SMART NEWS

Haters May Have a Natural Disposition to Hate

The researchers coined the term “dispositional attitudes” as a new means of assessing a person’s baseline outlook on the world

Rachel Nuwer

August 28, 2013

Haters, it turns out, may be born that way. Some of us, new research indicates, seem to generally view things from a rosy light, while others are prone to unwavering negativity. Medical Daily reports:

The findings were supported by a series of concomitant experiments, in which the researcher recorded and averaged the test subjects’ opinions of several unrelated stimuli – objects and concepts such as politics, cold showers, soccer, and architecture. From these averages, the researchers were able to derive clear, consistent dispositional attitudes in test subjects.

The researchers coined the term “dispositional attitudes” as a new means of assessing a person’s baseline outlook on the world. We all fall somewhere along a gradient scale of super positive and inconsolably negative, they think.

Whereas people with positive dispositional attitudes have a natural inclination to like, or approve of, external objects and situations, those with negative dispositional attitudes exhibit a strong tendency to dislike them. It would appear that our judgment is not as empirical as we would like to think.

In a fun twist, however, this means that haters shouldn’t be hated on for all their hating—they just can’t help their dispositional attitude.