Recent research on dehumanization

Highlights

• Recent research has added to the range of factors contributing to dehumanizing perceptions of others.

• There has been an increased attention to ‘mechanistic’ dehumanization, where people are likened to inanimate objects.

• Innovations include studies of dehumanization among children and of blatant forms of dehumanization.

Dehumanization has been a lively focus of social psychology research for the past decade and a half, and novel theoretical and empirical contributions have appeared at a rapid rate. The present review updates earlier overviews by calling attention to key developments over the past two years. The review indicates that researchers have broken new ground in recognizing the range of targets of dehumanization, the diversity of factors that contribute to it, the effects that it accounts for, and the implications and consequences that it has for intergroup relations. Theorists have also enhanced our understanding of how dehumanization phenomena can be conceptualized, assessed, and evaluated. These advances highlight the central but previously unacknowledged role that denials of humanness play in intergroup phenomena.

Introduction

Dehumanization — the act of perceiving or treating people as if they are less than fully human — has emerged as a major focus of scholarship on intergroup relations in the last fifteen years. Earlier researchers and theorists drew attention to the role this phenomenon played in war and atrocity, but it was only in the early 2000s that active programs of empirical and theoretical research arose. Beginning with Leyens and colleagues’ [1] work on ‘infrahumanization’ — a subtle form of dehumanization in which uniquely human emotions are denied to outgroups relative to the ingroup, and which occurs even in the absence of intergroup conflict — research on the topic has gathered force internationally. It has burgeoned in part because the concept of dehumanization offers an intriguingly different perspective from established ideas of prejudice. Seeing someone as lacking human qualities is not the same as derogating them because ‘human’ is not synonymous with ‘good’. People can be disliked without be dehumanized, and vice versa.

The explosion of dehumanization research makes it difficult to keep abreast of developments. The present review updates an earlier comprehensive survey that encompassed research published until 2013 [2^•] and an accompanying theoretical overview [3]. We therefore focus on original contributions published in the last two years. The review is organized into four sections that address the groups that are dehumanized; the factors that contribute to dehumanization; the effects that dehumanization accounts for; and the downstream implications and consequences of dehumanization. Some observations on the most novel theoretical and conceptual advances in dehumanization scholarship complete the review.