People think their opponents are hate-filled—unless you pay them money (2024)

Is it possible to appreciate the motives of the people on the opposite side of a conflict? In some of the more intractable, compromise-free conflicts of our time—think Republicans vs. Democrats, Israelis vs. Palestinians—there's widespread belief that the opposition has motives that are, put simply, not very nice. There's also a sense that your opponents are generally bad people, which undoubtedly contributes to the conflict.

But according to a new study being released by PNAS, it's possible to get people to think more positively about their opponents. All it takes is a small cash payment to get people to step back and think. And with a more positive understanding of the opposition, people become willing to think that compromise is possible.

While all that sounds fairly simple, its consequences are profound. "Ideological opponents risk the health of their economies and their planet because they are unable to make political compromises," the authors of the new paper write. "Ethnic and religious groups across the world engage in mass acts of violence, rejecting solutions of mutual benefit that involve sharing power, land, or religious sites."

While the sources of these conflicts may have deep and complicated roots, the consequences of the ongoing conflicts should be sufficient to drive compromise. So why hasn't it? The authors suspected that, layered on top of the disagreements, there was a general pessimism toward the prospect of coming to a mutually beneficial agreement. And they had a hypothesis about what could cause that pessimism.

The hypothesis focused on the motivation for continuation of the conflict. Individuals on any side of it will believe that their own group is driven to work together by love of each other. They'll refuse to recognize that same love in their opponents, instead assuming that the opposition is driven by hatred. That hatred, naturally, is directed at your own group. By assuming your opponents have an intractable negative bias against you, you end up with no desire to work with the opposition and pessimism about the prospects for any compromise. "If adversaries believe inflexibility on the other side renders mutual compromise impossible, they will be unlikely to adopt seemingly rational strategies for conciliation," as the authors put it.

To test this, the authors surveyed both US citizens about the Democrat-Republican divide, and Israelis and Palestinians about their conflict. In general, their hypothesis held up well. Most groups felt that their own members were motivated by love of each other, while the opposition was united in their hatred of the survey subjects. The single exception wasPalestinians, who felt that their own group was roughly equally motivated by self-love and hatred of the opposition. The authors suspect that this is a reflection of their relative lack of power, but they didn't follow up on it to find out.

To quantify the negativity, the authors measured the relative bias between how much individuals ascribed mutual love to their opponents and how much they ascribed hatred to them. The strength of this bias correlated with a reduced willingness to negotiate, reduced perception that a favorable compromise could be reached, and other measures of optimism. In short, once you're convinced your opponents hate you, then future prospects start to look bleak.

Is there a way out of this morass? Since money makes the world go around, the authors decided to try a small payment. They told a group of US participants that they'd give them $12 if their evaluation of their opponents' motivations matched the value their opponents gave for themselves. In other words, if a Democrat gave Republicans a self-love/opponent-hate rating that matched the one Republicans gave themselves, they'd get $12.

The goal wasn't really to harness greed; rather, it was simply to get people to stop and think of their opponents more carefully—to view them as humans, rather than some generic "other." To an extent, it worked. Simply offering the payment reversed the general trend, with people ascribing more self-love than other-hate to their opponents.

It would be easy to dismiss this as participants simply matching what they'd expect their opponents to say in order to get some money. But this change had the effect of reducing the bias score the authors calculated above. And they again showed that bias correlated with pessimism about compromise, a sense that a win-win agreement wasn't possible, and a tendency to assume that the opposition's opinions were an essential part of their nature. By reducing this bias, the small payment made people more open to the idea of compromise.

Now, clearly, it's probably not practical to pay every US citizen $12 just to get them to think better of their ideological opposition. And besides, it's not clear that the effects will last much longer than the time it took to fill out a few survey questions. Still, the study shows that many people's beliefs about the opposition are quite malleable and can easily be reevaluated. If that's what's necessary to generate a greater willingness to compromise, then it might be worth figuring out if there are ways to trigger that reevaluation that don't involve payments.

PNAS, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414146111 (About DOIs).