Dehumanisation - Y2

Introduction

What makes us human?

  • Morality
  • Intellect
  • Meaning seeking
  • Cognitive abilities
  • Complex emotions
  • Culture and society
  • Learning and adaptability
  • Language and communication

Dehumanisation = perception of others as belonging to a lower order of humanity

  • Denial of full human potential to an individual or social group
  • Comes from essentialism ideologies

Moral Disengagement Theory (Bandura et al, 1996) -

  • Cognitive mechanisms that deactivate self-sanctions that compel us to behave morally
    -> Moral justification, euphemistic labelling (using less harsh words to translate dehumanisation) and advantageous comparison = behaviour
    -> Diffusion of responsibility and displacement of responsibility = agency
    -> Distortion of consequences = outcome
    -> Attribution of blame and dehumanisation = victim

Models of dehumanisation

The path to dehumanisation -

  • Early theories - 70s. 80s and 90s; Kelman, 1976; Bar--Tal, 1989 and Bandura, 1999
  • Infrahumanisation - Leyens et al, 2001
  • Dual model of dehumanisation - Haslam, 2006
  • Mind perception - Gray et al, 2007

Infrahumanisation -
Tajfel's Minimal Group Paradigm studies -

  • Social identity theory (us v them)
  • Ingroup favouritism and outgroup deteroriation

Leyens et al, 2001 -

  • Human essence - language, intelligence, sentiments and reasoning
  • Sentiments make us uniquely human
    -> Primary emotions = anger, joy, fear, sadness and disgust
    -> Secondary emotions = admiration, contempt, pride, resentment and love

Dual models of humanness - Haslam, 2006 -

  • Two senses of humanness - human uniqueness and human nature
  1. Human uniqueness - refinement, intelligence, rationality and self-control
    -> Perception of not having this leads to animalistic dehumanisation
  2. Human nature - warmth, emotional, agency and flexibility
    -> Perception of not having this leads to mechanistic dehumanisation

Mind perception - Gray et al, 2007 -

  • Two dimensions of agency and experience
  1. Agency - thinking, self control and communication - animalistic dehumanisation
  2. Experience - emotions, consciousness and personality - mechanistic dehumanisation

Measures of dehumanisation

5 measures -

  1. Metaphors - language of animal comparison
  2. Emotions - primary (anger and joy), secondary (resentment and love)
  3. Words - animal words (instinct and pedigree) and human words (culture and people)
  4. Traits - HU and HN, priming and implicit measures
  5. Visual

Loughnan et al, 2009 -

  • Attribute-based measures -> characteristic attributed differently to groups / individuals
    -> Emotions, words and traits
  • Metaphor-based measures -> groups / individuals linked to animals and machines
    -> Metaphors and visual measures

Measuring dehumanisation -

  • Dehumanisation has been investigated along a 'severity continuum' from subtle to blatant, with both explicit and implicit manifestations (Haslam and Loughnan, 2012)
    -> Blatant dehumanisation research seems less understood - heavy focus on dehumanisation as an implicit or subtle phenomenon (Haslam and Loughnan, 2013)
    -> Blatant dehumanisation appears to be rooted in antipathy, which may not encapsulate the full manifestation of dehumanisation (Haslam and Loughnan, 2013)

Triggers of dehumanisation

Threat - Viki, Osgood and Phillips (2013) -

  • Christian participants -> dehumanisation of Islam with human-related words -> group seen as a threat -> torture proclivity increased

Disgust - Buckels and Trapnell, 2003 -

  • Link between interpersonal disgust and dehumanisation leading to prejudice (Hodson and Costello, 2007)
  • Those groups that usually elicit disgust and contempt are more of a target of dehumanisation (Harris and Fiske, 2006)

Behaviours - Rodrigues, Fasoli, Huic and Diniz, 2017 -

  • Monogamy v non-mongamy -> emotion attributino of primary and seconday emotions -> non-monogamous individuals seen as having less secondary emotions

Consequences of dehumanisation

Different targets -

  • Criminals, ethnic groups, homeless people, immigrants, individuals with mental health difficulties, people of low social status, religious groups, sex offenders etc
  • Studies have shown dehumanisation is different from prejudice (Vaes et al, 2013)
    -> it is different from mere negative evaluations or ingroup favouritism (Haslam and Loughnan, 2012)
    -> Groups who are not targets of prejudice can still be dehumanised (Leyens et al, 2000)
  • Type of humanness denied depends on culture (Bain et al, 2009)
    -> European Australians - denial of human nature to East Asian faces
    -> Chinese people - denial of human uniqueness to White faces

Violence - Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson, 2009 -

  • Priming -> video -> violence justification
    -> After being primed with dehumanisation related stimuli (ape) -> higher jusitifcation of violence towards the black suspect

Help (Vaes, Paladino, Castelli and Leyens, 2002) -

  • Secondary emotions -> more willingness to respond
  • More likely to help with formal personal pronouns

Help - Andrighetto, Baldassarri, Lattazio, Loughnan and Volpato (2014) -

  • Italian participants -> dehumanisation (mechanistic for Japanese, animalistic for others -> empathy -> help
    -> Dehumanisation leads to less empathy and thus decreased prosocial behaviour

Hostility - Kteily et al, 2016 -

  • To investigate whether dehumanisation leads to an increase in anti-immigration and anti-Muslim support
  • Study 1A
    -> Political conservatism, prejudice, anti-immigration attitudes, anti-immigration policy support, signing anti-immigration petitions
    -> Greater dehumanisation predicted anti-immigration policies, willingness to sign petition and more likely to vote for presidential candidates who are anti-immigration
  • Study 1B -
    -> Political conservatism, prejudice, anti-Muslim attitudes, policy support and anti-Islamic extremism and disbursement
    -> Greater dehumanisation predicted - casting Muslims as threatening, anti-Muslim policy support, more likely to divert funds to policing, presidential candidates who are anti-Muslim are supported

Application to other domains

Objectification -

  • Langton (2009) - silencing, reduction to appearance and body
  • Nussbaum (1995) - instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership and denial of subjectivity

Sexual objectification - occurs whenever people's bodies, body parts or sexual functions are separated from their identity, reduced to the status of mere instruments

  • When objectified, individuals are treated as bodies that exist for the use and pleasure of others (Frederickson et al, 1998)
  • Media focuses on the male gaze - Fredrikson and Roberts, 1997 and Ward 2016

From humans to objects - Bernard et al, 2012 -

  • Sexualised-body inversion hypothesis
  • Inverted stimuli picturing humans are more difficult to recognise than upright ones, but objects are not affected by inversion (Reed et al, 2003)
  • If sexualised women are perceived as objects they must be processed as an object = sexualised women should be easily recognised when a women is presented both upright and inverted
  • Results suggested that women were correctly identified in both conditions, whereas men were correctly identified less when inverted, proving the hypothesis

Dehumanisation in objectification (Vaes et al, 2011) -

  • Study 1 - implicit association task; 10 human related words, 10 animal related words
    -> Objectified women were associated with less human-related words
    -> No difference in men
  • Study 2 - women dehumanised objectified women as they perceived them as vulgar and superficial (distancing motive)
    -> Men dehumanised objectified women when they were sexually attracted to them
  • Study 3 - sex goals led men to focus on women's appearance more than personality and elicit dehumanisation
    -> Sex goals did not have the same effect on women

Objectification - mind perception (Loughnan et al, 2011) -

  • Women portrayed in an objectified fashion were perceived as having less mind and were rated as less moral than when the same target was presented as non-objectified
  • The same results were found for male targets - objectification led to the target being perceived as less competent and moral and having less mind
    -> Participants were more likely to give pain to objectified than non-objectified targets
  • Sexual objectification changes the way in which women are perceived by others but also how they are treated

Consequences of objectification -

  • Men who associated women with animals or objects reported higher levels of rape proclivity and more negative judgements towards a rape victim (Rudman and Mescher, 2012)
  • Women portrayed in a sexualised way were perceived as having less mind and moral concern and were blamed more for being victims of sexual harassment (Loughnan, Pina, Vasquez and Puyia, 2013)
  • Exposed to objectified portrayal of women -> slower in recognising cases of harassment and less willingness to help (Galdi et al, 2014 and 2017)

Anthropomorphism - People tend to see nonhuman agents as human like

  • Describes the tendency to imbue the real or imagined behaviour of nonhuman agents with human like characteristics, motivators, intentions or emotions (Epley et al, 2007)


When it is too much -

  • Uncanny valley (mori, 2005)
  • Threat to distinctiveness (Ferrari et al, 2016)
  1. Elicited agent knowledge - similarities with humans and use of human knowledge
    -> Eyssel, Kuchenbrandt, Hegel and de Ruiter (2012) - men attributed more humanness to the robot with a male voice and women attributed more humanness to the robot with the female voice
  2. Sociality motivation - individuals who feel lonely and lack in social connection
  • Eyssel and Reich, 2013 - mind attribution and human essence; more human essence and mind attribution in the lonely condition compared to the control
  1. Effectance motivation - desire to control and master the environment
  • Participants who anticipated interaction perceived the robot as more human, especially if he was unpredictable

Dehumanisation research -

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00224545.2016.1192097?needAccess=true

  • Looks at infrahumanization approach (outgroup lacks human emotion compared to ingroup) and two dimensional model of humanness (human uniqueness traits and human nature traits; what distinguishes us from animals and machines) and how individuals attributed primary and secondary emotions to three different groups (Humanised, Mechanised - no nature and Animalised - no uniqueness) with varying levels of these dimensions
  • Results in mechanistic and animalistic dehumanisation, more secondary emotions to humanised groups and animalised and mechanised groups received similar attribution

Animal metaphors increase social exclusion and foster hostile behaviours, particularly aggression
https://journals-sagepub-com.surrey.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/0261927X16632267

https://theconversation.com/refugees-in-the-media-how-the-most-commonly-used-images-make-viewers-dehumanise-them-171865

  • Identifiable victim effect - people engage differently with words and images concerning the suffering of a single individual rather than larger groups; more likely to help an individual
  • Dehumanisation stronger when exposed to images of them in large groups - lack of human nature - mechanistic dehumanisation or animalistic
  • Attributed less secondary emotions to them in large groups of refugees
  • Driver of prosocial behaviour is the emotions we experience looking at something - empathy-altruism model

https://theconversation.com/staring-at-an-image-of-yourself-on-zoom-has-serious-consequences-for-mental-health-especially-for-women-180384

  • Self-objectification increased in zoom meetings as you are near a reflection, there is a picture of you and others are evaluating your appearance
  • Cognitively taxing for women
  • Also produces feelings of shame, less eating and less speaking in mixed gender groups
  • Worse motor performance and difficulty recognising one’s own emotional and bodily states
  • More time on video calls = less satisfaction with appearance

Forms of discrimination -

  • Reluctance to help - actively or passively refusing to help people in society, to make they stay disadvantaged - individual, organisational or societal levels
    -> Aversive racism - racial anxiety and antipathy coupled with belief there is not as much disadvantage as there is leads to people not offering help
    -> When reluctance is attributed to factors other than prejudice, people are less likely to help - Gaertner and Dovidio (1977)
  • Tokenism - trivial positive acts toward minority groups without actually helping - often occurs with reverse discrimination
  • Reverse discrimination - go out of your way to help people disadvantaged to a higher level, which can also make them feel singled out

Stigma and self-esteem, psychological wellbeing and self worth - - Stigma can cause unfavourable self images which can depress self esteem

  • Tokenism can also impact self esteem, as you feel you are only hired for your minority characteristic (Chacko, 1982)
    • Reverse discrimination can also lead to overestimation of ability (Fajardo, 1985) -
      -> Affirmative action can also provoke a sense of injustice from majority groups and relative deprivation, provoking aggression to re-establish equality
    • Attributional ambiguity - stigmatised individuals can be very sensitive to how others treat them and this can lead to mistrust and suspicion in social interactions
      -> Also leads to individuals not taking personal credit for positive outcomes, attributing it to tokenism instead
      -> Individuals also do not always see failure as due to their prejudice

Failure and disadvantage -

  • Having the perception that you are disadvantaged and thus will fail in society can lead to apathetic and unmotivated lines of thinking in minorities - anticipation of failure is big in minority groups (Smith, 1985)

Self-fulfilling prophecy -

  • Prejudiced attitudes lead to covert and overt discriminatory behaviour