26.292 – Why a Clear Enemy Feels So Good
“The human mind must think with the aid of categories (the term is equivalent here to generalizations).”
Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (1954, p. 20)
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When a Label Starts Telling a Story
Gordon Allport, whose work at Harvard helped establish the study of personality, was interested in what makes a person distinctive. In The Nature of Prejudice (1954), he also examined the categories through which we encounter people. His starting point is familiar: generalizations help us find our way through daily life. The question is how readily we revise them when someone does not fit (Harvard University, n.d.; Allport, 1954).
Think of meeting a new colleague. Knowing their role gives you somewhere to begin: what you might ask them, how your work connects. Now imagine being told, before you meet, that they belong to “the difficult team.” You still know very little about this person, but you may already be preparing for resistance.
Perhaps you recognize that moment: a label arrives, and an expectation follows. What happens when a shared frustration gives that expectation the force of a verdict? A neighborhood disagreement offers a place to watch the shift.
The Label Arrives First
Imagine a neighborhood where “the people from the new building” began as a useful description. Someone had moved in; a name was not yet known. Then delivery vans began blocking the shared access lane. After several frustrating mornings, the phrase acquired a different tone: “Those people from the new building.” The address now seemed to explain the behavior. Before anyone asked who had arranged the deliveries, a judgment was circulating: the newcomers had no consideration for anyone else.
The obstruction in this imagined neighborhood has occurred on three mornings. One resident has had to wait while trying to leave for work. Another has struggled to get through with a mobility aid. At the meeting, the resident who was late describes standing beside the van while the driver carried another load inside. He had asked for room to pass. Being told it would only take a minute did little to help when he was already late.
“Somebody has to stand up for the people who live here,” he says. Several neighbors nod. One thanks him for speaking up. For a moment, the room gives him something the morning did not: recognition that his time matters and that he should not have been brushed aside. The acknowledgment is deserved. But the phrase “people who live here” has quietly stopped including everyone who lives along the lane.
A woman near the back says that she lives in the new building and has complained about the deliveries too. Before she can explain, someone replies, “Well, there are always exceptions.” Her experience is admitted into the conversation in a form that leaves the group judgment untouched. A considerate resident becomes an exception; an inconsiderate one becomes evidence. The account has acquired a way to survive almost anything people might notice.
The first speaker turns toward her. “Are you saying there isn’t a problem?” She is questioning who belongs inside the accusation, while he hears a challenge to the complaint that finally earned a hearing. His role as the neighbor willing to speak up may now feel at stake. Letting her complicate the story could seem like surrendering the recognition he has just received.
He began the evening inconvenienced and ignored. Now neighbors are thanking him for defending them, and he has an explanation they seem ready to share. The blocked lane has given them a common grievance; blaming the newcomers gives that grievance a direction. He need not have intended to exclude anyone to find some relief in their agreement. Yet each nod makes it a little harder to hear from someone the accusation includes.
As the discussion continues, “they” can mean the driver, the building manager, or every person who has moved in. No one pauses to separate them. A resident who rents a flat and a manager who orders supplies become part of the same explanation, although only one may have chosen where the vans should stop. The meeting has settled on whom to blame before establishing who could change the arrangement.
The woman tries again. “I’m saying the lane needs to be clear for us too.” Her answer leaves the complaint standing. It also asks the room to make space for information that the label cannot supply.
What the Story Leaves Out
Neighborhood language carries a great deal of memory. People remember who helped during a storm, which promises went unfulfilled, and how a shared space used to work. That knowledge can sustain trust. It can also make belonging sound like evidence: we know how things are done here; they do not. The person who cares about the neighborhood can begin treating familiarity as a qualification for having a legitimate concern.
When a longtime neighbor blocks the lane, others may know that a refrigerator was being replaced or that a delivery arrived unexpectedly. They can be irritated and still have some idea of what happened. With an unfamiliar neighbor, the inconvenience may be all they know. Where the missing details would have been, a judgment about character can take hold: someone who cared about the neighborhood would never have done this.
The woman at the meeting opens an email on her phone. She has written to management twice about the same vans. The deliveries are building supplies ordered by the manager, rather than purchases arranged by individual residents. In the reply, the manager says that drivers are instructed to use the side entrance. That entrance opens onto the shared lane. She reads the instruction aloud and offers to forward the relevant exchange.
The email names the entrance and the person who chose it. Whether the driver knew an alternative, or management understood the effect on access, remains unclear. But the woman whom the room had treated as part of the problem has given them somewhere to direct their inquiry. Her correspondence also shows that someone with authority had already heard about the obstruction and had an opportunity to respond.
“When did you send those?” the first speaker asks. She gives him the dates. One was before the morning he was delayed. He looks again at the reply. Management had heard about the obstruction before he found himself waiting beside the van. His anger now has a more specific question behind it: why were drivers still being sent to that entrance after someone had complained?
From her flat, the woman could hear the vans arrive, but she could not rewrite the delivery instructions or open another loading area. The manager could do both and was absent from the meeting. Blaming everyone at the address had obscured who controlled those choices. It had also left the residents defending their character while the person responsible for the arrangement had yet to answer for it.
Perhaps management misunderstood the entrance’s limitations; perhaps convenience was allowed to outweigh residents’ access. The correspondence can be checked, and the manager can be asked what alternatives were considered. Nothing in the woman’s account rules out negligence or deliberate disregard. The residents can request a change now, with the obstruction documented, while continuing to seek an explanation for why their earlier complaints went unanswered in practice.
Someone had called her an exception before hearing any of this. She had needed the lane to be clear long before her email proved useful to the meeting. If she had brought no correspondence, her experience would still have belonged in the discussion. Asking newcomers to respect shared arrangements also means hearing them when those arrangements fail; they may be living with a problem that their longer-established neighbors have only just encountered.
The first speaker can still ask his neighbors to back him in getting the lane cleared. They have heard what happened that morning, and the email gives them further reason to act. He has less reason to accuse everyone in the building of indifference. Some of the people he was blaming were trying to solve the same problem, and he can now pursue his complaint alongside them.
A Problem We Can Work On
Someone taking notes reads back a revised account: “The shared lane was blocked during three deliveries this week. Residents could not pass freely. Management’s instructions direct drivers to the side entrance, and complaints have already been sent. We need an arrangement that keeps the route clear.” The first speaker listens as the note reaches the request. His delay is still there, together with the complaints that preceded it and a named recipient who can act.
The group agrees to send the dates and the relevant correspondence to the manager, asking for an immediate change before the next delivery. The woman offers the email exchange, with personal details removed. The first speaker supplies the time of his delay. Neither is appointed to investigate every resident or supervise future deliveries. The responsibility for organizing a workable arrangement remains with the people who order the supplies and control access to the building.
In the days that follow, the manager confirms that the side entrance had been selected because it was closest to the storage room. The earlier complaints had received replies, but the instructions had stayed the same. The manager arranges for the next delivery to use the front loading area during a booked period and assigns a staff member to receive it. The response acknowledges that residents should not have had to keep asking for the lane to remain usable.
Management had continued sending drivers to an unsuitable entrance after receiving complaints. The residents can now put that failure on record, along with the promised remedy. They will be able to see whether the front loading area is used and whether the lane stays clear. If management fails to carry out the arrangement, the dates and correspondence can support a stronger complaint through an appropriate channel.
A firmer response may still be necessary if the obstruction continues. In a different situation, a documented pattern of threats or obstruction might warrant a protective boundary or formal intervention from the outset. Nobody has to accept unsafe contact, endless explanation, or a friendly conversation as the price of having a harm addressed. Knowing more about who made a decision can help determine where to direct that response.
At the next gathering, the first speaker mentions the revised instructions. He also says, “I shouldn’t have put everyone in that building together.” The woman does not have to reassure him or make the exchange into a public reconciliation. He can acknowledge what he said about her neighbors and still expect management to keep its promise. She can accept the narrower account without pretending that being called an exception was harmless.
There may still be anger about the delay, and confidence in the manager may take time to return. A practical correction may leave some of that anger unsettled. The neighborhood does not need to force a warmer ending. It needs to remain attentive to whether the new arrangement works and whether further concerns can be raised without turning a person’s address into an explanation of their character.
Another noisy evening or a missed collection may bring the old phrase back: “Those people from the new building.” Someone may remember this meeting and ask who has spoken to the residents concerned. They may turn out to have useful information again, or to bear some responsibility, or to know very little about it. Leaving those possibilities open takes more patience than an accusation. It gives the neighborhood a chance to find out what happened before another address becomes a verdict.
On the morning of the next delivery, the van stops at the front loading area. A staff member meets the driver. The resident who had been delayed leaves for work through the shared lane, and the woman from the new building passes him on her way out. They exchange a greeting. The manager still owes the neighborhood reliable follow-through. For that morning, the promised change is visible, and both residents can get where they need to go.
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Practice: Describe the Problem Without the Enemy
Estimated time: 9 minutes.
Choose an ordinary disagreement in which you have begun thinking about “people like them.” You may use an imagined situation. Your objective is to create an account that preserves the problem while separating what you observed from what you inferred.
The two-page worksheet will guide you through the act, its effect, the motive you have assigned, the group label you are using, and a condition or decision that may help explain the situation. You will finish with a description you can test, one question that would improve your understanding, and a proportionate next step. The expected outcome is greater clarity about responsibility and your available choices.
You can complete this privately. You do not need to contact anyone, disclose personal information, excuse wrongdoing, or relax a necessary boundary. Your next step may be a specific request, further observation, a formal complaint, or protection from continued harm.
Scientific Summary
Imagine a neighborhood map on which every street beyond one boundary has been replaced by the word “them.” The map offers a clear division but gives little help in reaching a destination. That is an analogy for the cost of an overly broad explanation. Research asks more specific questions: when do people give enemies greater influence, and how do they judge the motives of opposing groups?
Sullivan, Landau, and Rothschild (2010) examined perceived control and enemy influence across four studies. In one experiment, a threat to participants’ sense of control increased the conspiratorial influence they attributed to a political opponent. Another experiment found that an ambiguously powerful enemy could bolster reported control under threat. These results suggest that identifying an influential enemy can sometimes serve a psychological function. They do not show that every accusation is invented, that enemies always feel reassuring, or that a neighborhood complaint has this cause. The measures concerned perceived influence, risk, and control, rather than successful resolution of an actual dispute (Sullivan et al., 2010).
Waytz, Young, and Ginges (2014) examined motive judgments in five studies involving American political partisans and Israeli and Palestinian participants. A recurring pattern was greater attribution of concern for one’s own group to that group, and greater attribution of hostility to the opposing group. In an experiment with American partisans, offering incentives for accurate judgments changed how participants rated the opposing party’s motives. The incentive condition did not produce a statistically significant difference in reported willingness to negotiate compared with the control condition. The findings concern particular conflict settings and do not establish equal responsibility between groups or reveal any individual’s true motive (Waytz et al., 2014).
Together, these studies give us reasons to examine the explanatory work an enemy image may be doing. They cannot diagnose the neighbors in the fictional scene, establish that the proposed worksheet reduces conflict, or tell us which response a real case requires. The exercise offers a modest discipline: distinguish observations from explanations, look for information that could change the account, and make the next action answerable to what is actually known.
References
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley. Digitized text.
Harvard University, Department of Psychology. (n.d.). Gordon W. Allport. https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/gordon-w-allport
Sullivan, D., Landau, M. J., & Rothschild, Z. K. (2010). An existential function of enemyship: Evidence that people attribute influence to personal and political enemies to compensate for threats to control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(3), 434–449. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017457
Waytz, A., Young, L. L., & Ginges, J. (2014). Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(44), 15687–15692. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1414146111
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