Why Haters Hate: Scientists Discover Origins of Like and Dislike

Is the glass full or half empty? Good question--and your answer may just have everything to do with your personality. Scientists have discovered the reason why some people seem to dislike everything while others seem to like everything, revealing why haters hate.

In order to find out whether people differ in their tendency to like or dislike things, the scientists created a scale that requires people to report their attitudes toward a wide variety of unrelated stimuli. For example, some of the categories included architecture, cold showers, politics and soccer. After finding out how much people like or dislike these specific things, the researchers averaged the responses together to calculate their dispositional attitude. In other words, they calculated how much they tend to like or dislike things in general. The theory was that if individuals differ in the general tendency to like versus dislike objects, attitudes toward independent objects may actually be related.

So what did they find? It turns out that people with generally positive dispositional attitudes are more open than people with generally negative dispositional attitudes. This means that positive people may be more prone to actually buy new products, get vaccine shots and follow regular positive actions.

"The dispositional attitude construct represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of the properties of the evaluator," wrote the authors in a news release. "[For example], at first glance, it may not seem useful to know someone's feelings about architecture when assessing their feelings about health care. After all, health care and architecture are independent stimuli with unique sets of properties, so attitudes toward these objects should also be independent." Yet the researchers point out that the individual who formed the attitudes may be more prone to focus on positive features.

The findings expand attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a function of an object's properties. Instead, it's also a function of the properties of the individual who evaluates an object. In other words, the new study provides clear support for the dispositional attitude as a meaningful construct.

The findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.