Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

The People I Do Not Like, and the One I Hate.

I like a lot of people. I love very few. I dislike a few. I hate one.

Uyadika. That is what I hear the ladies say in my Gugs and Khayelitsha streets. Andifuni nokumbona lowo. Yho! Uyadika. Andimzondi, ndiyamcaphukela. Andimfuni, kodwa andimzondi.

That last line is the most precise piece of emotional taxonomy I know. In one breath, the women on my street draw the line that psychologists spend journal pages trying to draw: ukucaphukela is about what you do, ukuzonda is about who you are. Hold on to that distinction. The whole essay hangs on it. Every now and then you bump into a person you do not like. Deep down I want to be petty. I want to give them the cold shoulder, to be immature and childish, because childish is at least honest about how I feel. But I do not. I become the boring adult with the well-regulated nervous system, or so I tell myself. I am the first to extend a hand, to greet, to make small talk. And then I forget, in an instant.

So: how do we deal with the people who annoy us? What do we do with the ones we cannot stand? And do we owe them the news?

The one I hate
Let me confess first, because a man who writes about dislike while hiding his hate is running a con. There is one person I hate. I know I am supposed to forgive. I know the line about hate being like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. (It gets pinned on the Buddha, on Nelson Mandela, on Carrie Fisher. I could not find a reliable source for any of them. The line is better than its paperwork.) I know I should forgive to lighten the load.
I am not ready. I like my hate, for now. It soothes me. It makes me feel hellish, Luciferian. I giggle at my dark musings about what should happen to this person, at what my inner Dark Tetrads whispers I should cook up and action. I have pinched myself at how quickly I go dark when this person crosses my mind. I never, ever wish to meet them. Some days I wish they were already gone, struck by lightning rather than slipping away in their sleep. Sleep would be too kind to them and too unsatisfying for me.
Okay. This hate has to go, and it is petty. This is my last year holding on to it. Before I let it go, I want to understand why it feels so good. The science is unkind to me here.

When Dominique de Quervain and colleagues scanned people as they punished someone who had betrayed their trust (Science, 2004), the dorsal striatum lit up, the same reward machinery that responds to money and food. The people who showed the most activation were willing to pay more to punish. So the soothing is real. My brain is paying me to hate.
But it is a loan, not a gift. Kevin Carlsmith, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert (2008) set up a game in which a free-rider cheated the group. Some players got the chance to punish him; others did not. The punishers predicted they would feel better. They felt worse, and they kept thinking about the cheat for longer. Revenge does not close the file. It keeps it open on the desk, which is exactly what I described in Isiva Asilibali: the wound we frame is the one we never finish.

The soothing is real. It is also a loan, and the interest is paid by my own heart. 0And the interest is literal. Charlotte Witvliet and colleagues (2001) had people spend time rehearsing a grudge, then imagining forgiveness. Grudge rehearsal pushed up heart rate, blood pressure, facial tension and sweat response; the forgiving imagery brought them down. A 2009 meta-analysis by Chida and Steptoe linked chronic anger and hostility with higher coronary heart disease risk in healthy people. That is association, not a proven cause, but I am 52 and I run long distances. I do not need a randomised trial to take the hint.

As for the giggle: Erin Buckels, Daniel Jones and Delroy Paulhus (2013) found “everyday sadism” in ordinary people, not only in monsters. Paulhus’s Dark Tetrad is a spectrum we all sit on, not a diagnosis (see Diagnosis by Group Chat). My dark musings do not make me a villain. They make me normal. That is not an excuse. It is a reason to watch the dial.

What the people I asked told me
I asked a few people why they did not like someone. Some of their answers were my answers. Some were willing to give names and did not give a damn if the person found out. I told those ones that their dislike had already mutated into hate. I grouped the answers into themes and deleted the names. People’s names are expensive, and the POPI Act is real.

1. They lie. Exaggeration, broken confidences, stories that change with the audience. Once trust goes, everything they say arrives with an asterisk.
2. They control. Their way or no way. Micromanagement at work, manipulation at home.
3. They are never wrong. Always a finger pointing outward, never a mirror.
4. They do not listen. They interrupt, they talk about themselves, they use your turn to reload.
5. They envy. Your good news lands on them as bad news, so they cut you down to feel level.
6. They whine. Every conversation is a complaint with no plan attached.
7. They show off. Brand names, name-dropping, the constant performance of being above.
8. They flake and they snipe. Cancelled plans, forgotten promises, jokes with a blade in them instead of a direct word.
9. They are too nice. Always agreeable, never a flaw, never a boundary. It reads as calculated.
10. They are not from here. Different background, accent, look, type. Judged before the first sentence (see Your First Thought Is Not Yours).
Read the list again and notice something. Most of these are about what the other person does. Number five is often about the person doing the disliking: envy runs in both directions, and “they are just jealous of me” is sometimes my own ego in disguise. Number ten is about neither of us; it is about the tribe. Dislike is data. It is not always data about the person you dislike.

What social science tells us about dislike.
Anger aims at behaviour; hate aims at the person. Agneta Fischer, Eran Halperin and colleagues (Emotion Review, 2018) distinguish the two. Anger says “stop doing that” and still hopes the other person can change. Hate says “you are what you are” and wants the person removed, diminished or harmed. That is andimzondi, ndiyamcaphukela, peer-reviewed. The women on my street got there first.

We are harshest on our own. The “black sheep effect” (Marques, Yzerbyt and Leyens, 1988) shows that we judge a deviant member of our own group more harshly than the same deviant from another group. The gossip in your family WhatsApp group irritates you more than a stranger’s gossip because your gossip is a threat to your group’s reputation.

Difference repels more than sameness attracts. Donn Byrne’s decades of work tied liking to similar attitudes. Milton Rosenbaum (1986) pushed back: much of the effect comes from dissimilar attitudes driving people apart. We are quicker to be put off by difference than drawn in by agreement.
Good people get disliked too. Benoît Monin’s work on “do-gooder derogation” (Minson and Monin, 2012) finds that people who make moral choices, such as the vegetarian at the braai, are often disliked because their choice feels like an implied judgement of ours. That is a cousin of reason nine. Sometimes “too nice” is not fake. Sometimes it is a mirror we do not want to look into.
Envy is pain wearing a costume. Richard Smith and Sung Hee Kim’s 2007 review describes envy as painful, hostile, and heavily concealed, even from the person feeling it. It rarely announces itself as envy. It announces itself as “there is just something about him.”
One correction to what circulates online. You will read that dislike is our “behavioural immune system” warning us off liars. Mark Schaller coined that term for disease avoidance: disgust at contagion, rot and illness. Moral disgust exists, and the systems overlap, but borrowing the term makes the case sound more settled than it is.
Here is the finding that matters most. Dislike does not update itself. Jerker Denrell (Psychological Review, 2005) called it the hot stove effect. When we form a good impression of someone, we spend more time with them, so we collect more data, and the impression gets corrected in either direction. When we form a bad impression, we avoid them. No new data arrives. The error is never fixed. Negative first impressions are quarantined, not tested.

Positive impressions get tested. Negative impressions get quarantined.

Which means my boring-adult handshake may be doing more work than I gave it credit for. It is the only thing keeping my data fresh.

What happens when dislike stays too long?
It mutates from behaviour to essence. Irritation at what someone did slowly becomes a verdict on who they are. Ukucaphukela hardens into ukuzonda. The people who happily gave me names had crossed that line without noticing.
It manufactures its own evidence. In Rebecca Curtis and Kim Miller’s 1986 study, participants were led to believe that a partner either liked or disliked them. Those who believed they were disliked disclosed less, disagreed more, and were colder. Their partners then really did like them less. Your dislike is not a private feeling. It leaks into your tone, your eyes, your timing, and it recruits the other person into proving you right.
It gets delivered to the wrong address. A 2000 meta-analysis on displaced aggression by Marcus-Newhall, Pedersen and Carlson found that provoked people reliably take it out on innocent targets. The colleague I cannot stand does not feel my irritation. My partner does, at 7pm, over something small.
It costs you even when you hide it. James Gross’s work shows that suppressing an emotion, keeping the face calm while the insides boil, carries real costs to memory and to connection. Reappraising the situation carries far fewer. So the question for my handshake is not whether I greet. It is what is happening inside while I do (see Isiqingatha on reappraisal versus suppression).

How to move away from disliking someone
The goal is not love. It is not even liking. The goal is neutrality: the point at which this person no longer has a vote in my mood.
1. Walk it back from essence to behaviour. Replace “he is arrogant” with “he interrupts me in meetings.” You cannot fix an essence. You can respond to a behaviour.
2. Take a fresh sample. Denrell’s hot stove cools only if you touch it again, carefully. One coffee. One honest conversation. You may find the stove was never hot, or that it was hot only once.
3. Try the Franklin trick, but hold it loosely. Jecker and Landy (1969) found that people liked someone more after doing him a favour. It was a small study and the effect is modest, but it fits a bigger pattern: attitude often follows behaviour (see Ndiyazi). Asking for a small favour, or giving one, can shift the story.
4. Reappraise; do not just suppress. Ask what boundary of mine they are crossing, and whether it is a boundary or a preference. That turns heat into information.
5. For hate, forgiveness, which is not the same as reconciliation. Everett Worthington’s REACH model treats forgiveness as an internal process: recall the hurt, empathise, offer the altruistic gift, commit, hold on. It requires nothing from the other person. Reconciliation requires changed behaviour from them and trust from me. I can do the first without the second.

South Africa knows this distinction better than most places. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission asked victims to forgive in public, on television, and Archbishop Tutu argued in No Future Without Forgiveness that forgiving is neither forgetting nor condoning. The fair critique of the TRC is that the burden fell heavily on the harmed while the harmers kept much of what they took. Both things are true. Forgiveness is a private transaction between me and my own heart. Reconciliation is a public contract that needs two signatures. I am working on the first.

Do you tell them?
Mostly, the dislike is your problem to manage, not theirs to fix. Unless someone is breaking a rule, a contract, or your dignity, your dislike of their style belongs to you. Two facts should also humble you before you speak. First, the “liking gap” (Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark, 2018): after conversations, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them. Some of your “they do not like me” is miscalibrated, and so, perhaps, is some of theirs. Second, per Curtis and Miller, they probably already know. Dislike leaks.

And if you tell someone flatly, “I do not like you at all”? Fischer and Halperin’s work predicts what follows. A hate message says change is impossible, so it invites defence and counter-attack rather than repair. Curtis and Miller’s spiral kicks in from both ends. Mutual friends start picking sides. And you hand them the remote control to your mood: they now know they are inside your head.

John Gottman’s distinction between a complaint and a criticism is the useful exit (see I Run Before They Run Me). “I do not like it when you interrupt me in meetings” is a complaint. It names a behaviour and leaves a door open. “You are an arrogant man” is a criticism. It names an essence and closes every door. The first is ukucaphukela said out loud. The second is ukuzonda dressed up as honesty.
Some things the chest should hold (see Akanasifuba). “I do not like you” is usually one of them. “Please stop doing that” rarely is.

The Uyadika Audit.
1. Is this ukucaphukela or ukuzonda? Am I annoyed by what they do, or have I passed a verdict on who they are?
2. Which of the ten is it, and whose problem is it: theirs, mine, or the tribe’s?
3. When did I last take a fresh sample, or have I quarantined this impression since the first day?
4. Is my dislike making me colder, and have I started the spiral that will prove me right?
5. Who at home is paying for this person’s rent-free stay in my head?
6. If I spoke, what exact behaviour would I name, and what exactly would I ask for?

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, even this one
Ubuntu is not a promise to like everyone. I do not, and I will not pretend to. It is a refusal to reduce any person to their worst behaviour. Hate is exactly that reduction. It takes a whole human being and shrinks them to one act, one wound, one name I refuse to say.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. I am a person through other people, and that includes the people who make me say uyadika. It includes the one I hate. For years my hate has been shaping me too: my heart rate, my giggles, my 7pm tone. Whatever I think of that person, I do not want them to keep authoring me.

So this is my last year holding on. Next year’s Ramadan, Lent and Yom Kippur, I will let go and forgive.  I am not promising to forget at all. I am not promising to  forgive by this  December. I am not promising to meet them, or to reconcile. My name is Mzamo. I am promising to try.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.