Chapter 14: Why We're Taught to Hate People We've Never Met

It's a strange thing, when you stop and think about it.

Many people feel real anger, sometimes even hatred, toward people they have never met. People who live in the same country, use the same roads and hospitals, and want many of the same basic things out of life.

That reaction doesn't emerge naturally.

It's learned.

Human beings evolved in small groups: families, villages, communities where disagreement still required ongoing contact. You argued with people you had to see again the next day. Proximity imposed restraint. It made total dehumanization difficult to sustain.

Modern life removed much of that friction.

When disagreement is filtered through screens, headlines, and distant commentary, people stop being individuals and start becoming symbols. A neighbor turns into a category. A fellow citizen becomes "the other side." Complex lives flatten into labels that are easy to dismiss and easier to attack.

This is how it becomes possible to feel hostility toward people you've never met.

Distance creates distortion

Most modern political exposure does not come from direct interaction. It comes from curated media, social platforms, and selective amplification. These systems rarely highlight ordinary disagreement or everyday complexity. They surface extremes.

The loudest voices.

The most provocative clips.

The most emotionally charged examples.

Repeated often enough, those examples begin to feel representative.

They usually aren't.

One of the most consistent findings in polarization research is that people systematically misperceive one another. More in Common's "Perception Gap" research found that Americans dramatically overestimate how extreme their political opponents are. People routinely believe the other side is far more radical, hostile, and morally extreme than data supports.

The magnitude is striking. Democrats and Republicans each imagine that almost twice as many of their opponents hold extreme views as actually do, estimating that roughly 55 percent of the other side holds positions the survey data places far lower. And the study found the widest perception gaps among the most partisan and politically active Americans, the people most likely to shape what everyone else hears.

That distortion matters because it changes behavior.

If you believe the other side is mostly dangerous or malicious, contempt starts to feel responsible. Disengagement feels prudent. Hostility feels justified.

You're no longer disagreeing with a neighbor.

You're responding to a threat.

Abstraction makes dehumanization easier

Hatred requires distance.

Distance allows abstraction, and abstraction allows projection. When people are reduced to symbols, it becomes easier to assign motives, exaggerate differences, and ignore contradictions. Nuance becomes invisible.

In real life, most people do not fit neatly into ideological caricatures. They are juggling work, family, finances, health concerns, and uncertainty about the future. Political identity is rarely the organizing principle of their daily lives.

Research supports this more grounded view. The "Hidden Tribes" study identified a large segment of Americans, roughly two-thirds, who are not ideologically extreme and who express exhaustion with polarization. These individuals tend to hold mixed views, prioritize stability, and want the temperature to come down.

But exhaustion does not trend.

Extremes do.

When abstraction replaces proximity, perception drifts. And when perception drifts, hostility fills the gap.

Moral permission and emotional safety

Distorted perceptions do more than confuse. They grant moral permission.

If the other side is imagined as cruel, ignorant, or irredeemable, then treating them with contempt feels less like cruelty and more like self-defense. Anger becomes a signal of seriousness. Distance becomes a form of protection.

This doesn't mean people are consciously choosing hatred. It means they are responding to an environment that consistently frames disagreement as danger.

The result is a feedback loop:

• Extremes are amplified

• Misperceptions harden

• Distance increases

• Dehumanization becomes easier

Once that loop takes hold, even good-faith people can find themselves holding views about groups they've never encountered directly.

What proximity changes

The pattern begins to break when proximity returns.

Direct conversation.

Shared experience.

Working alongside someone over time.

Hearing a story that doesn't fit the caricature.

These moments do not erase disagreement. They complicate it. They introduce friction into the simplified stories people carry about one another. And even small disruptions can matter.

Proximity doesn't guarantee understanding, but it does reintroduce humanity. It makes it harder to maintain total certainty about who the other person is and what they want.

This is no longer only an inference from survey data.

In 2024, researchers published the largest experimental test of depolarization strategies to date. The Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a collaboration of more than 80 scientists led from Stanford, tested 25 different interventions on more than 32,000 Americans in a single head-to-head study published in Science. Twenty-three of the 25 reduced partisan animosity. The most effective approaches did exactly what this chapter describes: they presented relatable, sympathetic individuals with different political beliefs, and they emphasized identities that Democrats and Republicans share.

Correcting misperceptions mattered too. Among the treatments that reduced support for undemocratic practices, the strongest worked by showing partisans that their opponents' views were less extreme than they imagined.

The distortion is real. So is the repair.

If hostility is learned through distance, it can be softened through contact.

Not instantly.

Not perfectly.

But enough to matter.

Chapter Summary

• Hostility is often less a sign of clarity than a sign of distance. When people encounter one another primarily through abstractions and extremes, misperception becomes normal and dehumanization becomes easier. Research shows that most people are far less extreme than they are imagined to be, but distorted environments reward caricature over complexity. Restoring proximity does not eliminate disagreement, but it reduces the moral permission to hate.

• The largest experiment to date supports this. In a 2024 Science megastudy of 25 interventions, the most effective approaches reduced hostility by presenting sympathetic individuals from the other side and by correcting exaggerated perceptions of opponents' views.

• Both parties imagine roughly twice as many extremists on the other side as exist, and the distortion is largest among the most politically engaged.

Reflection

When you picture "the other side," whose face comes to mind?

Is it someone you know, or a character assembled from headlines and clips?

Transition

If distance and distortion shape how we see one another, the next question is what's been hiding beneath the noise: how much common ground already exists, even when we're told it doesn't.