LIT 7 - Rai Dehumanization Flashcards
What is dehumanisation? Rai et al
Dehumanisation is the act of perceiving victims as not completely human. It can be defined as the failure to engage in social cognition of other human minds. What makes someone human is the existence of an “inner life” comprised of cognitive, emotional and experiential states and sensations.
What are the two types of violence discussed in the Rai et al dehumaization literature?
- Instrumental Violence: Violence that is experienced as morally objectionable but nonetheless desirable for instrumental reasons. Perpetrators do not necessarily desire to harm victims, but knowingly harm them to achieve some other objective.
- Moral Violence: Violence motivated by moral sentiments that require violence despite any moral inhibitions against it. Perpetrators harm victims because they see them as deserving of it.
What is the relationship between dehumanisation and instrumental violence? Rai et al
Dehumanisation increases instrumental violence. Dehumanising victims enables instrumental violence by weakening moral inhibitions that would otherwise restrain it. Dehumanisation predicts, causes and is caused by instrumental violence.
What is the relationship between dehumanisation and moral violence? Rai et al
Dehumanisation does not increase moral violence. Morally motivated perpetrators do not need to dehumanise victims because they wish to harm victims who deserve it, can experience it fully, and understand its meaning. To do so, their victims must be capable of thinking, feeling, and experiencing - they must be human.
What are the implications of the findings for reducing violence? Rai et al
Combating dehumanization is critical to reducing instrumental violence. Dehumanisation enables the everyday violence and large-scale atrocities that observers enable through their indifference. It allows people to refuse to help and to sacrifice others for the greater good. However, dehumanisation does not directly cause morally motivated violence. To fully understand violence, it is important to examine both the breakdown of mechanisms that promote peace and the moral motives that impel aggression.
What were the methods used in the Rai et al experiments?
- Experiments 1 and 2 used attitude surveys to investigate whether natural variation in dehumanising attitudes toward victims predicted support for instrumental or moral violence.
- Experiment 3 used a vignette-based experimental design to provide causal evidence.
- Experiment 4 examined whether people spontaneously dehumanise strangers when they imagine harming them for instrumental or moral reasons.
- Experiment 5 extended the hypothesis by investigating whether people humanise strangers who are severely lacking in human attributes when they imagine harming them for moral or instrumental reasons.
What are some of the limitations of the research of rai et al?
- In practice, when perpetrators compare victims to animals, they may not only fail to perceive their victims’ minds, but they may also imbue them with savage and contaminating attributes.
- Perpetrators may be morally conflicted or motivated by moral and instrumental reasons simultaneously.
- Perpetrators may also engage in selective dehumanisation, denying some human attributes while upholding others.
How is dehumanisation operationalized in the rai et al article?
Dehumanisation is defined strictly as the failure to engage in social cognition of other human minds. It is operationalized in terms of capacities for:
* Agency (e.g., intending, planning, reasoning, remembering)
* Experience (e.g., pain, hunger, fear, pleasure)
* Counterbalanced positive and negative moral emotions (e.g., love, compassion, anger, hatred).
Why do the authors avoid directly measuring ascriptions of “humanness”? Rai et al
Abstract, global measures of “humanness” have been found to be more susceptible to contextual biases and demand characteristics than measures of specific attributes.
