SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGYTHE HATE THAT BINDS

An Analysis of Unity Through Opposition

INTRODUCTION

When I moved to Boston in the late 90s, one of the first things that struck me — something I never quite got used to — was the sight of Red Sox fans marching to or from Fenway Park, no matter who the team was playing, chanting “Yankees Suck, Yankees Suck!” even when they’d just won. Even when the Yankees weren’t anywhere near Boston.

I remember standing there, watching these crowds file past, trying to understand why they didn’t have their own song. Every great football club in Europe has an anthem, something that speaks to the love of the team itself. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at Liverpool, for instance. But here, the thing that united thousands of people, that brought their voices together in perfect sync, was not love for their own team. It was disdain for someone else’s.

Whatever the reason, that common hatred — admittedly in the spirit of harmless sports rivalry — was more galvanizing for them than any song about the Red Sox could ever be. The more I thought about it over the years, the more I realized that this seemingly trivial observation points to something much deeper about human nature. There is something about hate that helps certain kinds of people form a bond. I have watched this play out everywhere from global conflicts to my own social media feed.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SHARED ENEMY

What I witnessed at Fenway Park was not just about baseball. It was about the visceral sense of “oneness” that comes from having a shared target. Psychologists call this identity fusion: the blurring of the line between who you are as an individual and who you are as part of a group.

For those fans, the Yankees were not just a rival team; they became a symbol of everything that was not “us.” Chanting that simple, crude slogan was a way of saying to everyone around them: we are the same.

Hate, in this context, is not just an uncontrollable emotion. It can function as a kind of social glue — giving people a clear sense of purpose, something to push against.

I have come to understand that hate, in this context, is not just an uncontrollable emotion. It can function as a kind of social glue. It gives people a clear sense of purpose, something to push against. It focuses energy. It tells you who you are by telling you who you are not.

When that dynamic takes hold, the actual presence of the enemy becomes almost irrelevant. The Yankees did not need to be on the schedule for the hatred to feel real. They simply needed to exist as an idea.

FROM CHANTS TO GENOCIDE: THE TRAJECTORY OF DEHUMANIZATION

I want to be careful here. I am not suggesting that yelling “Yankees Suck” is the same as hate speech, let alone incitement to violence. But the psychological mechanism at work — uniting against a common foe — is the same one that, under different circumstances, has led to some of the darkest chapters in human history.

The leap from a sports chant to genocide may seem vast, but it exists on a continuum. The difference is a matter of degree, of what you are willing to do to the “other,” and how thoroughly you have stripped them of their humanity.

When I read about the Rwandan Genocide, the Holocaust, or the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, I see the same “us versus them” binary, supercharged with lethal intent. The Tutsi were not just rivals, but inyenzi, “cockroaches.” The Jews were not just a different religious group, but Untermenschen, “subhumans.” That word, dehumanization, is the critical switch. Once a group becomes an idea rather than a collection of human beings, almost anything can be justified.

Once a group becomes an idea rather than a collection of human beings, almost anything can be justified.

We see echoes of this today in the rhetoric surrounding the Israeli-Gaza conflict. The dehumanization of Palestinians — or in other contexts, of Israelis — gives a certain type of person something they can rally behind. It is no longer about policy, land, or historical grievance. It becomes about identity, about belonging to a tribe defined by its opposition to an enemy.

THE POLITICS OF DISDAIN: WOKE, BLM, AND THE EMPTY SIGNIFIER

I see the same pattern in the migration debates that have consumed countries from Australia to the United States. If you ask an average US Republican or Canadian conservative what they think about “Woke Culture,” Black Lives Matter, or ANTIFA, many will tell you without hesitation how much they hate these movements. They will not be shy about it.

Yet if you ask them what “woke” actually means, almost none of them can give you a coherent answer. I have tried this. It is a remarkable thing to witness.

They just know they hate it. They are willing to vote for anyone who promises to get rid of it — whatever it is.

This is the “Yankees Suck” phenomenon on a political scale. The enemy does not need to be clearly defined. In fact, its power comes partly from its vagueness. “Woke” becomes a container for everything that feels threatening, alien, or contemptible about the other side. Hating it becomes a way of signaling membership in your tribe. You do not need to understand it. You simply need to know that they are for it, and we are against it.

THE DIGITAL ACCELERANT: HOW ALGORITHMS SUPERCHARGE HATE

Things have changed dramatically since I moved to Boston in the 90s. Back then, the unifying disdain I observed was local, organic, and limited by geography. You marched with the people around you. You chanted with your neighbors.

Today, bad actors on social media have capitalized on this human tendency with terrifying efficiency. The platforms we use every day are engineered to keep us engaged, and the engineers have discovered that nothing drives engagement quite like hatred.

Algorithms do not just show you what you want to see. They learn what keeps you on the screen and feed you more of it. If that means showing you content that makes you angry, fearful, or righteous in your contempt for some despised “other,” that is what the algorithm will do.

A user searching for information about immigration might be algorithmically steered toward videos suggesting an “invasion.” A person curious about gender politics can be led down a rabbit hole to radical misogyny in a matter of days.

I have watched this play out in my own feed. A moment of curiosity about a political issue can quickly become a cascade of increasingly extreme content. The system is designed to find your vulnerabilities — your sense of grievance, your loneliness, your loss of control — and guide you down a path.

This creates global communities united not by geography or even by positive values, but by a common object of hatred. The man who attacked a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 had been radicalized on platforms like Gab, where he found a virtual tribe that shared his antisemitic worldview. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston, documented his journey through online white supremacist spaces — a journey that began and ended with the same kind of content the algorithms kept serving him.

These are not isolated madmen. They are the logical endpoint of a system designed to bind people together through hate. The virtual world is no longer separate from the real one. As the 2024 riots in the UK demonstrated, online incitement can spill into the streets with devastating speed. What starts as a chant about a baseball team can, under the right conditions and with the right amplification, become something far darker.

CONCLUSION

I still think about those Red Sox fans sometimes. I do not believe for a moment that most of them harbor any real animosity toward New Yorkers or even toward the Yankees as people. The chant is a ritual, a game within a game. But it is also a reminder that the desire to belong — to have a tribe — is one of the most powerful forces in human life.

When belonging is forged in the fire of a common enemy, it creates bonds that are incredibly strong.

The danger comes when that enemy ceases to be a rival sports team and becomes a racial group, a religious minority, or a political “other” stripped of all humanity. When that happens, the bond of hate becomes a rope that can drag societies toward violence.

For the first time in history, we have given this ancient human tendency the most powerful megaphone ever invented: algorithms designed to make sure the chanting never stops.