Disliking/Hating Tendency is one of Charlie Munger’s psychological tendencies: strong dislike for a person, group, or idea warps how fairly we can judge it and anything linked to it.
The idea
Once we dislike someone, the mind tends to discount their virtues, distort the facts to support the dislike, and lump in anything associated with them — their ideas, their friends, even unrelated positions they hold — as also bad. It is the mirror image of Liking/Loving Tendency, and the two often combine: we favor our in-group and its ideas more, and disfavor the out-group and its ideas more, than the evidence warrants.
When to use it
- Noticing you’re rejecting an argument mainly because you dislike who is making it.
- Reviewing decisions (hiring, partnerships, deal terms) where personal friction with a counterpart may be driving the outcome.
- Catching yourself extending dislike of one trait or action to someone’s entire character or output.
How to apply it
- Separate the person from the claim: restate their argument in its strongest form before judging it.
- Ask what you would think of the same idea coming from someone you like.
- Notice guilt-by-association reasoning (“X likes it, and I dislike X, so it must be bad”) and check it explicitly.
Watch out for
The bias is hard to feel from the inside — it presents as confident, well-reasoned dislike rather than as a bias. It also compounds with confirmation bias, since once triggered it recruits selective evidence.
Related models
- Liking Loving — the mirror-image tendency that inflates our view of people and ideas we like.
- Envy Jealousy — another Munger tendency that distorts judgment through emotion toward others.
- Cognitive Biases — the broader category this tendency belongs to.
Sources
Charlie Munger, “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” (speech), reprinted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.