The 2016 presidential race is already upon us. Do you find that prospect exciting or exhausting? If you chose the latter, I'm willing to wager it's in part because of the destructive rhetoric that threatens to accompany the election. At least half of American adults felt that the last presidential campaign was too negative.

The conventional approach is to blame the politicians and tacticians for this dreaded odium politicum. But we citizens need to look inward a little. Whether or not we want to admit it, political hate is a demand-driven phenomenon. We are the ones creating a big market for it.

Political hate generally appears in one of three basic forms.

The first is what some psychologists call "hot hate," based on anger. Imagine yourself yelling at the television, and you get the picture. Most Americans would be ashamed to say "I hate Republicans" or "I hate Democrats." But our market preferences tell the true story. We reward professional political pundits who say or write that the other side is evil or stupid or both.

For some haters, the hot variety is a little too crude. They prefer "cool hate," based on contempt, and express disgust for another person through sarcasm, dismissal or mockery.

Cool hate can be every bit as damaging as hot hate. The social psychologist and relationship expert John Gottman was famously able to predict with up to 94 percent accuracy whether couples would divorce just by observing a brief snippet of conversation. The biggest warning signs of all were indications of contempt, such as sarcasm, sneering and hostile humor. Want to see if a couple will end up in divorce court? Watch them discuss a contentious topic — which Gottman has done thousands of times — and see if either partner rolls his or her eyes. Disagreement is normal, but dismissiveness can be deadly.

As it is in love, so it is in politics. With just an ironic smile, one can dismiss an entire class of citizens as uncultured rubes or mindless theocrats.

The last variety is anonymous hate. Political discourse has always had a shadowy component, all the way back to Thomas Paine's pamphleteering in favor of American independence. But nothing has empowered casual vitriol in the Internet age like the pressure on news organizations to publish any and all anonymous feedback. This has scaled up our ability to express political hate with astonishing efficiency.

Before you dismiss this as harmless chatter, consider a 2014 article in the academic journal Personality and Individual Differences titled "Trolls Just Want to Have Fun." Three Canadian psychologists found that habitual Internet commenting is strongly correlated with hateful personality pathologies. The total amount of time spent posting comments online correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. And this held especially true for those who relished "trolling," the anonymous posting of negative and destructive comments.

So there you have it — a field guide to political hate. Millions of Americans dislike it, but should we care about its effects? Some dismiss it as simply inevitable. Others — myself included — see it as both damaging and regrettable, joining the Dalai Lama in the belief that all hate "is our true enemy," with "no other function than simply destroying us, both in the immediate term and in the long term."

In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson felt it necessary to warn the young nation that "having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions."

If you agree with the Dalai Lama and Jefferson, you can fight back this election season. Declare your independence by not consuming, celebrating or sharing the overheated outrage and negative punditry — even if it comes from those with whom you agree. Avoid indulging in snarky, contemptuous dismissals of Americans on the other side. And always own up to your views.

On the other hand, if you disagree, go ahead and leave a comment under an assumed name.

Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming "The Conservative Heart." He wrote this article for the New York Times.