  The theory of the imitation of affects informs these and other accounts of social dynamics in Spinoza. Human beings tend, he argues, to imitate the affects of those that we take to be similar to ourselves (IIIp27), and we tend, when we feel a given affect toward a person whom we take to differ from us, to feel that same affect toward that person’s whole class or nation (IIIp46). Spinoza grounds these doctrines on a series of claims about our associative tendencies at Ethics IIIpp14–24. 