In Spite, neuroscientist Simon McCarthy-Jones argues that spite is not a glitch in human nature but a strategy with reasons and even uses, and anonymous platforms break it by making it free.
The neuroscientist Simon McCarthy-Jones wrote a book called Spite, about something people would rather not admit: deliberately harming someone at a cost to yourself is part of human nature too.
Three flavours of spite
One kind aims at unfairness. When someone breaks the rules and gets ahead, bystanders will pay out of their own pocket to punish them. That spite makes a society fairer, and the punisher picks up a reputation along the way.
The second kind is competitive: cutting a rival down purely to lift yourself up, with no benefit to anyone else.
The third is strangest of all — paying a price just to prove some claim, or some law of nature, wrong. Occasionally it forces a new ambition into existence.
Trolls are bred by low costs
Anonymous social platforms are bound to be nasty places, because insulting someone there costs almost nothing. The author names these platforms directly, including the kinds of sites where rude commenters thrive.
He also notes that people who rose on ability rather than luck tend to provoke more envy. Those with a stronger spiteful streak are more competitive and less agreeable, but also more creative.
The author argues spite often pays off over time: standing up for someone else builds social capital, and people become more willing to work with you. Anger amplifies it, while the Buddhist idea of fierce compassion describes anger driven by a wish to protect rather than by disgust.
Why it matters
Most platforms market a lower barrier to speech as a virtue; this book suggests the barrier was the filter. When hurting someone costs nothing, what gets released is not more opinions but more hatred — and a designer who treats that as a technical problem rather than an incentive problem will never fix a comment section.
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