Who Is Hated the Most, and Who is Loved the Most?

By Leah and Tom

Hi Folks:

We did a little Sociology project. Maybe we were bored that day, but we hope this doesn’t bore you: The question was: How much are different groups in the world loved, and hated? You know - race, nationality, religion, etc. So we Googled how many “Hate” and “Love” search results you get when you enter various groups, e.g. “Americans,” “Europeans,” Frenchmen,” etc.


This is tongue-in-cheek to some extent. Google searches are not the most valid predictors of anything as emotional as nationalism/racism/love/hate. But we hope that you do find this fun and provocative.

Here is how it works (you can skip this part ):

1. Google shows a total of 18.2 million hate search results, and there were recently roughly 6.8 billion people in the world. This means one HATE entry for every 372 people. Similarly, with 15 million love search results, there is one LOVE entry for every 452 people.

2. Next, say you want to find out how much Americans are hated: Google shows 785,000 “I-hate-Americans” search results, and there are 307 million Americans.

3. So you divide 785,000 by 307 million, and multiply by 372, using the world’s general “hate level” to standardize the score. This gives you AMERICANS’ “BEING-HATED” score: .95. 4. How much are Americans LOVED? Google shows 165,000 “I-love-Americans” search results, so: 165,000/307 million x 452 = .24. This is AMERICANS’ BEING-LOVED score.

So now we have a formula to score and then COMPARE different groups/countries/nationalities:

Using the same formula for example for Europeans:

Europeans’ being-hated score is only .005, and their being-love score is .012.

This means that Europeans are being hated 200 times and being loved 20 times less than Americans. So this is revealing: Americans are a lot less popular than Europeans!

Because different nationalities get vastly different amounts of both Hate and Love entries on Google, a good way to make them comparable with each other is to compute for each group the RATIO of Hate over Love (or love over hate):

For example, Americans receive 4 times more hatred than love. So we give them a score of 4 (Hatred)
On the other hand, Europeans receive 2.4 times more love than hatred, so their score is 2.4 (Love).
Then, we ranked 20 nationalities/groups according to how much hate and love they receive:

1. New Yorkers receive 4.5 times more hate than love. Their score is 4.5 Hate. They are the most hated people in the world.
2. Americans are next: 4 hate
3. Californians are hated 3 times more than they are loved: score of 3
4. Hungarians are next: 1.4 hate
5. Turks: 1.2 hate
6. Russians: 1.1 Hate

After this, love scores are higher than hate scores, so we take the ratio of Love over Hate:

7. Greeks get 1.3: They are loved 1.3 times more than hated
8. Texans: 1.5
9. Hawaiians: 2.3
10. Europeans: 2.4
11. Germans: 2.41
12. Frenchmen: 7.6
13. Puerto Ricans: 9.4
14. Italians: 9.5
15. Irishmen: 13.7
16. Spaniards: 15.8
17. Dutch: 17.1
18. British: 22.7
19. Poles: 30.2
20. Swiss: 32.5: The most loved people in the world!

Another interesting thing is the RANGE between a country’s hate and love scores: Some countries elicit enormous Love scores AND hate scores: Opinions about them are highly POLARIZED. For example Ireland. So next time, we’ll give you a ranking of countries along this dimension.

If you want, you can copy our formula and add entries of other countries or groups (if you are bored enough).

What we want to do next is the REALLY interesting and controversial stuff: get scores for controversial groups such as Muslims, Jews, Israelis, African-Americans, Gays, atheists, etc.

Stay tuned! leave comment here