It was a summer holiday weekend in the late nineties. One of those weekends you look forward to for months. I was in London visiting friends on a blisteringly hot day. It was my last chance to see them before I started my postgrad degree in journalism, so I made the most of it. After one too many for a lunchtime, we convinced ourselves to carry on the party. The destination of choice was a bar on Tottenham Court Road well known for the diversity of its clientele.
few hours into the sprawling celebration I stepped out of the bar for some fresh air when a stranger approached me asking for a light. Before I knew it, two other guys jumped me from behind. I hit the floor with a thud. All I could think about in the moment was the metallic tang of the blood pouring from my split lip. I’d been a victim of a homophobic hate crime.
The attack left a permanent impact on me. I still don’t hold my partner's hand in public. I felt like I lost something that day, and I know I will never get it back. After the attack, I abandoned journalism to pursue a career in criminology instead. The questions I had about my attack preoccupied me, and the science was the place to find the answers. After 20 years of research into hate crimes, I wrote The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop it, to share what I have learned.
With far-right politicians making inroads in many countries, and a war raging in Ukraine, the world right now feels like a very hateful place. To understand the nature of increasing division across the globe, we need to get to grips with the origins of hate within individuals.
I’m often asked, what is the difference between prejudice and hate? Prejudice is an internal set of thought processes, that are conscious or unconscious, and developed through learning – our socialisation with parents and peers and our exposure to culture. They either predisposes a person to favouring or disfavouring another person because of a group they belong to. We label these ‘ingroups’ and ‘outgroups’. Prejudice is always group-based – a person will be treated with warmth if they are from the ingroup or contempt if they are from the outgroup.968…
Unlike prejudice, hate is completely negative and conscious. Unlike negative feelings we can hold towards people, like disgust, anger, and contempt, hate is more enduring - it’s more like an attitude with a clear moral underpinning. Often it is the perceived transgression of morals that can see a prejudice turn into hatred. People who graduate from prejudice to hatred also act differently, that can be thought of as ‘push’ and ‘pull’ behaviours.
People who hold a negative prejudice tend to ‘push’ away the outgroup. They avoid where they live or socialise, cross the road when they see them coming down the street towards them, and stop their children from socialising with members of the outgroup. Haters ‘pull’ their targets towards them. Because of the moral dimension of hatred, the haters feel the need to correct transgressions, sometimes via violent means. They seek out the ‘transgressors’, so they can correct, punish or event exterminate. We saw this happen in Nazi Germany, and more recently in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
But none of this is inevitable. We do not enter this world pre-loaded with prejudice and hate, we have to learn it. And if we learn hate, it can be unlearned. During my research for the book I came across a remarkable study that demonstrates just how easily humans can be reshaped through the process of relearning.
Mohamed Salah joined Liverpool Football Club in July 2017 in a club record €42 million transfer. He is one of around fifty Muslims among the Premier League’s five hundred-odd players. He scored thirty-six times in his debut season, becoming Europe’s leading goal scorer that year. Shortly after his transfer he was awarded Player of the Month by fans for his outstanding performance, and eventually won the Players’ Player of the Year and Premier League Golden Boot in 2018.
On the pitch Salah celebrates goals by performing the sujud (prostration to Allah) and has further raised awareness of Islam by posting pictures of Islamic practices (e.g. Ramadan observance) to his more than 11 million followers on social media, and refusing to celebrate goals following attacks on mosques. In appreciation of his success, fans have taken to victory chants that incorporate positive sentiment towards Islam:
If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim, too; If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me; Sitting in a mosque, that’s where I wanna be!
Salah joined Liverpool only months after the string of Islamic extremist terror attacks in 2017 which saw the highest rise in anti-Muslim hate crime ever recorded by police in the UK. At this time, Liverpool, being less ethnically diverse than the UK as a whole, ranked in the top five police force areas for hate crime. Within months, Salah’s actions were having a positive impact on perceptions of Islam amongst fans. Evidence was also mounting that this ‘Salah effect’ was spilling onto the streets of Liverpool. A study by Stanford University showed that Merseyside had a remarkable 16 per cent lower hate crime rate following Salah’s signing compared to the expected rate had he not joined Liverpool FC. The ‘Salah effect’ also spread online, with a 50 per cent drop in anti-Muslim tweets posted by Liverpool fans. Meanwhile the rates of hate crimes and tweets in other areas and other fan bases either remained stable or increased after his signing, indicating that the effect on tolerance towards Muslims was localised.
There were likely many elements to the Salah effect, but possibly the most salient was his portrayal of his religious identity, which may have been novel information to many Liverpool fans, and which may have had the effect of softening attitudes towards Islam. Acts including prostrating himself in prayer after scoring goals, his wife attending matches in a headscarf, and naming his daughter after the holy site of Mecca have made Salah one of the most well-
known Muslim footballers globally. His frequent messaging regarding his religion also indicates he is unlikely to be seen as an ‘exception’, which helps challenge the negative stereotype of Islam as threatening and at odds with British values, counteracting it and humanising other Muslims.
The Salah effect shows the prejudice- and hate-reducing impact of portraying a minority identity in a positive light. Spurred on by this remarkable study, I ended the book on seven steps to stop hate.
We must recognize false alarms when our threat detecting mechanism is triggered: When we are told by politicians and the media that life is bad because of people different from us, we must always question their motives and stand down red alert when we spot mis/disinformation.
We must question our prejudgements of others different from us: Though our brains are great at many things, they are flawed in a few important areas. Instincts are useful in certain situations, but they can lead to discrimination when used to make decisions regarding people different from us. We should never act on first impressions and must always give someone a chance to prove us wrong.
We should not shy away from engaging in contact with others different from us: Since the 1950s, over five hundred studies including more than 250,000 people across thirty-eight countries have shown that positive contact under the right conditions reduces prejudice and hate. Contact seems to work particularly well for reducing anti-gay prejudice, followed by prejudice motivated by physical impairment, race, mental impairment, and age.
We must take the time to put ourselves in the shoes of ‘others’: In the lab, exercises in imagining others’ perspectives and experiences have been shown to promote what psychologists call decategorisation, which means we come to see ‘others’ as individuals, and less as a part of a separate group.
We must not allow divisive events to get the better of us: When a divisive event unfolds we must ask ourselves if those groups depicted as being at its centre are really to blame. We must question the motives of those pointing the finger and seek out a range of opinions from across the spectrum of viewpoints before we decide on how to feel and how to behave.
We must burst our online filter bubbles: Most of us either actively avoid or are guided by algorithms away from, groups and information that do not match our preferences. Break the cycle.
We must all become hate incident first responders: When we see hate, we must call it out, while ensuring personal and collective safety. The limited research on those witnessing prejudice and hate shows that fewer than half actually do something in the moment either to help the victim or admonish the perpetrator.
The science suggests that if adopted in whole or in part, these seven steps would see a reduction in the expression of prejudice and hate in suitably motivated people.
When we look at the troubled world in which we live, to give us hope that hate is not inevitable, we need look no further than the stands of Anfield, around which praise for Islam has echoed.
Matthew Williams is the author of The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do To Stop It, published by Faber & Faber. Paperback £9.99
