Gervais & Fessler (G&F) view contempt as a sentiment built upon more basic emotions, such as anger and disgust. They portray contempt as a passive sentiment, a lack of the positive emotion of respect. According to them, the main role of contempt is to justify oppression and superiority.

Based on the social psychology of intergroup relations, particularly on the BIAS map model (Cuddy et al. Reference Cuddy, Fiske and Glick2007), we suggest that G&F's view of contempt cannot be directly applied to contempt as a collective emotion for three reasons: (1) Contempt cannot be viewed as a mere lack of respect due to its two-dimensional structure; (2) contempt and anger are not built upon each other, but may have distinctive roles, for example, in mobilizing collective action; and (3) disgust seems to be the most elementary and specific basic-emotional antecedent of contempt.

The current social psychological research on intergroup relations suggests that ethnic prejudice is built upon a two-dimensional structure of stereotype (consisting of two relatively orthogonal dimensions of warmth and competence; Fiske et al. Reference Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu2002). According to this model, respect is related only to the dimension of competence: it may be felt towards both allies and enemies, as long as they are perceived as competent (across cultures, correlations of respect and competence range from .74 to .99; Fiske Reference Fiske2015). On the contrary, contempt is defined not only as the perceived lack of competence, but also (and essentially) as the perceived lack of warmth. Therefore, a lack of respect may result not only in contempt, but also in pity (when the target group is disrespected but liked), which, like contempt, can justify oppression.

What is more, research closely analyzing the system-justifying structure of stereotyping (Cichocka et al. Reference Cichocka, Winiewski, Bilewicz, Bukowski and Jost2015; Jost & Kay Reference Jost and Kay2005) suggests that prejudice based on pity (and also envy felt towards respected but disliked outgroups) justifies oppression and inequalities more than prejudice based on contempt (the perception of outgroup as cold and incompetent). In line with this reasoning, mixed-content stereotypes (i.e., those evoking pity or envy) are the most prevalent in countries with greater income inequalities (Fiske Reference Fiske2015).

Thus, respect cannot be viewed as the opposite of contempt as the two are only loosely related. Three recent empirical studies found that the correlation between these two emotions toward different target groups varies from −.12 to .71 (Bukowski & Winiewski Reference Bukowski, Winiewski, Kofta and Bilewicz2011). In fact, a study by Laham et al. (Reference Laham, Chopra, Lalljee and Parkinson2010) demonstrated that respect moderates the elicitation of contempt, and not the conversion of respect into contempt, as suggested by G&F. This implies that the relation between contempt and respect is far more complex, and there are several other variables that explain that relationship.

The relationship between anger and contempt is also found to be more complex than postulated by G&F. Specifically, in studies on collective action intentions, anger and contempt act as two distinct emotions that lead to alternative forms of collective action: anger motivates normative forms of such action (Górska & Bilewicz Reference Górska and Bilewicz2015), whereas contempt motivates the violent, non-normative ones (Tausch et al. Reference Tausch, Becker, Spears, Christ, Saab, Singh and Siddiqui2011).

On that basis, contrary to G&F, we view disgust, and not anger, as the closest emotional antecedent of contempt. Previous studies indicate that disgust can affect many aspects of social evaluations (Hodson & Costello Reference Hodson and Costello2007; Inbar et al. Reference Inbar, Pizarro and Bloom2009; Jones & Fitness Reference Jones and Fitness2008). For example, inducing disgust can increase the severity of individuals' self-reported moral judgments (Schnall et al. Reference Schnall, Haidt, Clore and Jordan2008) and sensitivity to moral transgressions (Whitton et al. Reference Whitton, Henry, Rendell and Grisham2014). On the physiological level, increased activation of the levator labii (a face muscle indicating disgust expression) can be observed when people evaluate moral situations and the norms are violated (Krumhuber et al., Reference Krumhuber, Tsankova and Kappasin press), suggesting that disgust may play a crucial role in effective social evaluation processes. Studies of facial expressions of contempt and disgust reveal the similarities between contempt and disgust expressions, which are frequently mistaken (Alvarado & Jameson Reference Alvarado and Jameson1996; Darwin Reference Darwin1872/1955; Haidt & Keltner Reference Haidt and Keltner1999). Even if these two emotions do not reflect one process, they have a major physiological and communicative overlap.

On the level of collective emotions, neuroscientific research based on the BIAS map shows that people stereotyped as low in warmth and low in competence, such as the homeless or drug addicts, elicit contempt and disgust in observers on the behavioral level and cause changes in brain activation: they trigger insula and amygdala activation, while limiting medial prefrontal cortex activation (Harris & Fiske Reference Harris and Fiske2006; Reference Harris and Fiske2009; Reference Harris, Fiske, Todorov, Fiske and Prentice2011). This suggests that contemptuous prejudice is rooted in feelings of disgust as triggered by portrayals of groups and people that evoke disgust.

We began by stating that G&F's view of contempt cannot be directly applied to contempt as a collective emotion. However, we would like to point out one aspect in which the view of G&F and current approaches to contempt as a collective emotion converge – namely: their criticism of conflating the structurally different emotions of hate and contempt. The authors conclude that in fact, contempt motivates many of the so-called “hate crimes.” Our research suggests that the same conflation occurs in the case of “hate speech.” A recent study of hate speech content found that most racist and homophobic slurs are built on contempt and disgust rather than hate (Bilewicz et al. Reference Bilewicz, Marchlewska, Soral and Winiewski2014) and that they are more often driven by dominance and ingroup superiority rather than feelings of threat (Bilewicz et al. Reference Bilewicz, Soral, Marchlewska and Winiewski2017). Our new study of hate speech shows that among adolescents the emotion of contempt is a stronger predictor of the use of derogatory language about minorities (Muslim, gay, Roma, Jewish) than the emotion of hate (Winiewski et al. Reference Winiewski, Hansen, Bilewicz, Soral, Swiderska and Bulska2017). Therefore, we concur with G&F's suggestion that many instances of “hate speech” are in fact “contempt speech” and that by focusing our attention on their hate-related components we run the risk of overlooking the disgust- and dominance-driven psychological nature of such phenomena.