Some people provoke us when we first meet them. But why is it like that? And what does that ultimately say about ourselves?
Just the thought of this person – ugh! How he already looks, how he moves, how he talks, especially what he says. The list of characteristics may be short or long, but one thing is clear: they annoy you. This person annoys you. And that’s been the case since your first meeting.
Sometimes you don’t even know what the person’s last name is. You have no idea what his life story is, what strokes of fate might have led to him being so terribly irritating to you. And yes, there is probably the counterpart to “love at first sight” – “hate at first sight”. But where does this antipathy come from? How can it be that there are people we instinctively dislike? Psychology has many explanations for this.
Why we feel resentment
Feeling dislike towards our fellow human beings may not initially be a particularly desirable trait in society. And one must also realize that irrational and strong dislike of groups of people is more than just “undesirable” – it is the seed from which discrimination arises against women, queer people, people of color and other groups. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other structural forms of discrimination also stem from irrational, unfair and misplaced resentments and are a social challenge that we as humanity will (unfortunately) have to struggle with for a long time to come.
But where does this feeling actually come from? In fact, aversion is a protective mechanism that kept us alive in ancient times. It has its origins, among other things, in fear, as Robert Sapolsky describes in his book “Why Your Brain Hates Other People”: When you see a person who looks different than us, for example, The amygdala is activated, a region of the brain that is responsible for fear and aggression.
If the aversion is confirmed by the other person’s actions (for example, if he insults us or physically attacks us), the fear becomes rational and our negative feelings towards the person become stronger. “Our fight-or-flight response is our body’s way of dealing with such a stressor,” explains AJ Marsden, assistant professor of psychology at Beacon College in Florida, in an interview with Headspace. The problem: “Unfortunately, our body cannot distinguish between an actual stressor (being chased by someone with a knife) and a perceived one (having to work with someone you hate).”
Why we “instinctively” dislike some people
Like and dislike happen on a subconscious level, which is why on the surface it may seem to us that we dislike a person for absolutely no reason – but that’s not the case, sometimes we just have to look deeper to see the real reasons . And once we’ve got on the trail of them, the next step is to work on overcoming the aversion – which is often unfair and unnecessarily energy-sapping.
1. Our counterpart is “different”
“Being different” is a way of life for some, but for others it borders on a trigger word. What does “different” mean anyway? According to Duden, among other things, “deviant”, “different” but also “better” and “more beautiful”. In the context of individual people and their interactions, “different” can quickly become a synonym for “bad” or “worse than…”. People tend to exclude people who they perceive to be different from themselves in some way.
This behavior is also known under the term “othering” (can be translated as “making things different”) and means distancing and differentiating yourself from other groups in order to confirm your own “normality”, as the University of Cologne describes it. People or groups are assigned a number of negative characteristics that contrast with the perception of their own group (example: “This group of people steals everything that is not secured!”). In short, it’s about categorizing and distinguishing between “us” and “the others”.
Differences can be determined, for example, by appearance – for example skin color. Such a form of “othering” is the foundation of racism, nationalism and prejudice. But different cultural identities (including religion, for example) can also lead to a person being perceived as “different” – and therefore as problematic.
2. The other person is competition in some way
Many thousands of years ago, people automatically had to compete with each other to increase their social standing – higher status meant access to better resources and higher chances of survival. And even though our survival rarely depends on our social status in everyday life, the negative image of “competition” has persisted: a colleague who is smarter, faster, more experienced than us attractive person vying for the favor of the person we adore… or the sudden appearance of a new partner of our best friend with whom we suddenly have to share the attention of someone important to us – there are many examples of people with whom we are in competition in some way.
So envy and jealousy can often be the reason why we are skeptical about a person, to say the least. Because we are in some way inferior to such people – or at least feel like we are – we sometimes try to belittle these people indirectly, for example by criticizing or otherwise badmouthing them.
3. It reminds us of something threatening
Another possible reason for finding someone immediately unpleasant is that the person’s behavior reminds us of something threatening. For example, the person’s nose might remind us of our father’s, who used to yell at us as children. Our brain works a lot with associations: chocolate, for example, doesn’t really make you happy – at least not based on the ingredients of the candy. But many of us associate chocolate with childhood memories, with rewards, with beautiful moments – and our brain provides the pleasant emotions.
Unfortunately, the brain also works according to a similar principle when it comes to negative experiences: Anyone who has had an accident with a car may never feel comfortable in it again – simply because the brain associates the vehicle with danger. If you have had to go through mushroom poisoning, many people will soon feel sick at the mere thought of mushrooms. And so signals or characteristics from other people can trigger a deep aversion in us because we associate certain things with terrible experiences.
We are more than our “instincts”
This article presented just three of many possible examples of why we “instinctively” dislike other people. Prejudices and “othering” in particular can be eliminated if you educate yourself and approach new things and “strangers” with an open mind and interest. Anyone who sees another person as mere competition is usually doing them an injustice: we are rarely just one characteristic – it can often be worthwhile to take a closer look at the person. For example, a colleague with a lot of professional experience does not have to be an obstacle on the way to the top of the company, but perhaps a valuable mentor.
And knowing your own triggers (for example with the help of therapy) can help you better assess and cope with situations in which negative emotions hit us unexpectedly. At the end of days, we don’t have to be close friends with every person we meet in our lives. But it can be very exciting and insightful to deal with the people who “instinctively” annoy us – what does our dislike say about us? About our past but also about the people we are now and want to be?
Sources used: psychmechanics.com, headspace.com, duden.de, varietal.uni-koeln.de