Reach 2025: The Cycle of Hate
Why Do People Hate?
By Abeer Khan
Illustrations by Sébastien Thibault
CIFAR researchers explain the various ways intergroup animosity and mistreatment develop and build.
Gathered around a dinner table after a Boundaries, Membership & Belonging program meeting in October 2023, researchers Victoria Esses, Hazel Markus and Stephen Reicher were reflecting on the state of the world today.
“We were lamenting how much conflict and hate there is – not just war and violence, but everyday acts of discrimination and policies that are hurting people, and we thought about what we could do to combat that,” says Esses, a Fellow in the program.
Around the world, hate – acts of hostility, prejudice or discrimination towards individuals or groups – has been steadily on the rise. In May 2020, the United Nations raised the alarm about a “tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scaremongering around the world” during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Canada, the number of police-reported hate crimes rose by 72 per cent from 2019 to 2021.
As our world becomes increasingly polarized, Esses, Markus and Reicher knew there was a vast amount of literature on hate and why it occurs. However, it has been historically challenging to bring these ideas together in an accessible format for broader audiences. To bridge this gap and explain how intergroup animosity and mistreatment develop and build, they created The Cycle of Hate project.
What is the Cycle?
The researchers collaborated to identify 10 key factors and position them across a continuum, provoking hate and leading to its justification. The 10 factors are organized into four “hate provoker” components – history, current context, call to arms and the justification of mistreatment – and individuals and groups can enter the Cycle at any stage.
The first component uses history to justify mistreatment. This can be group history – stories we tell ourselves about our ethnic or national group – or individual stories that come from personal or family experiences, explains CIFAR Fellow Allison Harell.
That history can influence identity and behavioural norms and lead to interpretations of the current context that emphasize competition between groups. When a group is seen as threatening your situation, coupled with a lack of control and chaos in society, this makes the “other” group particularly likely to be a target of hate.
When history and current context create these discourses, it’s easier for there to be a call to arms to hate “others” by figures in leadership and in the ways the media portrays “other” groups.
Within these conditions, moralization occurs, where harming others is seen as the right thing to do. This leads to the dehumanization of the “other” group so that they don't need or deserve to be treated as human. In this way, mistreatment is justified.
“There's this dehumanization process that happens when we start thinking of the other group as threatening. This leads to the justification of hate,” says Harell, a Professor of Political Science at Université du Québec à Montréal. She joined the project alongside fellow Boundaries, Membership & Belonging members Prerna Singh and Vijayendra Rao after learning more about it at a CIFAR program meeting.
The group emphasizes that these hate factors belong in a cycle because they don't happen in isolation.
“Once you're in it, it's really hard to get out, and it becomes mutually reinforcing,” says Singh.
The project goes on to explain how the factors that lead to intergroup hate can feed each other and promote escalation. “Once initiated, the cycle requires some mindful strategies to intervene,” explains Esses, the Director of Western University’s Network for Economic and Social Trends and a Professor of Psychology.
Reicher, a Boundaries, Membership & Belonging Fellow, says the group felt it needed to develop an understanding of hate that didn’t just recognize it as a hot emotion. “It is about people harming others, often regretfully and without malice, and even thinking that they are doing good,” he says.
As a consequence, getting people to recognize what is hateful and when they're acting hatefully cannot be presupposed – it's a major aspect of combatting hate, he explains.
“Hate is not inevitable. It's something that humans make in their society and politics, so humans can unmake it."
"It's mobilized and therefore, we need to think about how we can organize counter-mobilizations,” says Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University
of St. Andrews.
How can the Cycle of Hate make a difference?
The group’s goal for the project is twofold. They're striving to show how everyday people's thinking can often contribute to this Cycle of Hate, even if it doesn’t lead to violence but instead to everyday acts of mistreatment. They’re also looking at interventions – namely, raising public awareness and alert recognition – so that when individuals fall into this cycle or when hatemongers are trying to draw them into it and justify mistreatment, they can recognize it and break free from the cycle.
“The first step is an acknowledgment that this might be happening either to you or to a loved one,” says Singh, the Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University.
The team also hopes that their analysis can allow individuals, organizations, associations, institutions, states and communities to reflect on how they might be implicated in the process of hate.
“We want to make the knowledge have an impact. We want it to have practical use,” says Hazel Markus, an Advisor in the program.
Markus, the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, says the group has discussed packaging the Cycle of Hate into a tangible resource like an infographic or graphic novel so that policymakers, social workers, educators and even kids can reference it. They’re thinking of various storytelling opportunities to catch people’s attention and resonate with them.
The team has plans to present their work on the Cycle at the World Bank in the spring, focusing on its relevance to international development. They’re also planning to focus on the solutions to intergroup animosity and mistreatment and investigate how to intervene in each of the Cycle's four components.
Together, Esses, Harell, Markus, Rao, Reicher and Singh all share a similar sentiment: addressing and combatting hate is essential to humanity's future well-being.
“Hate is one of the biggest challenges we face as human beings,” says Vijayendra Rao, Chair of the Boundaries, Membership & Belonging Advisory Committee and lead economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank.
Moving beyond hate will allow humans to work together to address challenges facing everyone as a global community.
“Climate change, pandemics, destruction of species – these are big challenges for humanity and no small group of people can overcome them themselves,” Esses says. “What hope is there for us to work together if we can't get along?”
Meet the Researchers
Related Articles
-
CIFAR launches new exploration on “The Future of Food”
July 15, 2025
-
CIFAR Distinguished Fellow W. Ford Doolittle appointed Companion of the Order of Canada
July 08, 2025
-
New and returning AI talent at CIFAR
July 03, 2025
-
In Memoriam: Raymond Laflamme
June 24, 2025