Why do we dehumanize others?

From New Scientist magazine, Jan. 18, 2014, page 39, volume 221 No 2952

postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2014-January/014697.html

It isn't only warlords and dictators who treat others as if they are
less than human. How can we tame the tendency to demean that lurks
inside us all?

HITLER did it when he referred to German Jews as viruses, parasites
and rats. In Rwanda, Hutu extremists did it to the Tutsis, calling
them cockroaches before killing half a million of them in the bloody
genocide of 1994. Dehumanisation has long been thought of as a
precursor to extreme acts of violence, but it is alarmingly common,
as anyone who follows the news will be aware.

•••••

To deny someone their humanity ranks among the most demeaning
insults one human can give another, and most of us would consider
ourselves incapable of such behaviour. But in the past decade
psychologists have come to realise that the tendency to consider
others to be less human than ourselves is universal. This form of
prejudice isn't only applied along ethnic lines; it can extend to
anyone we fail to relate to, from members of the opposite sex and
people with disabilities to social, sexual and religious minorities.
"It's as if we have a little humanness gauge in our heads that
twitches whenever we see another person," says Jeroen Vaes at the
University of Padua in Italy.

•••••

However,
recent research does offer some hope, suggesting that although it is
easy to trigger such prejudice, it may also be easily subverted and
tamed.

So, what do we know? For a start, some people are more prone to
dehumanising behaviour than others. Individuals with narcissistic
traits are particularly prone to it, as are those with a strong
sense of their own elevated position in a social or professional
hierarchy. Intriguingly, doctors who dehumanise their patients may
have better clinical outcomes, because they are more likely to
prescribe painful but effective treatments. Although most instances
of dehumanisation are not as blatant as the attacks on Kyenge and
Taubira, even subconscious prejudices can affect how we think of and
behave towards others. Experiments reveal that when we dehumanise
someone, we deny that they have traits such as the ability to be
rational or thoughtful. We are more likely to condone police
violence towards them. We are also less likely to help or forgive
them, and more likely to bully them.

Why we dehumanise is not clear, but it seems rooted in our tendency
to judge members of the social groups we belong to as more human
than other groups.

•••••

The fact that we so effortlessly affiliate with any group is good
news for anyone hoping to reduce prejudice, because if social groups
are transient, then so is our tendency to dehumanise. Indeed, Van
Bavel and colleagues have now found that simply informing people
that they have been accidentally assigned to the wrong group causes
them to reverse their biases. They and others have found that
encouraging interaction between groups helps reduce dehumanising
tendencies, too, as does pointing out that members of different
groups may belong to the same umbrella group - Irish Americans and
African Americans sing the same national anthem, for example. "You
can get rid of many types of ethnic bias pretty quickly as long as
you make people feel like they share some kind of group identity,"
says Van Bavel.

•••••

Humans have a deep-seated need to feel that they belong to a group,
with both positive and negative consequences. What does it take to
make a person feel like "one of us"? In other words, how small and
arbitrary can a group be while still generating a feeling of "us"
and "them"?

The "minimal group paradigm" was devised in the 1970s as a way to
explore this. British social psychologist Henri Tajfel and
colleagues found that flipping a coin, or simply telling people that
a coin had been flipped and that they had been assigned to one of
two teams as a result, was enough to produce a measurable preference
in them for members of their own team.

•••••

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.