Dehumanized perception a psychological means to facilitate atrocities, torture, and genocide?

Lasana T. Harris, Susan T. Fiske

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

157 Scopus citations

Abstract

Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition - considering someone's mind - recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a social-cognition neural network to pictures and thoughts of other people; our previous work shows that parts of this network uniquely fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets (homeless persons or drug addicts; see Harris & Fiske, 2009, for review). This suggests participants may not consider these dehumanized groups' minds. Study 1 demonstrates that participants do fail to spontaneously think about the contents of these targets' minds when imagining a day in their life, and rate them differently on a number of human-perception dimensions. Study 2 shows that these human-perception dimension ratings correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social-cognition network, including areas implicated in disgust, attention, and cognitive control. These results suggest that disengaging social cognition affects a number of other brain processes and hints at some of the complex psychological mechanisms potentially involved in atrocities against humanity.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)175-181
Number of pages7
JournalZeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology
Volume219
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
  • General Psychology

Keywords

  • Anterior insula
  • Dehumanization
  • Mental-state verbs
  • Social cognition

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