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A MAN buys a house next door to his ex-wife and installs a 4-metre bronze statue of a hand, middle finger raised, facing her window. A prominent investor buys a company so he can fire the management he dislikes, even though he stands to lose money. People take their time at the checkout to annoy the next customer, buy gnomes for their garden to antagonise a neighbour and slow down to annoy tailgaters, even though it puts everyone in danger.

Examples of spiteful behaviour, harming another at some cost to yourself, aren’t hard to find. As a psychological game where no one wins, spite is puzzling: we may wonder why it wasn’t weeded out by evolution long ago. Instead, in a competitive era of identity politics, all too often played out on social media, it seems more prevalent than ever.

Yet, compared with other social behaviours like selfishness, cooperation and altruism, there has been relatively little psychological research into why we do it. With potentially far-reaching consequences for both political stability and individual mental health, it has never been more important to understand this dark side of human behaviour.

For many years, most of the research into spite came from the field of behavioural economics: the study of how human decision-making differs from what you would expect from a purely rational point of view. Classical economists dreamed up the concept of Homo economicus, a person who only ever acts to maximise their own rewards. If offered a choice between something and nothing, Homo economicus would always take what is on offer.

In experiments, however, this isn’t how everyone behaves. In the Ultimatum Game, created by economist Werner Güth at the University of Cologne in Germany in 1977, one volunteer is given a pot of money and asked to decide how much of it to share with another player. If the other player accepts the offer, both will keep their share of the cash. But if the other player refuses the offer, both leave empty-handed. They only play the game once.

In , approximately half of the volunteers rejected offers of 20 per cent or less of the pot, leaving both players with nothing. At the time, these spiteful rejections were explained as being due to people’s anger at being treated unfairly, motivating them to pay a price to punish the other. Indeed, that unfair offers led to anger and disgust, which motivated players to punish the non-sharer. suggest that the brain also processes people’s faces differently when they have violated norms of behaviour, treating them as less face-like. This suggests that, in our anger, we dehumanise norm-violators, which makes it easier to set aside our empathic nature and punish them. The Ultimatum Game is a one-shot situation, but real life is not: spite evolved to persuade people to treat us better next time.

But in the past decade or so, cracks have appeared in the idea that spite evolved to make unfair people behave better. Further experimental games found that people didn’t only spite others who acted unfairly. They would , particularly when they could hide behind anonymity. Other studies found that spitefully punishing someone didn’t seem to work as a way of persuading them to treat you better in future. If spite evolved for a reason, .

So, if boosting cooperation doesn’t explain spite, what does? One clue comes from the fact that, as a social species, our position in the pecking order matters to our survival. Spite may have its roots in the desire to get ahead of others (dominance) and to stop others getting ahead of you (counter-dominance).

It is clear that the human desire for dominance has deep evolutionary roots, but so, it appears, does our counter-dominant drive. Anthropologists argue that our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved an egalitarian instinct to pull others down when they threatened to pull ahead. When , an anthropologist at the University of Southern California, examined the social structures of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, he found they were strongly egalitarian, at least in male-male relations. If a male hunter-gatherer got above himself and tried to take more than his share, or even if he had brought home a particularly impressive kill that would benefit everyone, but also inflate his status, he could be punished.

This may explain a seemingly confusing aspect of spite: that we are capable of spiting those whose actions have materially helped us. When someone helps us, but in a way that boosts their own social status, our spiteful side kicks in to cut them down to size.

“Social media cancelling allows us to climb the social ladder with a public display of ‘selfless’ virtue”

This phenomenon is called do-gooder derogation and it has been seen both in lab based economic games and in real life. In one such game, all players earn money if they pay into a group investment fund. Even though everyone benefits from the actions of generous investors, up some of their earnings to see those of the more generous investors destroyed. In real life, this phenomenon may also explain , particularly on social media – they are perhaps being punished for living out a lifestyle that is seen to be morally purer than most. Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 US presidential election, which focused on the rights of women and minority groups, may also have triggered do-gooder derogation and contributed to her defeat.

To make things more complicated, both the presence and absence of an audience can encourage spiteful acts. , called the Joy of Destruction, volunteers worked to assess the quality of magazine adverts. Everyone was paid fairly, according to how much work they had done. Participants were then given the option to destroy some of the other players’ earnings. If they had to do this publicly, . Yet, when given a blanket of anonymity, around 40 per cent opted to destroy some of the other players’ fairly earned money. This can be seen on social media, too. Anonymity helps to release our spiteful side.

Spite for likes

On the other hand, some studies show that an audience is often required to unleash our social conscience. If we see someone hurt a third party, we are more likely to take a hit to punish that person if others are watching. If there is no audience, and hence no social brownie points available, hardly anyone does this. Social media “cancelling”, where a public figure loses popular support after a perceived transgression, draws on this. A watching audience, ready to pile on with , encourages people to punish those who are seen to transgress against others, allowing the punisher to climb the social ladder by their public display of “selfless” virtue.

In 2019, , a psychologist now at University College London, and Redouan Bshary, a behavioural ecologist now at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, added a darker twist to the story. They argued that we have overestimated how much spiteful punishment is about increasing cooperation. Instead, it seems to be more about retaliation, often driven by envy, so it is more . We may delude ourselves into thinking we are punishing for noble purposes, when in reality we are concerned with inflicting harm and gaining status.

There is also the uncomfortable finding that acting on our spiteful impulses can be pleasurable, particularly when we find ourselves in a highly competitive environment. Both laboratory and real-life studies show that a more competitive world tends to increase spite. For example, the Nama people of southern Namibia live off their livestock, which grazes on commonly managed land. , using a variant of the Joy of Destruction game, that for every Nama living on the high-quality land willing to act spitefully, two on the low-quality land, where competition for resources is higher, are willing to act spitefully.

Intriguing research from Molly Crockett, a neuroscientist at Yale University, and her team suggests a biological mechanism for how competition and scarcity may encourage spite. One of the building blocks of serotonin, a neurotransmitter linked to feelings of well-being, is tryptophan, an essential amino acid that we can only get from our diet. If food becomes scarce, then we are likely to ingest less tryptophan and have reduced serotonin levels. This may encourage spitefulness as a means to grab limited resources.

To test this, . But before playing, participants either drank a normal beverage or one containing a tryptophan-depleting chemical. Those who had the tryptophan-depleting drink acted more spitefully when they played the game. , the researchers found, conversely, that enhancing serotonin function made people less likely to harm others. spitefulness because it made harming others more pleasurable. Reducing serotonin levels led to increased activity in the dorsal striatum, a brain region involved in anticipating rewards, when people were punishing others.

If spite really is as nasty as it seems, perhaps we should take steps to keep it to a minimum. At an individual level, one option is to remove anger from the equation. Studies in which activity in the brain’s emotional circuitry was temporarily reduced with drugs, such as benzodiazepines, or via – a small electrical current applied to the scalp – in the Ultimatum Game afterwards. More practically, simply delaying a decision on how to react to an offer in the Ultimatum Game lets anger decay and spiteful acts lessen.

Another way to reduce our spiteful tendencies is to , a measure of the ability to override gut responses in favour of rational thought. spiteful rejections in the Ultimatum Game, in part by allowing people to uncouple their emotional responses from their behaviour. When experienced Buddhist meditators received offers of $1 from a $20 pot in the Ultimatum Game, they were half as likely to reject it as non-meditators.

A force for good

This raises an important question: should we always try to reduce spite? Not acting spitefully, and accepting unfairness, could leave us vulnerable to continued exploitation. When standing up to injustice is required, but will inevitably come at a personal cost, spiteful behaviour may be just what is needed. A willingness to spite, to press our personal nuclear button, may be the final weapon we have in this situation.

Having a spiteful side also seems to boost performance in competitive situations. , spiteful and non-spiteful people, as assessed by a form of sharing task, were found to perform equally well on a simple maths-based activity. But when a prize was offered for better performance, the more spiteful surged in front, suggesting that their greater willingness to get ahead of others could pay dividends.

So, rather than trying to avoid spite, we should perhaps aim to be more selective about how we use it – aiming it at injustice rather than simply against those with more social or material clout. Using our spite at the right target, in the right way, at the right time could be a powerful tool to improve society.

Buddhism has the concept of wrathful compassion, which involves acting with love and courage to confront another for their own sake. Spite, done with the aim of wrathful compassion, could prove to be a force for good. Whether that reveals spite to be an upside of human nature will ultimately depend on which end of it you wind up on.