page_title: Dehumanization
section_title: Causes and facilitating factors
hierarchical_section_title: Dehumanization / Causes and facilitating factors
caption_attribution_description: Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction, in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769.
context_page_description: Dehumanization is the denial of full humanness in others and the cruelty and suffering that accompanies it. A practical definition refers to it as the viewing and treatment of other persons as though they lack the mental capacities that are commonly attributed to human beings. In this definition, every act or thought that regards a person as "less than" human is an act of dehumanization.
  Dehumanization is one technique in incitement to genocide.
context_section_description: Several lines of psychological research related to the concept of dehumanization. Infrahumanization suggests that individuals think of and treat outgroup members as "less human" and more like animals; while Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeld uses the term pseudo-speciation, a term that he borrowed from the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, to imply that the dehumanized person or persons are being regarded as not members of the human species. Specifically, individuals associate secondary emotions (which are seen as uniquely human) more with the ingroup than with the outgroup. Primary emotions (those that are experienced by all sentient beings, both humans and other animals) and are found to be more associated with the outgroup. Dehumanization is intrinsically connected with violence. Often, one cannot do serious injury to another without first dehumanizing him or her in one's mind (as a form of rationalization.) Military training is, among other things, systematic desensitization and dehumanization of the enemy, and servicemen and women may find it psychologically necessary to refer to the enemy as an animal or other non-human beings. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has shown that without such desensitization it would be difficult, if not impossible for someone to kill another human, even in combat or under threat to their own lives.
  Delegitimization is the "categorization of groups into extreme negative social categories which are excluded from human groups that are considered as acting within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values."
  Moral exclusion occurs when outgroups are subject to a different set of moral values, rules, and fairness than are used in social relations with ingroup members. When individuals dehumanize others, they no longer experience distress when they treat them poorly. Moral exclusion is used to explain extreme behaviors like genocide, harsh immigration policies, and eugenics, but it can also happen on a more regular, everyday discriminatory level. In laboratory studies, people who are portrayed as lacking human qualities have been found to be treated in a particularly harsh and violent manner.
  Dehumanized perception has been indicated to occur when a subject experiences low frequencies of activation within their social cognition neural network. This includes areas of neural networking such as the superior temporal sulcus and the medial prefrontal cortex. A study by Frith & Frith in 2001 suggests the criticality of social interaction within a neural network has tendencies for subjects to dehumanize those seen as disgust-inducing leading to social disengagement. Tasks involving social cognition typically activate the neural network responsible for subjective projections of disgust-inducing perceptions and patterns of dehumanization. "Besides manipulations of target persons, manipulations of social goals validate this prediction: Inferring preference, a mental-state inference, significantly increases MPFC and STS activity to these otherwise dehumanized targets." A 2007 study by Harris, McClure, van den Bos, Cohen & Fiske suggest a subject's mental reliability towards dehumanizing social cognition due to the decrease of neural activity towards the projected target, replicating across stimuli and contexts.
  While the social distance from the outgroup target is a necessary condition for dehumanization, some research suggests that it is not sufficient. Psychological research has identified high status, power, and social connection as additional factors that influence whether dehumanization will occur. If being an outgroup member was all that was required to be dehumanized, dehumanization would be far more prevalent. However, the only members of high-status groups associate humanity more with ingroup than the outgroup. Members of low-status groups exhibit no differences in associations with humanity. Having high status makes one more likely to dehumanize others. Low-status groups are more associated with human nature traits (warmth, emotionalism) than uniquely human traits, implying that they are closer to animals than humans b
caption: Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction, in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769.
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