Is hate fundamentally different from other negative emotions? Despite a fair amount of theorizing about hate, there is little empirical evidence that helps to answer this basic question. The present research examines how people construe interpersonal and intergroup hate and provides an empirical analysis of how hate is conceptually different from dislike, anger, contempt, and disgust. In five preregistered studies, using exploratory (Pilot Study) and confirmatory (Studies 1, and 2a through 2c) within-subjects designs, we asked adult participants in the United States (N total = 1,074) to describe examples of their interpersonal and intergroup targets of hate, dislike, anger, contempt, and disgust. We assessed their subjective experiences of each emotion by measuring the associated intensity, duration, arousal, valence, perceived threats, and action tendencies. Across studies, results revealed that participants feel consistently more emotionally aroused, personally threatened, and inclined toward attack-oriented behaviors when experiencing hate as compared with dislike, anger, contempt and disgust toward interpersonal targets. At the intergroup level, results revealed that participants experience hate as more arousing than the three moral emotions, more intense than dislike, anger and contempt, and feel more inclined toward attack-oriented behaviors than when they feel dislike and contempt. Results are in line with a general pattern of increasing differentiation suggesting that hate is conceptually closer to disgust and contempt than to anger and dislike. We discuss the specific differences and similarities between hate and these emotions across targets and their implications for future research on hate and negative emotions.

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Previous research has evidenced the effects of dehumanization on observers’ attributions, social categorizations, and retributive judgments, towards different kinds of perpetrators. Colombia is currently facing a peace process with the FARC, the largest guerrilla force in the country, and this post-war context becomes ideal for studying these effects. The current study evaluated the effects of a media dehumanizing discourse towards former perpetrators on observers’ agency attributions, retributive judgments, and resocialization attitudes towards them. Each participant read two different web news articles about the capture of a FARC member which were manipulated to be framed in humanizing and dehumanizing speech respectively. Then, they answered an agency attribution scale, retributive justice and resocialization attitudes measures, and a social distance scale about the news’ main character. Results show that when FARC members were framed in a dehumanizing context, observers significantly attributed them less agency, endorsed more severe retributive judgments, showed more negative attitudes towards their resocialization, and showed greater social distance. The implications of these findings for a Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reincorporation (DDR) process in a post-conflict scenario are discussed.

In the present research, we examine how sociocultural beliefs facilitate more positive and tolerant evaluations toward corruption. Ninety-six adolescents from 6th grade (M = 11.9 years), 11th grade (M = 16.6 years), and college (M = 20.5 years), from Colombia-a country with high levels of corruption-evaluated how morally right and acceptable were bribery and nepotism across a baseline condition without sociocultural information, and three experimental conditions including sociocultural beliefs about illegality, institutional illegitimacy, and survival. Results suggest that compared to the baseline, the sociocultural beliefs in the three experimental conditions lead to more positive and tolerant evaluations, and less severity and more acceptability towards corruption in different degrees. Implications for moral reasoning about corruption are discussed.