What is the hostile imagination?
Dr. Zimbardo coined the term “heroic imagination” because it was the opposite of the “hostile imagination”, a term used by Sam Keen, in Faces of the Enemy, where he talks about the ways in which certain situations have the power to trigger, or activate, hatred of other people, creating a psychology of enmity. Hostile imagination includes thinking of other people as objects, as unworthy, as less than human- in short, dehumanizing others. This in turn leads to thinking about and treating those people differently than you would your own kind or kin. The end product of this hostile imagination is creating the conditions of wanting to destroy the “other”, so it’s not just that you have a negative perspective, you really want to destroy them and you engage in or support antisocial behavior. Here we see the bad attitude leading to destructive behavior. Another aspect of the hostile imagination is sharing the negative attitude without taking the hostile action, instead being indifferent to the
