8 Scientific Reason Why People Are The Worst

3. Spitefulness Is Actually Useful

Scientists have devoted a lot of time, energy and research to behaviours such as aggression, selfishness, altruism and love, but surprisingly little research has been done on a subtler and more complex human behaviour: Spite.

Countless experiments, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, have shown humans' willingness to inflict pain and misery on others when given the chance, but spitefulness goes a step further in people's urge to inflict pain and misery on others even at a cost to themselves. In one study, a survey was conducted on 1243 people containing question such as "I would be willing to take a punch if it meant someone I did not like would receive two punches" in order to develop a new 17-item "spitefulness scale".

It was found that men tend to be more spiteful than women and young people tend to be more spiteful than older people and that levels of spitefulness were correlated with callousness, Machiavellianism and poor self-esteem. Unsurprising, perhaps, but evolutionary theorists believe that it might be a bit more complicated than "bad people are spiteful". It is thought that a lot of spiteful behaviour is actually born out of an instinct for cooperation and fair play. There's an idea that it's actually a form of altruistic punishment and a good mechanism for maintaining fairness and justice.

It is thought that spitefulness could even be a necessary evil in a self-regulating society. A study at Tufts University found through a gaming experiment that a community completely made of either spiteful or spite-less people is less likely to function as well as a mixture of the two. The willingness of some people to punish rule-breakers, even if their actions didn't directly effect them actually enhances the "fairness" of the rest of the society.