3. Disliking/Hating Tendency

(For a background behind this series and references/sources used, please view the first article of this series at: https://nitnblogs.blogspot.com/2019/01/series-of-posts-on-psychology-of-human.html)

“The newly arrived human is also "born to dislike and hate" as triggered by normal and abnormal triggering forces in its life. It is the same with most apes and monkeys.  In present-day Switzerland and the United States, the clever political arrangements of man "channel" the hatreds and disliking of individuals and groups into nonlethal patterns including elections.  Another example is the extreme popularity of very negative political advertising.

Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to (1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred.”  

My Notes: 
Please do not confuse this with Envy/Jealousy tendency which is very different.  

Disliking and hatred are hard wired into us – this is a fact of life and cannot be avoided.  We all hate a lot of things, and it generally includes certain members of our family and immediate neighbours.  We end up distorting facts to enable us to continue to hate the person we do not like. Be aware of the vulnerability presented by your innate capacity for hatred and the power of that desire to cause you to underestimate or overlook positive attributes in the object of your dislike.

We tend to dislike people who dislike us (and, true to Newton, with equal strength.) The more we perceive they hate us, the more we hate them.  A lot of hate comes from scarcity and competition. Whenever we compete for resources, our own mistakes can mean good fortune for others. (FS)

Life is too short to do business with people you do not like.   

Examples:

• The key takeaway I have from this tendency is that if we dislike someone, we tend to dismiss that person's ideas.  We need to be extra careful in our decision making process when we dislike someone. Trying to be rational in a love/hate situation is the best way forward.
• Startups often over-focus on their competitors. In the startup world, that often leads to multiple competitors engaged in a shooting war in a market that’s still too small for anyone to succeed. I think it’s much better for a startup to focus on creating and developing a large market, as opposed to fighting over a small market.  A variant on this dynamic is letting your competitor determine your strategy by watching what he does and then making countermoves. The issue here is that it’s highly likely that neither one of you actually knows that much about what you are doing yet — since you are in a new market, by definition — and while you know you don’t know that much about what you’re doing yet, you only observe your competitor’s deliberate actions as opposed to seeing their equivalent or greater level of internal confusion. So they seem like they know what they’re doing, and so you fall into assuming they know more than you do, when they probably don’t. (Marc)
• Second, when you are in a truly competitive situation, this bias can easily lead you to underestimate your competitor by, as Mr. Munger says, “ignoring virtues in the object of dislike”.  His product sucks, his salespeople aren’t as good, his venture capitalists are those morons who backed that large data center vendor that went bankrupt — and so on. Notably, this attitude can become cultural in your company very quickly. I think that if you’re in a shooting war, even if you privately think your competitor is an amoral pinhead, that you establish a tone that says, we’ll assume that he’s highly competent and has many fine virtues, which we will respect and then systematically target with our own strengths and virtues until we have killed him. (Marc)
• Past good experience leads some investors to have some kind of a love/hate relationship with some stocks. We all understand how unwise that is. The legendary investor Peter Lynch (and fictional character Gordon Gecko) reminds us not to fall in love/get emotional with a stock. The stock doesn’t know that we own it, so falling in love with it only makes us susceptible to bad judgment.
• We see this over and over again: in corporate offices, where a liked person will always be preferred over a disliked but otherwise competent person for a particular group task; or a liked player (but slightly less talented player) chosen over a disliked one in the team.
• Not hiring someone competent who comes from a religion, university or a sexual orientation you hate is not a rational thing to do.  (Most people who hate communities or religions do not hire from them.)
• Michael Faraday was once asked after a lecture whether he implied that a hated academic rival was always wrong. His reply was short and firm “He’s not that consistent.”  This is a very good example of how Faraday avoided this bias objectively. 
• You will find employees of Coca Cola avoiding a visit to Pizza Hut (as it is a subsidiary of their hated rival Pepsi), or Steve Ballmer (ex-CEO Microsoft) ‘brainwashing’ his kids from using any Apple or Google (hated rivals) products.  These are surely not rational decisions. 
• Religious extremism has found and has successfully channeled hatred of people for its own benefits. Many a times the only unifying force among believers is their hatred of other religions. Politicians routinely channel our hatred of many people, religions, beliefs or practices into votes. You can always find politicians in India polarising voters on the basis of religion or economic beliefs (communism, welfare, capitalism). They also combine this with a fear of us losing our ‘liking’. As an example an Indian politician often subtly says that if you don't vote for her party which supports X religion, the other winning party will terrorize and wipe out all followers of religion X.

Many thanks to Anshul Khare, Vikas Kasturi and Prashanth Jnanendra for reading drafts of this and valuable suggestions.