How to Bounce Back From Cruelty

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I recently counseled a woman I’ll call Grace. She struggles with depression and feelings of hopelessness, fear, and sadness after receiving hundreds of online hate messages. As a trauma care nurse, she advocates for rape victims and strongly supports a woman’s right to choose abortion. When multiple men invaded her social media with messages like, “Your body, my choice,” she knew the cruelty behind those messages. She could picture the battered bodies of the hospitalized survivors she tended.

According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans have personally experienced online harassment. More severe forms of abuse include physical threats, stalking, sexual harassment, and sustained harassment. In 2014, 15 percent experienced such problems. Today 25 percent report experiencing intense online abuse. Our culture has coarsened (Pew Research Center, 2021).

Human cruelty is ubiquitous and timeless. Leaders throughout history have referred to other humans as “vermin,” “trash,” or “subhuman.” Many go on to direct devastating violence against minorities in their quest for power. Stalin, Hitler, and American slaveholders all directed campaigns of hate that harmed millions of lives for generations (Watkins, 2024).

Characteristics of Human Cruelty

Salman Akhtar, psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry and human behavior, finds cruelty appears in all religious, ethnic, and national groups (Akhtar, 2024). He outlines five features of human cruelty:

1. Destructive
2. Intentional
3. Pleasurable to the perpetrator
4. Inhumane
5. Unethical

Today we carry messages of cruelty on our mobile phones. A hostile insult can pop up at random and feel like a gut punch. Internet trolls take pleasure in the pain they cause, with built-in emojis and memes meant to ridicule the suffering of others.

What Makes People Cruel?

Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist, came up with a simple equation to describe human behavior. He wrote, in 1936, that behavior is a function of both personality and the environment (B=f{P, E}). Some personality types are indeed more prone to acts of cruelty. The “Dark Triad” traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are associated with high rates of self-reported sadistic behavior.

Narcissists feel a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement. They crave attention and fantasize about unlimited success and power. Machiavellians use deception, flattery, and manipulation to advance their self-interests (Hartley, D. 2023). Psychopaths display antisocial behavior and impulsively violate the rights of others with no remorse. Psychopaths are also more likely to engage in animal abuse, sexual sadism, and torture (Lobbestael et al., 2023).

Researchers have seen a correlation between sadism (gaining pleasure from the pain or humiliation of others) and the Dark Triad personality types. Folks whose personalities fall into what has been renamed the Dark Tetrad, or the Dark Quad, are more likely to engage in online harassment and trolling. However, they don’t account for all the cruelty we see online. Research shows that individual trolling behavior may be better explained by the social rewards people feel from posting negative content than by personality traits alone (Craker et al., 2016). This evidence supports Lewin’s notion that our social environment is a powerful predictor of our behavior.

Both history and human behavior studies show that if placed in certain environments, all of us are capable of cruelty (Lewin, 1936). If our social environment encourages it, if we depend on putting others down to enhance our own self-worth, then we too will engage in casual cruelty.

How to Bounce Back

To contend with the effects of cruelty, Akhtar suggests we all work to cultivate the character traits of courage, resilience, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, and sacrifice. Resilience, he notes, does not merely stem from the constitution of the individual but from the support of the wider culture.

Akhtar identifies three important ways we can combat human cruelty:

1. Education
2. Empathy-building
3. Victim empowerment

First, get an education in resilience. Psychotherapy tools, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, strengthen our coping skills for stress. Self-care like good sleep, nutrition, and exercise helps generate myokines, or hope molecules, which help us feel happier and cope better (Lyon, 2023).

Empathy-building supports a culture of compassion instead of a culture of cruelty. Many universities offer compassion cultivation training, a mindfulness-based way to build empathy and lower stress arousal. Reading literary fiction also strengthens empathy (Schwering et al., 2021). As a boy, famed television host and author Fred Rogers felt scared about dangerous world events. His mother told him, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” The helpers demonstrate empathy.

Victim empowerment requires pushing back on the powerful who puff themselves up by putting others down. Support groups, advocacy groups, and community organizing can help marginalized groups obtain justice and support. When we amplify the voices of victims, provide support, and shut down bullying we become the helpers. Lives have been saved by the one online voice of support in a sea of callous cruelty.

Finally, it all begins with a decision. What kind of a human do you wish to be? How do you want to be remembered? What do you stand for? Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “All cruelty springs from weakness.” By strengthening our own character, and helping others to do the same, we can change the culture.