The urge to dehumanise others is itself all too human

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129521.500-the-urge-to-dehumanise-others-is-itself-all-too-human.html#.U8_ub-NdWQA

22 January 2014
New Scientist Magazine issue 2952

It is a depressingly familiar story. Two communities live in cheek-by-jowl harmony until, one day, they don't. Then, for reasons that may on the face of it seem quite trivial – a property dispute, or a social slight, perhaps – a rift develops. Neighbour becomes suspicious of neighbour; hostility mounts, then turns to aggression, violence and – well, the story doesn't have a happy ending.

Rival sides in such conflicts describe each other in ways that deny their shared humanity: they may liken each other to vermin, or pests to be exterminated. The words onlookers use to describe such conflicts – bloody religious factionalism in the Central African Republic, for example, or the civil war in Syria – are also animalistic: perpetrators are "brutal", while their victims are "slaughtered".

But thinking of such incidents as no more than outbreaks of bestial savagery is misleading. The cruelties meted out can be so ingenious as to betray the work of a sophisticated social brain. It seems the tendency to see others as less than fully human is deep-seated in our psyches – and dismayingly easy to trigger.

We now know that we are all prone to grouping the people around us according to how they look, where they live or what they believe – an urge that we give in to on the slightest of pretexts – and inclined to deny those outside our own groups their humanity, to varying degrees (see "Talent for prejudice: Why humans dehumanise others").

Far from being a reversion to animal roots, this propensity may be uniquely human. "I don't think that we have any evidence that any other living animal is able to negate the status... of another individual belonging to the same species," cognitive neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese said last month at the launch of the Human Mind Project. The ability to deny another person's humanity is "probably one of the worst spin-offs of language", he concluded.

Understanding this as part of human nature, rather than a departure from it, helps us work against its darkest aspects. We can learn how to make groups more inclusive; or how former enemies might be reconciled, rather than driven to retaliate. Remembering our shared humanity is the best way to guard against those who would deny it.