Lecture 13: Dehumanization Flashcards
dehumanization
Perceptions of people as lacking the mental or physical capacities of regular human beings
Sumner on dehumanization
People have a tendency to view their group as real people and other groups as less than
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1856
Viewed Black people as property rather than humans
13th Amendment, 1868
Representatives…shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons…three-fifths of all other Persons.
Prince Harry & Dehumanization
“While in the heat of combat, I didn’t think of those 25 as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people.”
primary emotions include
happiness, pleasure, excitement, sadness
secondary emotions include
compassion, tenderness, bitterness, shame
subtle dehumanization involves
ascribing less secondary emotions to outgroups (for both positive and negative emotions)
subtle dehumanization experiment
Participants were presented with positive and negative primary and secondary emotions. They were told to circle words that best represented their ingroup or the outgroup. Found that people circled more secondary emotions for their ingroup but more primary emotions for their outgroup.
implicit dehumanization association study
Samples of students from first grade, fifth grade, and sixth grade completed an IAT measuring association between Spanish (ingroup) and Arab (outgroup) names with “human” (logic, mature) versus “animal” (wild, feral) words. All three samples of students showed ingroup/human, outgroup/Arab associations on the IAT.
implicit dehumanization single word study
Participants chose more animal-related words for the outgroup members than for the ingroup members.
Bandura’s blatant dehumanization study
- Participants supervised a 3-person group in the other room
- If the group made the wrong decision, give a shock
- Overheard the experimenter describe the group in humanized, dehumanized, or neutral terms
- Dehumanization leads to more aggression as measured by the intensity of shocks given
ascent of man measure
- Shows an inaccurate picture of how humans developed from apes
- Asks participants on a scale of 1-100 to indicate how evolved they consider each group to be
white American participants and extent of man scale
American participants rated South Koreans, Mexican immigrants, Arabs, and Muslims as less human on this scale
Blatant dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims leads to
- Immigration opposition
- Less helping
- Support militaristic aggression
- Drone strike support
(event after controlling for measures of explicit prejudice)
