Slight and Spite: Salving The Stings of Social Exchange

“How do you feel when someone cuts you off in traffic?

Says they will meet you somewhere then doesn’t bother to show?

What about when a loved one forgets your birthday?

Or, when you are reprimanded at work for something all your coworkers do?”

You probably relate to one if not all of the above scenarios.  You might even be bristling right now with righteous indignation. Asking yourself why people are such selfish jerks.

But slow down.

Take a moment.

Consider the following:

“Have you ever deliberately slowed your vehicle when another driver expressed frustration with your speed? Or showed up late to a chronically tardy friend’s event? What about losing time and money taking someone to small claims court “out of principle”?”

So, why are you so petty?

And sometimes to your own detriment?

The questions listed above gauge feelings of slight and feelings of spite. These negative, sometimes self-defeating emotions have their roots in social exchange rules and our want to enforce them.

They are the toxic cousin of altruism and cooperation and it’s crucial that we spot and recognize them. Because while they may still show up to the family reunion, we need to know enough to keep them at the kids table.

Reciprocal Altruism: The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Origins of Cooperation

“Game Theory” has been around since the 1940s thanks largely to polymath (and one of the founders of Computer Science) John Von Neumann.

In his book, Behave, Robert Sapolsky gives a detailed introduction to the understanding of reciprocal altruism as it relates to the benefits of cooperation and how this understanding grew in the 1980s when game theorists and biologists started talking.

The conversation starts with a dilemma game theorists were working on known as The Prisoners Dilemma: Members of a gang, A and B, are arrested. Prosecutors lack evidence to convict them of a major crime but can get them on a lesser charge, for which they’ll serve a year in prison. They can’t communicate with each other. Prosecutors offer each a deal–inform on the other and your sentence is reduced. Each prisoner’s dilemma is whether to be loyal to your partner (cooperate) or betray them (defect).

When a known number of rounds of Prisoners Dilemma are run through a computer choosing what strategy is best is easy. When the number of rounds is unknown it isn’t.

Political Scientist Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan issued a strategy challenge to his colleagues. He then programmed the various strategies for The Prisoner’s Dilemma and pitted them against each other.

Mathematician Anatol Rapoport won with the simplest strategy. Cooperate in the first round. After that do whatever the other player did in the previous round. It was called “Tit for tat”. Interestingly the best you come out with is a “break even” strategy, but other strategies present greater losses (imagine if you will the annihilation of an “always cooperate” strategy pitted against one more aggressive).

From this Axelrod and evolutionary biologist, W.D. Hamilton detailed reciprocal altruism (“tit for tat”). A logical basis for the development of human cooperation.

Slight

As illustrated with those first questions, you are familiar with slight. Slight is the feeling of not being respected as much as we deserve. If you feel very slighted you may ruminate over the incident for weeks or even months!

How is this feeling related to reciprocal altruism? It’s our desire for behavioral enforcement. We need to be able to rely on others, and our feelings have evolved to be attuned to when we are being cheated in terms of resources and also emotionally. It is that sense of “this is not fair”. That sense that the other individual isn’t living up to their end of the social contract.

“People are highly sensitive to violations of these social exchange rules because such violations signal that the perpetrator is a poor partner for social exchange whose behavior has the potential to disadvantage the individual, either in the present encounter or in the future.” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). That bristling sense of injustice is the feeling that reciprocity is in order (tit for tat).

Because slight is an emotion based on perceived social rule violations it isn’t necessarily tied in with actual tangible consequences. Tangible meaning that the slight physically hurt you or caused lasting damage in some other way you could point to. Injuries can fall into the category of Narcissistic Injuries, a psychological term for such slights.

  “They bruise our egos, make us feel belittled. Ultimately all types of slights boil down to the same basic feeling of being devalued or disrespected.” ~Dr Steve Taylor

Such injuries lend themselves towards rumination. Dr Taylor states, “[Slights] can play on our minds for days, opening up psychic wounds which are difficult to heal.” We might want to fight back and nurse a grudge against them.

More details on this can be found in the book The Narcissist You Know, in which Dr. Joseph Burgo states that narcissistic injuries (wounds) happen when our self-esteem is challenged by disapproval, rejection or slight. We all need to sense the respect of at least the important people in our lives and it hurts when this sense of self-worth is not supported by the people around us.

Burgo defines three defensive manoeuvres people take to shore up their attacked self-esteem:

1. Shifting blame
2. Taking refuge in superiority or expressing contempt for the source of the narcissistic injury
3. Angry indignation

“Reacting defensively to criticism is an extremely common response. One might say a universal human reaction.” Burgo explains.  He elaborates by stating how the person being criticised might feel like an attack and result in plans for counterattacks to cover the psychological wound.

Spite

The planning of “counterattacks” brings us to the more active, angrier, emotion associated with reciprocal altruism, spite.

A piece from Medical Daily describes spite thusly, “As the darker side of altruism, spite compels the human animal to punish others for the collective good, spending resources to enforce social norms and standards of fairness on an aggregate level.”

Spite is the enforcer. Spite is you deliberately slowing your car down to teach that impatient driver behind you a lesson (even if it makes you late…it’s worth it).

It seems counterintuitive that altruism or cooperation be associated with something as pointless and potentially damaging as spite but an article by the New York Times describes it very well:

“The new research on spite transcends older notions that we are savage, selfish brutes at heart, as well as more recent suggestions that humans are inherently affiliative creatures yearning to love and connect. Instead, it concludes that vice and virtue, like the two sides of a V, may be inextricably linked.”

This article also details another version of game theory where results found that groups of excessively spiteful or selfish players quickly collapsed, and rigidly fair-minded societies were readily destabilized by influxes of selfish exploiters. Flexible sharers proved able to coexist with the spiteful types, moreover the presence of spitefuls had the effect of enhancing the rate of fair exchanges.

Sometimes enforcement is necessary to keep cheaters to a minimum. This is why the trait formed. But clearly, in our day to day lives, it is not the most constructive or healthy use of our time to be imagining elaborate revenge fantasies.

What Can be Done?

So far we have related:

What slight and spite mean and how they relate to each other and the foundations of altruism.

How we are attuned to the opinions, implications, and tone others take with us because this ability was essential in forming fair cooperative societies.

Now, how do we remain aware but not overly affected by the actions and opinions of others?

1. Awareness.

Knowing the fact that ‘we might be wrong’, to some extent liberates us from being easily slighted. We realize that what we assume is not necessarily what happened.

This awareness will assist us to grow thick skin by developing the mentality that we are not the centre of the universe: That driver that caught you in the traffic was not intending to show you he is smarter! There must be a chance that he didn’t intend to use all his mental resources to ruin our day! So we should take it easy sometimes.

“The key to growth is the introductions of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.” ~Lao Tzu

1. We might be tired.

Exhausted means drained, and when you are low on emotional resources that’s when every little-unwanted experience will be incredibly annoying or irritating. You will be more likely to make a big deal out of even the small transgressions and more likely to assume negative motivations, to think others are causing deliberate pain.

1. Mindful meditation

Practising meditation regularly helps to maintain a healthy mind. Being able to keep your mind calm will throw the stress out of the window and bring you peace.

1. Forgive (if possible).

Honestly examine the results of the offender’s actions and forgive if possible. Were there tangible consequences? When examining the incident with some emotional distance, does it still seem as important as when it first happened? If the answer is no, consider forgiveness. There is growing evidence suggesting that forgiveness benefits the forgiver as well as the forgiven.

“When you forgive, you in no way change the past- but you sure do change the future.” ~Bernard Meltzer

1. Live Mindfully.

Create a mental distance from the situation. View it from “outside”. This is where our earlier advice on living mindfully and avoiding rumination comes in handy.

We can all live in a happier world where we understand and respect each other. We are all busy and want to utilize the very little time left to be with our close friends and family members. As we all appreciate the moments we are spending with the loved ones, let’s also take a moment to consider other people’s feelings. Let’s take a second to smile at the exhausted waitress at the restaurant or say thank you to the hard working bus driver. We all need a bit more compassion.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle”. ~Plato

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References:

1. “Slighting-the Dangers of Being Disrespected”, by Steve Taylor PhD Psychology Today

1. “Getting Past the Stress of Feeling Slighted”, by Loretta G. Breuning PhD Psychology Today

1. “Narcissistic Rage Revisited”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Krizan, K, Johar, O.

1. “The Psychology of Spite” by Matthew Mientka. Medical Daily

1. “Spite is Good. Spite Works” by Natalie Angier. The New York Times

1. “How to Coach Your Brain to Stop Being Mad at Someone”, by Peter Finch. Fast Company

1. “Why Seemingly Trivial Events Sometimes Evoke Strong Emotional Reactions”, The Journal of Social Psychology. Leary, M, Diebels, K, Jongman-Sereno, K, Duong Fernandez, X

1. Behave, by Robert Sapolsky

1. The Narcissist You Know, by Joseph Burgo

1. Habits of a Happy Brain, by Loretta Graziano Breuning