Phobias are characteristic anxiety disorders in people who develop an irrational fear of people, animals, objects, or situations that pose no real threat. However, outside the field of psychiatry and clinical psychology, this term has also been used to create words that denote social rejection or unjustified hatred of people from a certain group.

Photophobia is one of the neologisms that have been created to refer to this psychological and social phenomenon related to a feeling of repulsion towards the different. Specifically, “aportophobia” means hatred or rejection of the poor , something that is expressed both in the way of thinking and in the way of acting of many people. In this article we will see its causes.

What is aporophobia?

In short, aporophobia is the rejection of poor people simply because they are poor . The term appeared for the first time in publications of the Spanish philosopher Adela Cortina to have a word with which to differentiate this phenomenon from xenophobia or chauvinism.

Thus, it is not a mental disorder, but rather a social dysfunction that reinforces the marginalization of people in a vulnerable position .

Unlike what normally happens with phobias that have diagnostic criteria because they are medical entities, in aporophobia the one who sees his quality of life lowered is not the person who has internalized this fear or rejection, but the one to whom this rejection is directed. This is why can be an easy to learn pattern of behaviour , since it does not have direct and immediate negative consequences on those who reproduce this attitude.

Why does it happen?

In aporophobia, poverty, a circumstance about living conditions that has a multi-causal origin and that often escapes one’s control, is identified with one’s own essence as if it were part of one’s identity . Thus, the lack of resources goes from being a situation to being part of what one is, independently of the context in which one has grown up and of one’s starting situation.

Now… what drives many people to reproduce aporophobia against the most vulnerable people? Well, let’s see.

1. Ideological Bias

There are several ideologies that lead to despise the poor . Some of them linked to the political right, for example, are based on the idea of meritocracy to start from the assumption that being poor or not is fundamentally a matter of personal attitude and will power.

This, besides being false (the best predictors of poverty are variables that are beyond the control of the individual: family income, country of birth, parents’ health and even their IQ), reproduces a discourse that favours the marginalisation of the poor.

This bias towards meritocracy usually fits in with an individualistic mentality, but in other cases it can also be related to a totalizing collectivism. For example, certain variants of the national-socialist ideology lead to considering poor people as individuals who do not want to adapt to a strongly hierarchical system that protects everyone if they work for it.

3. Cognitive dissonance

aporophobia can also be based on the discomfort of having poor people in the vicinity and not doing anything to improve their situation. This fact can lead to the creation of prejudices simply to justify this lack of help , something related to the concept of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a state of psychological tension and discomfort that appears when two contradictory ideas collide. To eliminate this discomfort, an attempt is made to “readapt” one of these ideas (or both) so that one triumphs over the other, or both can exist at the same time in a different scheme of thinking.

In the case of aporophobia, a positive self-concept on which self-esteem is based clashes with the fact that most poor people with whom one comes into contact are not helped (for example). Creating reasons to reject them is one way to make this not uncomfortable.

3. Prejudice for lack of contact

It is also possible that aporophobia is caused by the lack of direct contact with poor people, which makes the view of them based on prejudices, stereotypes and even a criminalization reproduced by some political actors or media. This is something that is often at the root of racism or xenophobia.

What to do against aporophobia?

Combating aporophobia is complicated, since poverty is widespread around the world and it is easy for this social rejection to spread from one side to the other. Moreover, there are few entities committed to defending the interests of people with few resources.

In this sense, one way of combating aporophobia is to disseminate an anti-essentialist vision of poverty , which does not link it to “the essence” of people but to the way in which, for various circumstances, they must live. It is also important to do this without normalizing poverty, as if it were something predestined and consubstantial to all societies, which cannot be avoided.