like altruism and cooperation. You need to understand our darker impulses as well.
