UCLA Launches Ambitious Three-Year, Campus-Wide Study Of Hate

Supported by a $3 million gift from an anonymous donor, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) announced this week that it was launching the Initiative to Study Hate, a three-year effort by scholars in more than 20 disciplines to understand and mitigate hate in all its forms.

Under the direction of David Myers, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History at UCLA, the initiative will feature 23 projects in its first year, supported by $600,000 in internal research funds. Additional projects will be funded in years two and three of the pilot.

Researchers will convene in a monthly seminar to discuss their research findings and hear from other experts. The initiative will also host public programming and engage with relevant policymakers, practitioners and NGO leaders in order to explore how to translate theory and research findings into potential applications in educational curricula, health care and public policy.

“Hate is so pervasive in our world that it almost seems too daunting to take up,” said Myers. “But we believe that this is exactly the kind of big question that a great public university like ours must seek answers to. This new initiative aims to understand how and why hate functions as it does.

“We’re interested in hate as it takes rise in groups and is transmitted from generation to generation, but we are also exploring how hate takes rise in the individual’s brain. Our ultimate aim is to do all that we can to mitigate or minimize hatred in individuals and groups,” added Myers.

Students and faculty working on the initiative represent disciplines across the UCLA campus, including sociologists, psychologists, historians, education experts, cognitive scientists, public and community health experts, computer scientists, legal scholars and others.

UCLA is casting the initiative as part of its efforts “to support research and actions in an effort to build more just and humane societies.” Other examples include the Bedari Kindness Institute, the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, Center for the Study of Women and the Institute of American Cultures.

Examples of the first-year projects in the Initiative To Study Hate include:

• How the Atlanta spa shooting of 2021 affected the mental health of Asian Americans, especially Asian American women
• The impact of racial slurs directed against Latino high school students
• The effects of bullying and the criminal justice system on LGBTQ+ youth
• Reviewing how a person’s race correlates to when security is called at UCLA Health
• The erasure of Black histories and spaces
• Videogames as a tool to teach tolerance
• The effect of Fox News on political extremism
• How hatred is manifested against abortion providers
• Rhetoric used around misinformation in both Russian and U.S. media
• How artificial intelligence and machine learning perpetuate bias.

One team, involving economists, health care professionals and historians, will study hate directed at people who experience homelessness. The project will identify the beliefs, stereotypes, and fears that fuel hatred of homeless people, and it will examine the stigma, discrimination, and hatred they experience.

Another team is examining how certain brain mechanisms might create a sense of dehumanization toward others. They’ll study participants with healthy brains as well as those with frontotemporal dementia.

The comprehensive initiative comes at a time when expressions of hate appear to be increasing both in frequency and intensity – in the United States and globally. And college campuses have recently seen a disturbing increase in incidents of antisemitism, attacks on ethnic minority students and LGBTQ+ youth, and other hate crimes.

“Hate directed at certain people and groups has unfortunately been a common theme throughout human history,” said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, in the university’s news release. “This interdisciplinary initiative will contribute much to our understanding of group hate — and more than that, will help us overcome it.”