What is the biology behind hate? This is one of the central questions Rush W. Dozier attempts to answer in his 2002 book Why We Hate: Understanding, Curbing, and Eliminating Hate in Ourselves and Our World. Pulling from the 1960s research of Paul MacLean one of Dozier’s main points is that as humans we possess a “primitive animal” within, a “reptilian” section of the brain surrounded by an “old mammalian” and “new mammalian” brain (Dozier 57). The reptilian brain is the oldest, purely instinctual, while the far more complex and more recently evolved mammalian brains demonstrate emotion, reasoning capabilities, and rationality (Dozier 50-53). Dozier maintains that the reptilian brain serves as the primary producer of hate, and can effectively poison our mammalian brains to turn us into brutal killers.
MacLean’s model, known more commonly as the triune brain model, is deeply appealing in its simplicity, Dozier’s hypothesis even more so. To be able to blame, as Dozier does, such horrors as genocide on individuals’ “primitive minds” combining with their higher mind’s search for “meaning” is a comforting thought, suggesting we can choose to be above our instinctual tendencies (Dozier, 66). But there is an issue with the triune brain model: as a 2020 scientific article put it, it “lacks any foundation in evolutionary biology.”
The Triune-Brain Model
Image Credit: Elmira Anderzhanova, accessed through ResearchGate
MacLean’s model essentially argues that humans evolved through and surpassed all other forms of life, becoming a sort of evolutionary pinnacle. In a scathing 1990 review of MacLean’s book, neurologist Anton Reiner wrote of that logic, “the older, simpler ideas about brain evolution and function upon which the triune-brain is based are fundamentally wrong. Neuroscientists, therefore, basically came to ignore the idea.” Critiques go even further back too. As Lisa Barrett, a neurologist at Northeastern said, “scientists have known since at least the 1970s that the idea of a lizard brain is a fiction of neuroscience.”
Decades of research on animal intelligence played a part in this debunking. The groundbreaking 30 year study on a single African grey parrot was just one of many that established profound intelligence in both vertebrates and invertebrates – all before Dozier’s publication (many are linked through the 2020 article for those interested). Since his publication, corvids and cephalapods (among numerous other animal groups including, yes, reptiles) have demonstrated abilities from tool use to dreaming, leaving the scientific community astounded.
But if it isn’t the reptilian brain, what causes hate? The honest answer is that neuroscientists and behaviorists are still figuring it out. A 2008 study established some of the neural pathways involved in hate towards individuals, but what about hate towards groups? What about the neural pathways in perpetrators of genocide? We’re still not sure.
As for Dozier's argument that "systems of meaning" motivate us to violence, it has real merit. Though, perhaps a better way of looking at it would be through sociobiological forces of pressure. The Milgram Experiment, Stanford Prison Study, and Robber's Cave Experiment all demonstrated the tremendous ease with which humans can be manipulated into doing horrible things. However, this arguably has less to do with seeking meaning and more to do with the evolutionary desire to have a place in a group, even if that place is dying for it. Perhaps it is our group structures that make humans so apt to commit atrocities, and many primate species so apt to hate, while so many other profoundly intelligent life forms do not… We’ll have to wait on the research.
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