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 language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 175-181 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology |
Volume | 219 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2011 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- General Psychology
Keywords
- Anterior insula
- Dehumanization
- Mental-state verbs
- Social cognition