Disliking/Hating Tendency

Concept Analysis

Definition & Origins

Disliking/Hating Tendency is the mirror image of Liking/Loving Tendency: an inborn conditioning device that causes a person, once he has tagged some object as disliked, to ignore its virtues, to dislike whatever is merely associated with it, and to distort facts in service of the hostility. Third on Munger's list of 25 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment, it describes the machinery by which dislike becomes data corruption.

Munger traced the tendency to deep evolutionary roots — the primate need to classify threats and rivals — but his interest was relentlessly practical: hatred is not just an emotion, it is a systematic source of analytical error. The person who hates does not merely feel; he miscounts.

In Munger's telling, the newborn human is "born to dislike and hate," just as the apes and monkeys are, and the long history of man contains almost continuous war to prove it. What civilization adds is not removal but channeling: the clever political arrangements of places like Switzerland and the United States channel the hatreds and dislikings of individuals and groups into nonlethal patterns, including elections. The English maxim he liked to cite — "politics is the art of marshalling hatreds" — is the same observation from the other side: the tendency is a standing reservoir of energy that institutions either route into safe outlets or leave to find its own.

Core Ideas

Dislike filters evidence asymmetrically. Munger's formulation is exact: the disliker/hater tends to "(1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, (2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and (3) distort other facts to facilitate hatred." The first filter removes positive data, the second spreads the taint by association, the third manufactures confirming evidence. Together they make hostility self-sealing.

Hatred of bad news is a special case with institutional consequences. Among the "most important miscalculations" Munger catalogued are those flowing from mere association with "one's disliking and hating, which includes a natural hatred for bad news." Organizations that punish the bearer of unwelcome facts teach everyone to stop bringing them — the Persian Messenger problem — and thereby guarantee that leadership's picture of reality degrades.

The tendency compounds with others. Dislike amplified by envy/jealousy becomes the engine of feuds; combined with Deprival-Superreaction, it makes conflicts escalate far beyond their stakes; fused with ideology, it produces the groupthink of "university liberal arts departments, law schools, and business organizations" that Munger described rejecting almost all conflicting inputs.

Distortion makes mediation impossible. Munger's bleakest illustration: when the World Trade Center was destroyed, many Pakistanis immediately concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Muslims concluded that the Jews did it. Once the third filter — distorting facts to facilitate hatred — has operated, the two sides no longer inhabit the same factual world, and mediation between opponents locked in hatred becomes difficult or impossible because facts in one side's history overlap very little with facts from the other side's. His family-level example is equally sharp: Buffett's repeated joke that "a major difference between rich and poor people is that the rich people can spend their lives suing their relatives" — the sibling hatred Munger watched fill his father's Omaha law practice.

Practical Application

Analytical hygiene. When you notice visceral dislike of a company, a management team, or an idea, treat it as a prompt to audit your evidence: what virtues am I not counting? The dislike may be justified — but the judgment must survive contact with the ignored virtues.

Institutional design. Protect the bearers of bad news. An organization where messengers are safe gets early warning; one where they are punished gets surprise catastrophes.

Negotiation and conflict. Expect the other side's perceptions of you to be distorted by the same machinery, and do not mistake their distorted picture for their considered position.

Build channels, not just prohibitions. Since the tendency cannot be eliminated, Munger's institutional lesson is to give it safe outlets: competition by election rather than riot, grievance procedures that let hostility be heard before it hardens, and cultures where disagreement is performed openly and early. The organization that suppresses all visible conflict has not removed the tendency; it has merely guaranteed that the eventual expression will be unchannelled.

Disaggregate the messenger from the message in your own reading. The investor's version of the Persian Messenger problem arrives by mail every quarter: the bullish letter from a manager whose style you dislike, the valid criticism from a short-seller with abrasive manners, the useful data point inside a competitor's self-serving presentation. Munger's discipline was to strip every input of its source long enough to evaluate it — to ask what the fact would be worth if it had come from a friend. This is harder than it sounds, because the second filter of the tendency works precisely by pre-tainting the container. The procedure that defeats it is mechanical: extract the claim, write it source-free, evaluate, and only then restore the attribution for weighting. Investors who practice it find their information diet widening immediately — and their rivals, still sorting mail by sender, keep eating the same poisoned diet.

Common Misconceptions

Misconception 1: Strong dislike is evidence of strong reasons. The tendency manufactures its own justification. The intensity of a hostility measures the tendency's activation, not the object's demerits.

Misconception 2: Dislike stays in its lane. Association spreads it — to the disliked person's colleagues, products, and unrelated ideas. That is why Munger separated message from messenger with unusual discipline.

Munger's Own Words

Thought Evolution

Legacy & Influence

Disliking/Hating Tendency, paired with Liking/Loving, forms the affective core of Munger's psychology — the two inborn conditioning devices that bend cognition before reason gets a vote. Its legacy within the Munger framework is structural: it is the missing piece that explains why intelligent people cannot simply be told the truth. If facts arrive tagged by a disliked source, or carry implications the listener hates, the three filters remove, taint, and rewrite them before analysis begins. Much of Munger's practical teaching — separate messenger from message, protect bearers of bad news, distrust your strongest aversions — is a set of workarounds for this single circuit.

The tendency's explanatory reach has only grown since 1995. Munger's examples were elections, lawsuits, and the politics of his era; the mechanism he described — hatred as a standing reservoir of energy that institutions either channel or suffer from — now reads as a precise account of attention-economy media, in which the marshalling of hatreds has become an industrial process with engagement metrics attached. His English maxim has been upgraded in scale, not in kind: the outlets and platforms that learned to monetize the tendency are running the oldest political art with better tooling. Against that backdrop his Swiss-American observation acquires its full weight: civilization does not abolish the tendency, it builds safer conduits for it — and the conduits require maintenance.

Within investing, the tendency's legacy is a permanent audit item. Every experienced analyst carries a list of companies, sectors, and managers he has learned to hate, usually for good original reasons; Munger's framework is the reminder that the list then filters all future evidence in one direction. The durable practice he modeled — redo the arithmetic from raw data whenever visceral aversion is detected — remains one of the few reliable ways to recover the analytical ground the tendency quietly confiscates.

Related Concepts

Case Companies

The Persian Messenger — Organizational Denial. Munger's paradigmatic case is not a company but a pattern: ancient Persians killed messengers whose sole fault was bringing truthful bad news. Modern organizations reproduce the syndrome whenever a subordinate learns that delivering unwelcome facts is career-threatening. The result is an information system optimized for comfort, and a leadership that discovers reality only when it arrives uninvited.

Ideological Institutions — Groupthink. Munger pointed to university departments, law schools, and business organizations as institutions where ideology-based dislike of dissenters rejects almost all conflicting inputs — the disliking tendency institutionalized, with former believers punished hardest because their defection triggers both betrayal and fear of persuasion.

The Analyst Who Hates a Ticker — Personal Miscounting. The tendency's quietest damage appears in the investor who has been burned once by a company or a sector and thereafter cannot see it straight. Every subsequent piece of news is processed through the three filters: the turnaround's genuine progress is ignored (filter one), the new management team is condemned for its association with the old story (filter two), and ambiguous data is read as confirmation that the company remains rotten (filter three). The analyst believes he has learned from experience; in fact the tendency has confiscated the experience. Munger's counter-habit was to treat any strong visceral reaction to a business — positive or negative — as a reason to redo the arithmetic from raw data rather than as a conclusion to act on: the emotion may carry information, but it is the kind of witness that must be cross-examined, never simply believed.

Mentioned In

Source: Poor Charlie's Almanack, The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger