On Not Being Human.

Morton Ann GernsbAcher is the Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic C. Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached via email at [email protected]. Around the time I took office as president of the Association for Psychological Science, Wray Herbert, Public Affairs Director of APS, began e-publishing his now syndicated blog, “We’re Only Human.” Although I won’t pretend to be privy to the inner workings of Wray’s mind, I’m guessing that Wray chose his blog’s moniker to allow wide berth for our diverse curiosities, eccentricities, and proclivities. We might do this, we might even do that, because, well, after all, we are human. But are we? Do we all agree that all humans are indeed, human? The anonymous tract, Disputatio Nova Contra Mulieres, Qua Probatur Eas Homines Non Esse (A New Argument Against Women, in Which it Is Demonstrated That They Are not Human Beings), first published in 1595, was reprinted prolifically during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 1860s, British anthropologists espoused that Blacks were an inferior species, more comparable to apes than to Caucasians, and therefore well suited for slavery. At the Nuremberg Trial, one SS general explained his allegiance to genocide by the simple contention that “Jews are not even human.” Sixteenth-century theologians, Victorian anthropologists, and 20th-century Nazis are not the only ones who have deemed various groups of humans ape-like or nonhuman; some current-day American psychological scientists are just as guilty of this crime. A few years ago, I was at a conference on language and evolution when an audience member questioned a prominent child language researcher’s thesis by raising a counterexample: One aspect of the development of children with Williams syndrome didn’t quite fit the researcher’s theory. The prominent child language researcher quickly retorted, “Oh, I’ve seen children with Williams syndrome. They don’t count. They’re not even human. They must belong to some other species entirely.” With the wave of a hand, an entire group of people was erased from the human race. Without a contesting word, members of the human species were sacrificed — but a theory was saved. And what was the distinctly nonhuman behavior demonstrated by some children with William syndrome? It was their ability to develop a prodigious vocabulary, prior to developing the ability to extend an index finger to point. Admittedly, this psychological scientist’s dehumanizing pronouncement occurred during a relatively free-flowing discussion at a relatively small, invitation-only conference. The outrageous comment wasn’t even illuminated on a PowerPoint slide. But similar pronouncements have been typeset on the pages of other psychological scientists’ bestselling books and bound into our field’s most prestigious scholarly journals. For example, in a recent New York Times “notable book of the year,” an internationally acclaimed psychological scientist segregated autistic1 people from other humans and placed them “together with robots and chimpanzees.” The distinguishing feature, according to this psychological scientist, is humans’ “innate equipment to discern other people’s beliefs and intentions,” which he proposed that robots, chimpanzees, and autistic people inherently lack. However, laboratory tasks that probe people’s understanding of the intentionality of other humans’ intentions fail to distinguish autistic from nonautistic people (Aldridge, Stone, Sweeney, & Bower, 2000; Carpenter, Pennington, & Rogers, 2001; Russell & Hill, 2001; Sebanz, Knoblich, Stumpf, & Prinz, 2005) and failure on laboratory tasks that probe people’s understanding of other humans’ beliefs is neither universal among autistic people (Happe, 1995; Kleinman, Marciano, & Ault, 2001; Ozonoff, Rogers, & Pennington, 1991; Peterson, 2002) nor unique to autistic people (Benson, Abbeduto, Short, Bibler-Nuccio, & Mass, 1993; Miller, 2001; Peterson & Siegal, 1995; Rowe, Bullock, Polkey, & Morris, 2001; Saltzman, Strauss, Hunter, & Archibald, 2000; Tager-Flusberg, 2001). Nonetheless, such theorizing was recapitulated in the popular press as the claim “it’s as if they [autistic people] do not understand or are missing a core aspect of what it is to be human” (Falcon & Shoop, 2002). If